Our Defense

Thank you, Monte. With far fewer resources, a new coaching staff/new system, we lost by 1 TD. What brilliant analysts.

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Monte, chill man. At some point you are going to wake up and realize this team lacks talent and the coaches are doing the best they can this year. This is an 8 win team at best. I give the coaches a PASS for the entire season. They don’t have any horses on D. That is why they are dropping 8 into coverage on the majority of passing downs. You can disagree with the term if you like, but when a team rushes 3, that’s certainly not being aggressive. I’m not criticizing the WHY for the decision. The secondary is suspect and the coaches think if they blitz they will give up more big plays. It makes sense, but it is what it is.

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The best pass D is a good pass rush, which we don’t currently have. Sir Oliver was a master with the rush and we already see the impact of his absence on the D line. His play made others better. Now he’s gone and we don’t have another player to match his impact on the D line. For us to put pressure on the QB, we have to rely more on disguised LB or Safety blitz opportunities.

However, I believe Coach Cauthen is better D coach than Coach D’Onofrio and it’ll take time to correct the play of the defense while recruiting D players with more impact.

With no more nationally ranked teams on our schedule in the coming five weeks we’ll see improved play from both the O and D. Based on the play of the O in the WSU game, we need to cut down on holding penalties which probably cost us 14 more points.

This team isn’t nearly as bad as some fans make them out to be. We’re averaging 30 points per game. It’s not like we’re only averaging 17-20 points per game. Did we really think that OU or WSU were going to allow us to score 40+ points against them?

We have a tough schedule, new coaching staff, DL and passing offense issues and a successful season might be measured with 8-4 record with possible losses to UCF and Memphis. For us to be competitive with those teams, we will have to see significant improvement.

Go Coogs!!

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Gordon had more time to throw the ball yesterday than any QB I ever remember seeing.

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In the 4th quarter of the OU-UCLA game they mentioned Kelly and how he wants to ad depth to his team, 3-4 deep, like he had at Oregon.

They mentioned that his D at Oregon rotated players to keep them fresh and they were not concerned with stats but with stops. Often they got turnovers.

They also mentioned that they rotated not just DL but LB’s and DB/S’s. Again going 3-4 deep during a game. This would keep fresh bodies so that if the Ducks scored quickly they still had a good D.

They mentioned that OU and a few other teams had that ability.

This year you could see OU, Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State and Georgia having that depth with LSU, Texas, and a few others close to getting there.

I have noticed how UH has been rotating DL and not wearing out players like last year. Some players have not bought into this new stategy but OU is proving it is the direction that D’s must go in the age of air raid, spread, hurry up O’s.

I like what the DC is doing and if UH keeps him next year with all the players returning and those not eligible coming in, we could be stout and have depth.

With the O it reminds me of the Jack Pardee team and once QB and WR gets clicking, we will surprise some this year.

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