Takeaways from game 1 (vs Rice)

Although many of you would argue that Rice is a bad measuring stick (being a one win teams and barely escaping a fcs team) I thought they played us well. They seemed well coached and clearly had a game plan in mind. Here are my impressions from game one.

The good:
*King had around 15 yards per completion, didn’t get sacked once, and didn’t give the ball away.
*Every RB but T.Will averaged more than 5.8 yards per attempt. I cant remember the last game we put up over 250 rushing yards.
*Chambers, Turner, and Roman Brown looked great on the D#. P.Car was a MAN at RB.

  • In only 20 minutes of TOP we managed to get off 65+ plays and nearly 600 yards of O.
  • Wrs looked great, I was ecstatic to see them use B.Smith all over the in the O even if he did have a special teams blunder. I could see him being used as a weapon in trick plays also. Stevenson can sure RUN.
    *Kings Arm is unreal, especially if he’s given time. The wider splits seem to give him a better pocket and makes it easier for an outside scramble

The Bad:
*3rd and long seemed to be no issue for rice. Our dbs were never burnt but seemed to have issues finding the ball, that’s not going to cut it against a Memphis or a USF.
*even with the 250+ yrd rushing game, I felt like we got stuffed every time we tried to hit the A or B gaps. 3rd (and 4th) and short are going to be a major issue for ur O.

Things I wanted to see:

  • Really wanted to see Raelon Singleton catch a pass, see JuJu out there, and see Peyton Sawyer return a punt or too.
    *thought Grant Stuard was all over the ball when he came in the second half, I liked his grit and speed more than J.Will.

Moving Forward:
*If we can get 65+ plays in 20 minutes, I bet we will average 70+ plays a game for the season.
*After today does anyone see P.Car getting more touches?
*Can we get people off the field on 3rd down? Our DB play gave me flashbacks of last year. This aspect Is the most concerning to me with AZ coming in next week.
*was our Speed at WR a real weapon or was it just Rice having slow DBs?

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We used 57 players today, that’s good depth development. I still can’t believe we had nearly 600 yards in only 20 minutes of play. Going to be interesting to see how much improvement between this week and next vs. Zona.

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I would not mind if the transfer rb rode the pine for a while. May be they used him to motivate the other backs. Player cannot seat out of football for a year and be ready game one. Never can replicate game speed and reactions in practices.

He was tentative, dancing around, not hitting the hole or bouncing it out.

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I was chatting with a friend at the game and I wonder if they are using back at different points if the game. M.Carr came in for a drive in the 4th and was just bullying them. Eventually, he was bound to pop one. Reminds me of how Bama used Derrick Henry. Grind until the Defense doesn’t want anymore. With fresh backs they can’t keep up.

Anyway, what is their strat at RB?

They were rotating the three backs by series for the first half. In the 2nd, they seemed to go with the hot hand a bit longer…then again, we were scoring so fast, none of them were on the field for long periods of time.

I think we’ll continue to see a rotation of the three backs…a lot like the 3 headed monster (Beall, Hayes, Sims) we saw in 2009-11.

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Yeah i feel like we should only try the middle once they have been grinded down in the pater in the game or a plus 8 tempo drive

Thought all of the backs looked better than twill