It was a win, that's about all. The vaunted DL looked terrible, Carlo and Fox bit on every two bit fake that 1st time starter gave them and those guys are 5th year Sr's, you might think you can coach young guys up on a game to game basis, but if 5th year guys don't get I don't think they can be coached up. Devin Garden and Michigan are licking their chops after watching what the Temple QB could do to our defense. Kelly made a big deal out of the fact we held the scoring down and that is goal number, ok I agree but that's freakin' Temple. On offense we made some really big plays, great and we put up a lot of yards, great. But 28 points and only 7 in the 2nd half that's pretty disappointing against an outmanned Temple defense who had a bunch of short DB's. Tommy made a number of excellent throws, Daniels and TJ made some great catches and so on. But still you measure the game by how many points you put on the board. We have a lot of things to work on this week if we want to have a chance at Michigan. Remember we are 1-8 at Michigan recently.
Terry, I agree with everything you said about our defense, but I respectfully disagree about our second half offense. There was no incentive to put more points on the board than necessary or to show more than basic offense, i.e., run the ball and pass to maintain possession. IMO, we showed class by not running up the score, especially at the end when we could have taken TO's to score a TD. I'm not concerned about the 28 points. I'm concerned about the 362 yards given up by the defense.
No one ever got rich betting on ND to cover a spread. It all starts with the DL. To me, they look too big and too slow. That means minimal pressure without the blitz. So we start blitzing like crazy and now we ask our LBs to cover one on one.
-Rees misses way too many wide open WR. I mean, I feel like an asshole pointing toward a kid who threw for over 300yards and 3TDs and saying, 'you can do better' but honestly...he could and should. It's the difference between blowing the doors off of Temple vs that not-really-comfortable easy win you saw Saturday. I love his composure so far. I like the higher deep ball that he throws, but the problem is our WRs probably won't be that wide open on the deep ball against better teams..so he can't hang the ball up that high. Still, that's a marked improvement from the past. -We have 5 RBs and the 2 freshman look to be the best. I like Amir's speed but I'm afraid for him whenever he gets hit. Those 2 freshman RBs look like the types of RBs we see in the SEC or the old Big8. -I hope Diaco had a meeting with the defense this morning that started with the words 'You motherf*****s.' Before that meeting, I hope Kelly had one with Diaco that sounded very similar. Why are we running soft coverage while blitzing? That allows the WR to sit down. It's the #1 read for a WR. Sit down in the zone, run away from man. We didn't even make it hard for them. Part of that was design. Part of that was what appeared to be laziness, IMHO. -The only hope I have is that Kelly is pulling a Holtz and sandbagging everything for a final farewell to Ann Arbor. -I wish we could have gotten Hendrix into the game sooner. -In the past, I thought our TEs blocked well enough but were great pass catchers. We look to have much more traditional (albeit physically freakish) TEs now. We were crushing people on the perimeter. -FG sucks, Punting sucks, punt return... 'meh' but better than last year, kickoff coverage was good.
Oh Jaylon.. I watched him a lot to see if he was over his head. One of the reasons you didn't hear his name called (he played A LOT) was that his receiver wasn't open and they generally seemed to stay away from him. Michigan won't give him that kind of respect. We'll find out how good he is next week.
Corey, good catch on the TE perimeter blocking. I watched for it because it was one of Eifert's strengths last year, and #85 did a great job yesterday.
Back to my keyboard. 1. Rees seemed to be a bit stronger with the throws and had some incompletions that were either caused by trying to avoid the INT or the frosh receiver ran a poor route. 2. The vaunted D line played like they were Clowney and didn't want to get hurt. 3. Punting was stupid but not weak. It's easily corrected. Tausch was awful, Brienza was at least strong but off. There's hope. 4. KO coverage was less than mediocre. Temple like many teams lines up and then pulls up after the D sets and looks for the sideline to signal in a play against that D. Why the F don't we change Ds after they reset? Hendrix is 8 mos from graduation and medical school. He's almost a waste of time. O line is terrible inconsistant. It can open huge holes but often misses assignments. Teams improve the most from game 1 to 2. This part of the team had better improve a lot! As an aside, Temple was well coached and had some tough kids. I was really impressed with their ILB, C, and QB.
related to Gip's note about inconsistency.. how much of that is on the RB. I know Cam McDaniel gets praised a lot for being a 'smart' player, but at least twice I saw gigantic holes in the line which required him to cut back inside. He would have caught the ILBs over pursuing and the flow would have put the safeties 10 yards off line. It's an easy 25 yard run with a cut back inside. Yet he bounced outside both times.. Now, I'm not in the meetings so for all I know the staff has designed that play to go outside every time. Still, I can't imagine they wouldn't trade a 7 yard run for a 25 yard run every time. I thought our pass protection was fine. We had a blown assignment on a twist early, but settled in well. We sealed the perimeter all day long in the run game and regularly blew massive holes in 9 man fronts. It's early, everyone is still getting into game mode. I'm still concerned about the D though.. hopefully, they get it together next week.
ND <t>I've taken a couple of days and watched the replay of this game before making a comment. <br/> <br/> At the end of the game on Sat I knew ND had won but it sure didn't feel like it. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. It was like "boom", at TD strike on the first set of downs and here we go! Same on the second set of downs. Just when you're thinking we are gonna score 50+ points on the day it slows to a crawl. What happend to the D line and LBs???? They looked like they had their feet in a foot of mud! Isn't this basically the same defense I saw last year all over QBs and making their life miserable? You mean we lose 1(albeit a really good one) inside LB and the defense go to hell? They were sloooooooooow! They won't win more than 6 games if they play like that all season. <br/> <br/> I'm not really happy about the offense either. They just seemed to go in spurts. I'm really not happy with Atkinson at RB at all. He still runs high and after 3 seasons going into his 4th I think we can safely say, he always will. That's not gonna cut it. You saw the little flashes from our two freshmen RBs right? That's who we need to keep giving the ball to along with Carlisle. <br/> <br/> If we played Purdue next I say we would be O.K. but we don't. It's the much hated um and we will not win next sat playing like this against them. We just won't. As a matter of fact we will probably get the crap kicked out of us for sure.<br/> <br/> I'm sorry but I can't feel very good about this remainder of the season after watching that game,</t>