Thoughts on the game

Clearly there was some pep to the offense with postman in the game. I still think king is our best option. We see flashes of great offense but it sputters in the second half. We have seen a huge learning curve for the coaches on the offensive side. On the defensive side why are the blitzes so slow to develop? D has been a strong suit but I never get the feeling our o can score at any given moment. I get nervous about us getting a 1st down. Overall I am happy about 3/1 and hope that we mature as offensive group. The future is bright as our recruiting is trending in the right direction. I feel applewhite will get it done.

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I agree. I was thinking we’re not as aggressive on blitzes as in the past but maybe we are using delayed blitzes?

The O needs to get much better or we will lose some games. SMU leads the conference in sacks with 21. They got to Ward a bunch last year, 7 times, I think.

USF has 14 INTs with 2 DBs with 3 and 1 with 2.

All of that spells trouble for our Offense. Using King will help but I really think we should swap him and Postma at QB and WR. With both on the field and the other DC not knowing who will be behind center could allow us to catch opponents in the wrong set.

Defensively, we still miss too many tackles. I don’t know what coaches do the practice after the game for guys who missed assignments, whiffed on tackles like they had their eyes shut, and so forth. There should be hell to pay in my opinion. Intense remedial physical training, conditioning drills, an hour tackling your teammates and so on.

I have played for coaches who would bench kids for a series for whiffing on a tackle.

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Just being devil’s advocate here. I like this idea in theory, but given RPO is such a timing-intensive scheme, I would be concerned that the offense would never be able to get into any sort of rhythm. I would love to see King in there getting some QB snaps. Postma is a great athlete, but King is a special athlete more like Greg Ward. Also, some may disagree with me on this, but I think Postma is probably a better pure WR than King. But, I don’t get paid nearly $2 million/year for my offensive philosophy opinions.

They mentioned in the broadcast that USF had a lot of success with delayed blitzes against them. We did that several times. Don’t know if USF players are faster, Temple picked it up better, or we just sent them too late, but we didn’t have the success with them that USF had

USF has incredible team speed. On the whole, they are much faster than we are.

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They had practice to correct it. Their coaches also assumed we’d watch the USF game and use a similar scheme. Hats off to Temple, they prepared well. Just not well enough. lol

I want to challenge this.

Flowers is fast , but we have at least two linebackers (Hines, Williams )who can run 4.6’s.
They have speed on the outside at WR, but Johnson and Myers can run.
Our offense is a different story. lol I do think we match up well with them on defense. We’ve been struggling with the Pocket Passer quarterbacks. Maybe we do Flowers like we did LJ last year. haha

Yeah, our defense matches up with their offense much better than our offense matches up with their defense, speed wise. However, with that said, they don’t have a skill player on offense that goes slower than 4.55 (among majority of their priduction), and at least three of them have been clocked in the 4.4s (Flowers, Johnson and Tice). IJ, Myers and perhaps Khalil Williams can keep up with that speed but not sure we have anyone else who can.

Defensively, their corners and safeties clock anywhere from 4.37-4.55. Most of their LBs run between 4.6-4.7. I don’t know if we have an offensive skill guy in the 4.5s. Maybe Corbin?

USF plays fast on both sides of the ball. I was basing this on the eye test until I looked up their times. They are actually a bit faster than I thought.

I like what your saying. I think Postma becoming a pure WR after a few games of transition is the natural result of this idea. Plus, that WR pass off of a reverse or jet sweep look becomes even more deadly.

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Yea, I’m going to go out on a limb an say that they don’t have that amount of speed. I don’t even think Bama, Clemson, or Ohio State has that kind of speed. That is immensely abundant. Some times when players have been playing in a scheme for so long they appear faster because they play faster. Another thing, we’ve been a pretty good tackling team in space. Flowers and gang will have to make us miss a lot (Hines and Adams won’t let them do that all game) as a defense in order to get north and south. We’ve struggled with some missed tackles this year, but the USF game isn’t for a while. I think people are in full panic mode and (I’m not saying you are, but some people) are assuming USF is leaps and bounds more talented than we are. They’re not. We’re still one of the most talented teams in the AAC. The difference between them is that they have 16 returning starters, and we don’t. They know what they are supposed to do, but it’s still football. We can line up and beat them, regardless of how the season plays out up to that game. We can beat them! Go Coogs!

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I agree with pretty much everything you said and think we will make it very tough for the Bulls to win at home. Certainly not trying to make USF sound invincible.

Really, this all started with me saying that I thought USF has incredible team speed. That was my only point. I stand by that. I had to really dig to come up with some of their 40 times, as well as some of our own. Who knows how accurate they are, but I would imagine any discrepancy between actual and reported times goes both ways. So if they’re a little slower than reported times, so are our guys.

I really wish we had them in The Cage this year. smh I think we can contain Flowers. I’m not sold on him being more elusive or faster (top end speed) than GWJR ,and teams still found a way to contain him. I really hope we shock them and the rest of the naysayers.

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