Tags » ‘Postmortem’
January 12th, 2012 by admin
A season in review.
• Be careful what you ask for. The general consensus on the starting quarterback in August was “Anyone but Garrett Gilbert,” and the wish came true: Gilbert was benched in the second quarter of the second game, never to be seen again after being ruled out with a shoulder injury. (He eventually settled on a transfer to SMU.) Immediately following Gilbert’s exit from the lineup, the Longhorns a) Rallied from a 13-0 hole against BYU behind sophomore Case McCoy and true freshman David Ash, b) Trounced UCLA in the Rose Bowl, 49-20, on a 13-of-15, two-touchdown effort by McCoy, and c) Won comfortably at Iowa State to extend their record to 4-0 heading into the annual date with top-ranked Oklahoma on Oct. 8.
Five turnovers and three defensive touchdowns later, any illusions about the “chemistry” of the Ash/McCoy ticket had been permanently shattered. The back half of the season was a chaotic pas de deux that resolved nothing and repeatedly answered the question “Have the Longhorns found the quarterback of the future?” with a firm “Not really.” In five losses, Texas had more than twice as many turnovers (17) as offensive touchdowns (7) and barely averaged 14 points per game; in late wins over Texas A&M and Cal, two of the ‘Horns’ three touchdown passes came via the arm of freshman receiver Jaxon Shipley on trick plays. After the Holiday Bowl, they ranked eighth out of ten Big 12 teams in scoring and ninth in pass efficiency, leaving UT no closer to a permanent answer at the most important position than it was in August.
• I complained about the passing game, until I met a man with no healthy tailbacks. The book on first-year offensive coordinator Bryan Harsin suggests a heavy dose of misdirection, throwbacks and other hocus pocus he imported from Boise State, and the tricky stuff was certainly there. When the offense was working, though — that is, in back-to-back midseason blowouts over Kansas and Texas Tech — it was a smashmouth affair: In those two games alone, the ‘Horns kept it on the ground an incredible 126 times for 880 yards and 11 touchdowns, outscoring the Jayhawks and Red Raiders by a combined 75 points. They also went over 200 rushing against UCLA, Oklahoma State and Baylor.
 Of course, all five of those defenses ranked 90th or worse against the run, giving up somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 yards on the ground as a matter of course. (Considering they play in the most pass-happy conference, Texas Tech and Kansas were arguably the two worst run defenses in the nation.) But if anyone has a future on the offense, it’s freshman tailback Malcolm Brown, who was well on his way to fulfilling the five-star hype before he was struck down with the dreaded turf toe on the heels of back-to-back 100-yard games in October. He was joined shortly thereafter on the injury list by ailing backfield mates Fozzy Whittaker and Joe Bergeron, and UT limped through the last five games — losing three — with no offensive identity and virtually no firepower to speak of.
• Something old, something new. Reviews were considerably better for first-year defensive coordinator Manny Diaz, who kept the torch lit by Florida-bound predecessor Will Muschamp burning at the top of the Big 12 rankings. Texas led the conference in total defense for the fourth year in a row and slung the moribund offense on its back for the late wins over Texas A&M and Cal, thanks in large part to four seniors — defensive tackle Kheeston Randall, linebackers Emmanuel Acho and Keenan Robinson and safety Blake Gideon — whose steady presence belied the overall youth movement. Make no mistake: With four other players back next year who qualified for a first or second-team All-Big 12 nod — defensive ends Alex Okafor and Jackson Jeffcoat, cornerback Quandre Diggs and safety Kenny Vaccaro — this unit isn’t going anywhere in 2012.
• Return of the Mack. The quarterback situation is still in flux, there are no reliable playmakers at the skill positions and almost half the starting defense will be new. The only certainty in 2012: Head coach Mack Brown, who’s about to get another contract extension to fend off rumors of his imminent retirement, locking him in (on paper, anyway) for the foreseeable future. After 13 wildly successful years, Brown was forced to overhaul the entire operation after the 5-7 disaster in 2010 with two new coordinators and an almost entirely new coaching staff. Their first campaign together was a small step forward, and recruiting is still going like gangbusters, as always. If McCoy or Ash (or an as-yet unidentified blue-chip) develops into a reliable starter, the overall talent level is where it was when Colt McCoy was leading the Longhorns to BCS bowls in 2008 and 2009.
As of right now, there is no indication that Ash or McCoy is going to raise his game to that level, and the only candidate for the title of “rising blue-chip” — incoming recruit Connor Brewer, a four-star prospect from Scottsdale, Ariz. — would force the offense to spend another year in the development phase. At age 60, Brown insists he still has the patience to see the rebuilding cycle through. Until they find a way to upgrade under center, Longhorn fans should probably follow his lead.
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Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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December 15th, 2011 by admin
A season in review.
• The Expectations. As intriguing as it must have been to watch a bunch of freshmen play a major role in pulling a 2-6 season from the brink of oblivion last November, the big-picture equation heading into the fall was the same: The Vols are green, man.
Coming out of the spring, the starting quarterback, starting fullback, two starting wide receivers, four of five starting offensive linemen, three starting defensive linemen and at least one (and potentially as many as three) regular members of the secondary were freshmen or sophomores. Only four seniors were penciled in as starters on either side of the ball, fewest in the nation outside of attrition-ravaged Auburn.
 Most of the optimism for a leap forward rested on the arm of a sophomore quarterback, Tyler Bray, who wrested the starting job from Matt Simms as a true freshman, went well over 300 yards passing in four of five starts and connected on multiple touchdown passes in all five. (He also came within one second in the bowl game of winning all five.) Two of his targets, fellow sophomores Da’Rick Rogers and Justin Hunter, arrived with NFL bodies and blue-chip, and seemed poised for a breakthrough after combining for 21.5 yards per catch and nine touchdowns as true freshmen.
• The Facts. After a fast start outside of the conference, Tennessee literally couldn’t string together two touchdowns against SEC defenses: In eight league games, they were held to a single touchdown or less in six of them. During one midseason stretch, LSU, Alabama and South Carolina combined to keep UT out of the end zone for ten consecutive quarters.
Altogether, the Vols came in 103rd nationally in total offense, 106th in scoring and 116th in rushing, dead last in the SEC on a miserable 2.8 yards per carry. They lost six conference games with 12 points or less on the board — including a 10-7 loss at Kentucky, snapping a 26-year winning streak against the Wildcats — and picked up their only conference win (at Vanderbilt) on a defensive touchdown in overtime. Their seven conference losses for the year are the most in school history.
• Positive Spin. For starters, it doesn’t help when your October schedule — featuring Georgia, LSU, Alabama and South Carolina in consecutive weeks — doubles as a list of the top four defenses in the nation. When your lineup is decimated by injuries during the same stretch, you don’t stand a chance.
The first man down was Justin Hunter, who dominated the first two games (16 catches, 302 yards, 2 TDs) before going out for the season with a torn ACL on his first catch against Florida. Then there was Bray, who missed five games — four of them against top-10 teams — with a broken hand, leaving backup Matt Simms and true freshman Justin Worley at the mercy of the gauntlet. Tailback Tauren Poole played in every game but was plagued by back and hamstring problems and came nowhere near his 1,000-yard campaign in 2010. The only player with any preseason buzz who managed to stay healthy, Da’Rick Rogers, finished with six 100-yard games, nine touchdown catches and enough to emerge as a first-team All-SEC pick in his first season as a starter.
 Even if the Vols were inherently doomed by the schedule, the absence of two of their emerging stars for most of the year kept them from even feigning competitiveness. At full strength, a passing game featuring a healthy Bray dropping bombs to a healthy Hunter and Rogers could have been the most lethal long-ball attack in the conference — at the very least, they could have kept some of the lopsided scores within reason, and turned at least one of the closer games into a bowl-clinching win — and still can be in 2012.
• Negative Spin. The atrocious numbers speak for themselves, and the injuries can only explain so much. The offensive line, for example, remained astonishingly intact: Four of the five positions up front were manned by returning starters Zach Fulton, Dallas Thomas and Ju’Wuan James and Notre Dame transfer Alex Bullard in every single game. The fifth spot remained in flux not because of injury, but because sophomore James Stone was demoted at midseason in favor of true freshman Marcus Jackson. That group remained together all year, most of them for the second year in a row, and still produced by far the worst rushing attack in the league.
The quarterbacks don’t get a pass, either. Big numbers against Montana, Cincinnati and Buffalo notwithstanding, Bray struggled against Florida and Georgia before the broken hand, and was downright awful following his triumphant return. Against Vanderbilt and Kentucky, he completed well below 50 percent of his passes with four interceptions and a dismal efficiency rating of 94.1 — a full 50 points below his average for the season. In four SEC games, Bray’s rating was 106.6.
And that still made him look like Peyton Manning compared to Simms, a senior with eight starts under his belt in 2010 who suddenly looked like he’d never stepped on a field before. There was no reason Worley should have been thrown to the dogs in the middle of a redshirt year, but between the nonexistent running game and Simms’ implosion, there wasn’t much choice.
• The Takeaway. The combination of youth and a brutal schedule commanded patience, and that was before the crippling injuries to Hunter and Bray erased the faint hope of a respectable finish. By the final gun, though, even the apologists had run out of patience: With Bray back in the lineup and a bowl game on the line against their traditional November whipping boys, the Vols barely survived at Vanderbilt and lost to Kentucky with seven points on the board. No set of circumstances — youth, injuries or otherwise — will excuse a last-place finish at Tennessee.
2012 is a make-or-break season for coach Derek Dooley in a lot of ways, and not only because it’s Year Three — Bray, Hunter and Rogers will be juniors with the NFL in their sights, the offensive line will return intact and the running game can’t possibly be worse. Neither can the injuries. There’s a new athletic director. If the Vols are going to return to the top half of the SEC on Dooley’s watch, it’s now or never. But where the potential in the passing game offered hope around this time last year that the answer was right around the corner, the actual results are tilting toward “never.”
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Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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January 30th, 2011 by admin
 A season in review.
Ubiquitous No. 1 rankings notwithstanding, there was no doubt in August (no reasonable doubt, anyway) that Alabama’s revamped defense was bound to regress from its dominant turn in 2009: You can’t lose nine starters, three All-Americans and six draft picks from a unit that spearheaded a 14-0 run to the BCS championship and not take at least some small step back. What we weren’t certain about was a) How bad the suffering would be in the face of such massive attrition, and b) Whether it would be enough to derail the bid for a repeat opposite a veteran offense that stood to improve at roughly the same rate as the defense regressed.
The answer to the first question, it turns out, was "not very bad." If the ’09 D was a Category Five hurricane, finishing atop the SEC and second nationally in every major category, its successor was a strong Category Four threatening to move up. The new class held the line at the top of the SEC in total and scoring defense, as well as pass efficiency D, despite starting a true freshman and two green sophomores in the secondary. With five new faces in the front seven, the Tide came in a mere yard per game behind Auburn for the league’s best effort against the run, and yielded fewer touchdowns on the ground (six) than anyone else nationally except West Virginia. They were back in the top 10 across the board. Individually, the slots filled by Terrence Cody, Rolando McClain and Javier Arenas on the 2009 All-SEC team were filled at the same positions by Marcell Dareus, Dont’a Hightower and Dre Kirkpatrick on the 2010 edition, with junior Mark Barron reprising his role as an all-conference safety. (Barron’s counterpart, sophomore Robert Lester, led the SEC in interceptions and was voted to the second team, for good measure.) From afar, the two storms look nearly identical.
How to account, then, for three losses and a fourth-place finish in the SEC West when the offense delivered on its promise for more yards and points? There, the devil’s in the details.
The fundamental difference in the ’09 and ’10 defenses – and ultimately the fundamental difference in the outcomes of both seasons – was the younger group’s sporadic, short-lived lapses: Specifically, in the first half at Arkansas, in the first half at South Carolina, in the second half at LSU and, of course, in the second half against Auburn. The meltdown were brief, but on all four occasions inflicted roughly an entire game’s worth of damage:
1st half at Arkansas: 302 yards, 17 points, five plays of 20+ yards.
1st half at South Carolina: 160 yards, 21 points, TDs on first three possessions.
2nd half at LSU: 334 yards, 21 points, seven plays of 15+ yards.
2nd half vs. Auburn: 242 yards, 21 points, TD drives of 69, 75, 67 yards.
 Here we see the consequences of the young secondary against the most talented, seasoned quarterbacks in the conference. In Fayetteville, Ryan Mallett struck for back-to-back big plays on the first two snaps of the game for a quick, 7-0 Razorback lead, eventually finishing with more yards through the air (357) than any quarterback against ‘Bama since Nick Saban’s arrival in 2007. The flurries by South Carolina and Auburn both included three touchdown passes apiece by Stephen Garcia and Cam Newton.
Even Jordan Jefferson, fighting to hold on to his job with one of the worst stat lines in the league, turned in one of the most efficient efforts of his career (10 of 13, 141 yards, one touchdown, no picks, 193.4 passer rating) in one of the most validating wins of Les Miles’ six-year tenure at LSU. That was in large part thanks to Tigers’ 225 yards rushing – by far the best effort on the ground against a Saban defense since the Tide struggled to handle Arkansas’ star tandem, Darren McFadden and Felix Jones, in early 2007. (The only other attacks the Tide allowed to hit their season average on the ground were two of the worst running offenses in the country, Duke and Tennessee, in lopsided blowouts.)
The ’09 defense suffered one comparable lapse, falling behind Auburn 14-0 in the first quarter of the Iron Bowl, maybe two if you’re willing to count Texas’ desperation rally for a pair of late, ultimately futile touchdowns in the BCS Championship Game. Otherwise, that group had it on lockdown. It held Virginia Tech to a measly 155 yards total offense in the season opener, and later limited the SEC’s highest-scoring offenses, Florida and Arkansas, to a grand total of two touchdowns between them. When the foundering ‘Bama offense managed just two TDs itself over the course of a three-game October funk, the defense obliged by holding Ole Miss, South Carolina and Tennessee to just one TD – and only then when Tennessee took over with a short field following an untimely fumble by Mark Ingram. With an interception return against the Gamecocks and a pair of picks to set up several automatic field goals at Ole Miss, the ’09 defense was often responsible for putting as many points on the board when the offense was struggling as it allowed.
 The 2010 group flashed that kind of resilience early on, forcing Mallett into a pair of late interceptions that sparked and then sealed the Tide’s comeback from a 20-7 deficit. But that was it for moxie: ‘Bama blew second half leads in the only other games that were still in doubt into the fourth quarter, LSU and Auburn, and blew its chance to rally at South Carolina when the ‘Bama offense answered a momentum-turning interception by the defense early in the fourth quarter – Carolina’s only turnover of the game – by turning the ball over on downs. Carolina subsequently drove 74 yards in four-and-a-half minutes for the clinching touchdown.
Now, for the really terrifying part where the rest of the SEC is concerned: With Barron’s decision to skip the draft for his senior season, the 2011 defense will reprise the veteran template of the ’09 group with a whopping ten returning starters – all but Marcell Dareus – every single one of them a former four or five-star prospect from the succession of chart-topping recruiting classes that have beaten a path to Tuscaloosa since 2008. (To say nothing of the chart-topping class preparing to sign letters of intent next week.) If it can add just a little opportunism to its standard appetite for destruction, the reservations about the new quarterback may matter even less than they did with Greg McElroy two years ago.
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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January 27th, 2011 by admin
A season in review.
Virginia Tech’s steady success through its first six years in the ACC was synonymous with nasty, unflappable defense, and the relationship generally hasn’t been subject to the usual cycles of personnel and attrition. Even in a season when defensive coordinator Bud Foster welcomed back fewer than half the number of returning starters (four) as the Hokie offense (nine), the game plan didn’t figure to change: The offense would look to pound away between the tackles about two-thirds of the time, confident the defense and special would keep the score within reach. The results of that philosophy – six straight 10-win seasons with three conference championships despite consistently dreadful offenses – speak for themselves.
There was no change in philosophy in 2010 – the Hokies ran on a little over 62 percent of their offensive snaps – or in the results: They won nine straight ACC games en route to the conference title and their third Orange Bowl bid in four years, finishing off the first perfect ACC record since eventual BCS champ Florida State went 8-0 in 1999. Yet again, Tech finished as the highest-ranked team in the conference in the final polls, for the seventh season in a row.
The balance of the latest run, though, was a little off, beginning with the rebuilding defense, by any measure the worst Foster unit since Virginia Tech defected to the ACC in 2004. The Hokies yielded more points (20.6 per game) on more yards (361.5) than at any point since they joined the conference and finished seventh against the run in the ACC alone, its usual perch in the national rankings. Boise State dropped 33 points on Tech to open the season, Stanford unloaded for 40 to close the season, and much of the ACC seemed to find the Hokie D uncharacteristically manageable in between.
In the meantime, the veteran offense was as advertised, in form and function. It remained a run-first affair, as always, with four different players – quarterback Tyrod Taylor and running backs Darren Evans, Ryan Williams and David Wilson – combining for 2,600 yards and 30 touchdowns on almost 40 carries per game, good for the No. 2 ground game in the ACC behind only the triple-option extremists at Georgia Tech. But the attack really blossomed with Taylor’s underrated efficiency in the play-action game: He led the conference in passer rating, yards per attempt, yards per completion and completions covering at least 25 yards, cruising to Offensive Player of the Year honors as the captain of the highest-scoring offense in the league.
If that impact can boiled down to two sentences, it’s this: Over six years from 2004-09, the Hokies won a grand total of seven games (and lost 15) in which they allowed at least 20 points. In 2010 alone, they won six games when opponents scored twenty. Somehow, Taylor flew under the national for failing to create a singed imprint of Michael Vick’s face in the turf on a long, winding touchdown run or something, but he leaves Blacksburg with the five-star hype sufficiently fulfilled.
That leaves a gaping question mark for 2011, considering towering, 6-6/240-pound successor Logan Thomas has barely played and both Evans and Williams are on their way to the draft with two years of eligibility remaining apiece. You can almost hear entire sections of the playbook going back under lock and key from here. If you have to say goodbye to your best offense in a decade, though, at least there’s a championship to ease the sting.
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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January 23rd, 2011 by admin
A season in review.
Jimbo Fisher was hired at Florida State to revive a once-explosive offense that had fallen into utter disrepair by the end of 2006. When he finally supplanted Bobby Bowden as head coach three years later, though, Fisher’s mandate was on the other side of the ball: The 2009 Seminole D was unrecognizable as a product of longtime, respected Bowden aide Mickey Andrews, falling on its face out of the gate and eventually stumbling in at dead last in the ACC in rushing, pass efficiency and total defense.
FSU gave up at least 26 points in every conference game in ’09, and had to be bailed out by repeatedly by the offense in shoot-em-up wins over bottom-dwellers N.C. State (45-42), Wake Forest (41-28) and Maryland (29-26) – all of which put up more than 400 yards total offense – as well as at North Carolina (30-27), where the ‘Noles had to rally from a 24-6 hole in the second half. It was the first time a Florida State defense had allowed 30 points per game across an entire season since an 0-11 effort in 1973, three years before Bowden’s arrival.
Compared to the rock bottom of Andrews’ swan song, the mediocrity of the first season under Mark Stoops was a great leap forward – or backward, if you’re thinking along a timeline – especially against the ‘Noles’ closest annual rivals, where the results weren’t so mediocre. In the instate wars, they held Miami to 17 points and Florida to a paltry seven in a pair of satisfying blowouts. Within the Atlantic Division, they shut out Wake Forest and held Boston College, Clemson and Maryland under 20 in FSU wins.
Elsewhere, though, the shootouts persisted, and the offense proved less prolific in keeping pace. Oklahoma knocked FSU off the national radar with a vengeance in September, dropping four touchdown on the Seminoles the first four times it touched the ball in a 47-17 incineration that brought visions of 2009 flooding back. Even on the heels of a subsequent five-game winning streak that eased some of the worst fears, the ‘Noles were lit up in losses at the hands of the three most veteran quarterbacks in the ACC: N.C. State’s Russell Wilson (247 total yards, 4 touchdowns in a 28-27 upset that put the Wolfpack in the Atlantic Division driver’s seat for the last five weeks of the regular season), North Carolina’s T.J. Yates (439 yards passing, 3 touchdowns in a 37-35 Tar Heel win) and Virginia Tech’s Tyrod Taylor (287 total yards, 4 touchdowns in a 44-33 triumph in the ACC Championship Game). Four times Florida State allowed upward of 20 points, a good rate in the grand scheme, but all four times it went home a loser.
Fortunately for the overarching sense of progress over the next six months, the Chick-Fil-A Bowl win over South Carolina sent FSU into the offseason with probably the most promising defensive effort of the year – a five-turnover, four-sack, 17-point night against a solid veteran quarterback (fourth-year junior Stephen Garcia, making his 31st career start) and his All-America receiver, Alshon Jeffery, that sealed the Seminoles’ first 10-win season since 2003. Cornerback Greg Reid knocked out star workhorse Marcus Lattimore on the first series of the game, and went on to justify his five-star recruiting hype as the game’s MVP, setting himself up for a more sustained breakout as a junior. Seven other regular defensive starters will be back with him, including top pass-rusher Brandon Jenkins and the other cornerback, Xavier Rhodes, both of whom landed on the All-ACC team prior to the bowl – and two of the three likely new starters in the fall, linebackers Christian Jones and Jeff Luc, were hyped, five-star recruits themselves last year, to say nothing of 2011′s incoming superstar-in-waiting, James Wilder Jr.
But it’s not like Florida State has ever lacked for talent, or for high expectations as a result. If this group has earned the top-10 projections certain to come their way this summer, it’s mainly because they’re being compared to their immediate, vastly underachieving predecessors instead of the halcyon headhunters that made top-five finishes routine for more than a decade. With the offense taking significant hits at quarterback and on the offensive line, the old standards will be in force, and it will take another leap forward to meet them.
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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January 20th, 2011 by admin
A season in review.
When Notre Dame hired Brian Kelly last December to wake up the echoes, it was going in a specific kind of echo: Kelly’s offense at Cincinnati in 2009 was the best in the Big East in passing, total and scoring offense, and ran the table despite rolling the league’s worst total defense; the Bearcats also won 10 games with a top-20 offense and mediocre D in 2007, Kelly’s first season in Cincy after a three-year stint at Central Michigan, which had led the MAC in total and scoring offense en route to the conference championship under Kelly in 2006. You can trace the thread to his Division II days at Grand Valley State: Where Kelly goes, fireworks follow.
But maybe it was no surprise that his first offense at Notre Dame looked less like the efficient, up-tempo assault Irish fans imagined before the season than it looked like what it really was: A unit in transition under a new coach and a new quarterback after losing the most prolific pass-catch combo in school history to the first two rounds of the draft. ND came in four points and 72 yards per game below its 2009 averages and ranked in the bottom half of the country on both counts. Instead, the Irish lived and died by coordinator Bob Diaco’s defense, which held opponents below 21 points in all seven wins and yielded a mere 39 over the four-game November/December winning streak that saved the season from total collapse.
That streak – including validating wins over Utah, USC and Miami – was the first time all season either side of the ball particularly stood out against anyone worth standing out against. Prior to November, the defense had held Purdue to 12 points in the opener and Boston College to 13 on Oct. 2, but the Boilermakers and Eagles both went on to finish as the worst offenses in the Big Ten and ACC, respectively. The Irish offense rang up 535 yards in the last-second loss to Michigan in September and 44 points against Western Michigan a month later, but the Wolverine defense wound up being abused on a weekly basis, and Western Michigan is, well, Western Michigan.
Aside from a total offensive flop against Stanford on Sept. 25, the Irish were consistently mediocre in all respects, and only the defense raised its game down the stretch against respectable opposition: With true freshman Tommy Rees playing in place of Crist, the offense averaged 27 points on 330 total yards over the last four, barely above the season average in the former case and significantly below it in the latter.
On the heels of the eye-opening, 33-17 Sun Bowl rout over Miami, though, the good vibes carrying the Irish into Kelly’s second season are clearly being emitted by the offense. Almost half of the defensive starters in El Paso were playing their last college game, but the offense gets back nine Sun Bowl starters in the fall, including Rees, three offensive linemen and receiver Michael Floyd, source of the most stunning draft snub this side of Andrew Luck, who’ll push for his place among a crowded field of preseason All-Americans – and not including Crist, who’s likely to regain his starting job as a senior, or running back Cierre Wood, who wound up leading the team in rushing despite spending the first half of the season as a virtual nonentity. This from an outfit that was justifiably left for dead at the end of October.
Instead, it rallied from back-to-back humiliations at the hands of Navy and Tulsa and Crist’s injury to earn ND’s first win over a ranked team since 2006 against Utah, then to snap an eight-game skid against USC with a rain-soaked, fourth quarter comeback in the L.A. Coliseum, and then to trounce a fellow traveler in underachievement in the bowl game. Given the circumstances and the alternatives – and the Irish are more than accustomed to the alternative, having stumbled through eight losses in nine games in back-to-back November collapses under Charlie Weis in 2008-09 – that’s about as good an end to a roller coaster debut as Kelly could ask for. With Crist and Floyd back for one more go-round in the fall, it’s also just a start.
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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January 19th, 2011 by admin
A season in review.
Halloween: Nebraska is 7-1, ranked in the top 10 in both major polls and in the top 20 in total and scoring offense. The Cornhuskers have just easily dispatched undefeated Missouri, 31-17, a week after snapping Oklahoma State’s 6-0 start in Stillwater. Both have come on the heels of dominant road blowouts over Washington and Kansas State. The ‘Huskers are averaging 38 points on 459 yards per game, making speedy redshirt freshman quarterback Taylor Martinez is one of the breakout stars of the season.
Two months later: Nebraska has closed the year by losing three of its last four, failing to top 20 points in any of them, including a six-point, zero-touchdown effort in a loss at Texas A&M and a seven-point flop against Washington in the Holiday Bowl – a little over three months after throttling the Huskies by five touchdowns in Seattle. In between, the ‘Huskers went three-and-out eight times and failed to score at all in the second half of a 23-20 loss to Oklahoma in the Big 12 Championship Game. For the year, the offense now comes in 60 yards and a full touchdown below its season averages at Halloween, and has fallen into the bottom half of the Big 12 on both counts. Martinez has failed to run for a touchdown in the last nine games, and snapped a five-game streak without throwing for a score with a second quarter TD in the bowl game, Nebraska’s only points in the stunning loss. What happened?
The short answer is that Martinez got hurt, spraining his ankle with the victory in hand against Missouri. Then he got hurt again, injuring his foot early in the debacle at Texas A&M, gamely returning in the second half to no particular end. That was the same night that he incurred the very visible wrath of coach Bo Pelini on the sideline, and the transfer rumors began in earnest amid a sense of general decline. Even with Martinez ostensibly healthy, the embarrassment in the Holiday Bowl was the final sputtering of a team on ‘E.’
In the bigger picture, though, the end of 2010 looked an awful lot like the majority of 2009, minus the uplifting bowl redemption. The ’09 Cornhuskers were inept enough offensively to lose three games in which the defense allowed fewer than 17 points, including the infamous, 13-12 loss to Texas on the final snap of the Big 12 Championship Game, in which the ‘Huskers failed to score a touchdown. Much of that failure was laid at the feet of quarterback Zac Lee, a one-dimensional "manager" type who failed to generate enough of a passing game – or at least enough respect for a hypothetical passing game – to keep defenses from ganging up on the respectable ground attack. The offense finished 11th in the conference in passing and total offense, with an abysmal 105.1 efficiency rating in Big 12 games.
With the added threat of Martinez running out of the shotgun, the 2010 attack was quite a bit better than "respectable" on the ground, as it turned out, softening up secondaries for big gains downfield: Martinez had 150 yards (including a 24-yard touchdown pass) on just seven completions at Washington, 128 yards (including a 79-yard touchdown pass) on just five completions at Kansas State, 116 yards (including a 40-yard touchdown pass) on six completions against Missouri, and 323 yards with five touchdown passes at Oklahoma State. After the injury against Mizzou, though, it was all downhill. Martinez’s next start was a lackluster, 20-3 win over North Division whipping boy Kansas, and his last three starts yielded a grand total of 33 points, seven scoreless quarters, a pass efficiency rating well below 100 and a single sustained touchdown drive covering longer than 12 yards. By the Big 12 Championship Game, Martinez looked equally uncomfortable in the pocket (he double-clutched his way into seven sacks at the hands of Oklahoma defenders) and ineffective as a runner, to the point that tailback Rex Burkhead started taking regular Wildcat snaps in the second half – with almost no threat whatsoever to throw – in search of some kind of spark.
It didn’t help Martinez’s cause that backup Cody Green cameoed with a solid, 10-for-13, two-touchdown effort in a 45-17 rout over Colorado in the regular season finale. But Green didn’t see the field as the game plan deteriorated against Oklahoma and was brutal in relief in the Holiday Bowl, completing a paltry 3 of 12 passes. Despite the rumors and apparent clashes with Pelini, there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that Martinez is still the starting quarterback as Nebraska embarks on its exodus to the Big Ten. Whether he can still be the electric playmaker that briefly had Big 12 defenses shaking in their cleats in October, on the other hand, will be one of the burning questions of the year.
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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December 30th, 2010 by admin
A season in review. Today: Texas Tech’s offense in transition.
By almost any standard, Texas Tech remained one of the most prolific passing attacks in the country in its first season in a decade under the watch of someone other than spread guru Mike Leach, and by some of them, you would have never known Leach was gone. As usual, the Red Raiders were back in the top 10 nationally in yards and attempts per game, and tied with high-flying Oklahoma for the Big 12 lead in touchdown passes. They went over 300 yards through the air in seven games, with at least three touchdown passes in eight. Eight different Raider receivers brought down at least 25 receptions.
In other, more significant ways, though, it was a radical departure. Tech ran 42 percent of the time, up from roughly 25 percent under Leach, and actually ran more than it passed in the Nov. 6 upset over Missouri – unheard of on Leach’s watch – with roughly 50-50 splits against Oklahoma State, Colorado, Oklahoma and Weber State. Aside from a dismal effort against Texas, the ground game consistently produced, to the tune of 151 yards per game in the other eleven.
The net result was a slight backwards step on paper – from 471 total yards and 37 points per game in 2009 to 453 yards and 32 points – with largely the same personnel, but the specifics were downright ominous: The early loss to Texas was an across-the-board disaster, and Tech went five straight games in conference without topping 27 points in any of them, a streak bookended by ugly trouncings at the hands of Oklahoma State (34-17) and Oklahoma (45-7). Numbers were down in terms of both yardage and efficiency. Only once, in a 45-38 shootout over Baylor, did the offense give any hint of Leach-era fireworks against a non-cupcake, and that’s probably being generous to Baylor’s defense.
Not that any of the above should come as any surprise, given the transition and Tuberville’s conservative track record in the SEC. Even with a spread-friendly coordinator and a core of veteran players recruited and trained specifically in the spread – the top two quarterbacks (Taylor Potts and Steven Sheffield), leading rusher (Baron Batch) and top two receivers (Lyle Leong and Detron Lewis) are all seniors – the offense trended increasingly toward more balance as the season wore on. And with that core moving on after Saturday’s Ticket City Bowl date with Northwestern, the death of the "Air Raid" is officially nigh:
"I like what we’re doing. I couldn’t have come in here and just been a running team with the type of personnel that was already here," Tuberville said Monday after his team’s first bowl practice at Bishop Lynch. … "But I still believe in running the football. More than what they did in the past. That’s the biggest difference. We want to be a bit more physical and be able to run the ball, which will help throwing it down the field, too."
[…]
Those trends were expected coming off the Leach years, especially after Tuberville installed more zone blocking and zone reads for the rushing attack. But Tuberville’s pedigree – head coach in the SEC at Auburn, defensive coordinator at Miami – points to a much bigger makeover for his second season in Lubbock.
In other words: Less thrilla, more vanilla. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if more vanilla gets results. But for Raider fans hoping to hold on to the last vestiges of the high-flying, up-tempo philosophy that produced the most successful – and easily the most interesting – decade in the history of Texas Tech football, they should set their DVRs Saturday for posterity.
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
Dr. Saturday – NCAAF – Yahoo! Sports
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December 21st, 2010 by admin
A season in review. Today: Cincinnati’s freefall from the top of the Big East.
Brian Kelly’s three-year run at Cincinnati produced the three best individual seasons in school history: In successive years, the Bearcats set new program highs with 10 wins, then 11, then 12, while turning in Cincy’s first ever finish in the final polls, first major conference championship, first major bowl game and first undefeated regular season. With a run like that, it’s no surprise that the Bearcats fell back to the pack in their first season under Butch Jones.
It is, however, a surprise that they fell so far back, from 12-0 to 4-8 overall, and just 2-5 in the Big East, barely enough to keep them out of last place – and especially that, in a lot of big-picture ways, Jones’ hapless debut didn’t look all that different from Kelly’s triumphant farewell.
Just like the ’09 team, Cincy gained more yards and scored more points than any other offense in the Big East. It also finished seventh in the conference in total defense – a slight improvement, after coming in dead last en route to 12-0. Quarterback Zach Collaros passed for a conference-best 2,900 yards and 26 touchdowns, easily better than predecessor Tony Pike managed in the Bearcats’ 11-3, conference championship season in 2008, and turned in a slightly better efficiency rating. The offense improved its third-down conversion rate, from 42 percent to forty-six. Armon Binns and D.J. Woods were the No. 1 and No. 2 receivers in the Big East, combining for 1,999 yards and 18 touchdowns on 132 receptions. Altogether, there were seven Bearcats on the postseason All-Big East team, down from eight all-conference picks in 2009.
And yet, the 2010 edition not only came nowhere near a conference championship; it didn’t even threaten to turn a winning record. The Bearcats dropped five of their last six games, four of them by double digits, with the highest-scoring offense in the league failing to top 17 points in any of them. The defense, often an opportunistic, bend-don’t-break outfit in ’09, was torched for at least 27 in every conference game. In a single season, essentially the same group of players rode essentially the same generic profile – good offense, bad defense – from an extreme high to an extreme low.
That chasm is bridged by big-play opportunities on the margins. The return game declined from the best in the conference on punt and kickoff returns to the worst in both categories. The high-pressure defense that led the Big East in sacks and tackles for loss in 2008 and finished in the top 10 nationally on both fronts in ’09 fell back to the middle of the pack. The line that allowed the fewest sacks in the conference last year – despite blocking in the most pass-happy offense – gave up the second-most sacks this time around. And one of the least turnover-prone teams in the country devolved into an outfit the couldn’t hold on to the ball to save its life.
For the season, the Cincy offense coughed up 29 giveaways, more than any other attack in the conference, and only wrangled 14 takeaways, fewer than any other defense. Not surprisingly, the Bearcats finished in the red in eight of 12 games, six of them losses, and turned in a –15 margin for the season – a staggering 24-turnover swing from 2009, and ultimately worse than all but one other team in the nation (Middle Tennessee).
The athletes didn’t change. Neither did the high-flying, up-tempo philosophy on offense. But this team was far sloppier with the ball and totally lacked its predecessor’s big-play knack on defense and special teams, which makes it just another unremarkable entry in decades of mediocrity.
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
Dr. Saturday – NCAAF – Yahoo! Sports
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December 20th, 2010 by admin
UCLA fired defensive coordinator Chuck Bullough Saturday, for fairly obvious reasons: The Bruin D declined from third in the Pac-10 in total and scoring defense in Bullough’s first year to ninth and eighth, respectively, yielding 30 points on 420 yards per game. Eight of nine Pac-10 opponents scored at least 24 points, seven racked up more than 200 yards rushing and only two were forced into multiple turnovers – and those two, Arizona and USC, only gave it away twice en route to comfortable wins in the Rose Bowl.
By no standard was Bullough’s defense good, or even competent, despite the presence of a dozen players in the regular rotation who were rated four stars or better out of high school, six of whom have been on campus all three years under head coach Rick Neuheisel. If not for surprising flashes in upsets over Houston, Texas and Oregon State – three of the Bruins’ four wins – it might have limped in as one of the most hopeless outfits in the country.
And still, the elephant in Bullough’s office as he packs up his things is that Norm Chow’s offense was even worse. Significantly worse, and eminently worthy of the title of "hopeless." The Bruins finished dead last in the Pac-10 in total offense, and very nearly last in the entire country in pass efficiency, beating out Vanderbilt and Buffalo; only the triple-option attacks from the service academies and Georgia Tech passed for fewer yards. Between them, quarterbacks Richard Brehaut and Kevin Prince served up 12 interceptions to just nine touchdowns and failed to lead a single victory when the running game was held below 200 yards on the ground. The Thursday-night loss at Washington on Nov. 18 was a nationally televised catastrophe.
All that in a year that was supposed to yield at least another modest step toward breaking out of a decade of mediocrity in USC’s shadow. For the first time under Neuheisel/Chow, the offense returned a starting quarterback (Prince), along with the top two rushers from 2009, the top two receivers and an all-upperclass line with a Pac-10-high 92 career starts between them. Part of their undoing, undoubtedly, was another round of bad luck – Prince missed the last six games with a knee injury, one of his backups was knocked out for the year and the Bruins played all season with two starting offensive linemen on the shelf as academic casualties. Another was sidelined with a bum ankle. Still, after three years, at no point in Neuheisel’s tenure has the offense not resembled a MASH unit.
But the regression overhwelms the excuses. The Bruins end yet another season with no reliable quarterback, no playmakers in the backfield or at receiver, no consistency on the offensive line and no remaining shred of the sense of slow-but-steady progress Neuheisel sustained through most of his first two seasons. After three years of oversight by the home-grown hero and the most respected passing architect in the game, the offense remains a shambling wreck in all directions.
The contract extension Chow agreed to over the summer was formally approved last month; in the meantime, Neuheisel promised Saturday to continue "to evaluate the entire staff," with the suggestion more heads could be rolling soon. The odds that he’ll be spared a decision on Chow by his departure to another school are dwindling. If Chow’s still holding the offensive cards in 2011, it’s an all-in bet on a hand that hasn’t come close to paying off so far, and it may be the last one Neuheisel gets.
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
Dr. Saturday – NCAAF – Yahoo! Sports
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