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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 869366, member: 289"] I decided that now that we have completed the football season, I’d look back at what I said in my season preview and talk about how things worked out. I’ll focus on the players and my discussion of various departments of the team. DEFENSIVE BACKS Then: We have been collecting athletic, talented recruits for the defensive backfield for the last several years and it will pay off this year. Our back-ups may prove to be even better than the starters. Cornerbacks Keon Lyn and Ri’Shard Anderson have started for a couple of years. They have good size, (6-2 and 6-1 and decent speed to go with plenty of experience. Jerami Wilkes is not very big at free safety, (5-9, 189), but he’s another returning starter. The one loss was a big one: strong safety Shamarko Thomas, who is now a Pittsburgh Steeler, (and probably will be for some time to come: his combination of speed and hard-hitting is perfect for the Steel Curtain). He’s being replaced by Durell Eskridge, who has size at 6-3, 202. The coaches have been impressed with him for a couple of years and now he has his chance. We also have Ritchie Desir at that position. He’s less heralded but plays with abandon and brought some life back to our punt returns late last year. But the names people are really talking about are the other back-ups: Brandon Reddish and Julian Whigham at corner and Wayne Morgan at free safety. They are all fast and talented and will probably be upgrades over the more experienced guys ahead of them when they get their chance. Now: I was amazed at how bad our defensive backfield was in the early part of the season. When Alan Robinson of Penn State came into the game, the Nittany Lions immediately hit two long pass plays to score, the latter a 51 yarder. Later they got a 54 yard TD on a blown coverage. Northwestern’s two quarterbacks threw for 4 touchdowns against our leaky pass defense, the last a 47 yarder. Clemson annihilated us with touchdown passes of 60, 42, 17, 40 and 91 yards. I took to just watching the defensive backfield on each play to see who was running free. But in doing so, I noticed that we tightened up on our coverage considerably in the second half of the season. We started getting coverage sacks. Georgia Tech burned us on one play but that was because we were so focused on their running attack. Florida State had three TD passes but they were of 6, 6 and 17 yards. Pitt had one for 7 yards. BC had two 9 yard TD passes. We were “keeping them in front of us”. Then Minnesotas surprisingly burned up in the fourth quarter of the bowl game with a 20 yarder, a 55 yarder and a dropped 40 yarder at the goal line. I’m not sure what happened there but the trend for the year was that the pass defense got substantially better. I think part of it was scheme and part of it was personnel. We were playing a very loose zone early in the year, (you could call it “Tavern League” if you want). I didn’t see much of anybody running free in the later games of the season. We also started to give the younger, more athletically talented D-backs more playing time down the stretch. Keon Lyn was injured and out for the season. We saw less of Wilkes and Anderson and More of Morgan, Reddish and Whigham, (until Julian got hurt and missed the final three games). In the bowl game we were without Lyn, Whigham and Eskeridge, which may explain the fourth quarter problems. But we still held them to 17 points and won the game so somebody was playing some football back there. Lynn, Wilkes and Anderson have all completed their eligibility. Eskeridge, who was our best defensive player after Bromley, (and that was close), Morgan and Reddish will be back. Ritchie Desir and Darius Kelly also saw playing time and will be back as well. I’m not sure what Whigham’s future is. He ruptured some scar tissue from esophageal surgery when he collided with a teammate in the Florida State game and wound up vomiting blood. It raises the question of whether he should be playing football any more. But I haven’t heard anything suggesting he won’t be back. He seemed to be our best pass coverage guy late in the year, the one with the greatest instincts for the position. [/QUOTE]

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