Before the season the strength of this team IMHO was going to be the kicking game. Our guy was extremely reliable both place kicking and punting. Well he's fallen apart in the last 4 games. He (and his holder/snapper) cost us the Northwestern game and he cost us this game ( or at least the chance to go to OT). I didn't get to watch the 2nd half, so I'm glad we didn't get run out of the stadium which when it was 14-3 it looked like that was exactly what was going to happen. Bottom line it was a loss and while this is hardly the 2005 USC team, I don't see us winning that game either.
Well Cam McDaniel and Kyle Brendza can look back at their senior years and celebrate how they went out on top. That's the type of senior leadership this team has had.
And while we're at it, 2 players who should have been out there were Redfield and Schumate. Apparently these "student"-athletes haven't done what they're supposed to be doing.
Louisville piled up another 409 yards of offense, led by a second team Freshman QB. Morgan had ten tackles before his ejection. Golson is completely broken at this point. He exudes a total lack of confidence. I feel bad for him because his coach has placed the the entire gameplan on his back. Has anyone found Ben Koyack yet ? Brindza, like Golson, has lost his mojo. Some of the poorest tackling I've ever seen led by senior leader Collinsworth.
:cry: RE: Brindza........ YOU DONT HAVE A LEFT HANDED HOLDER FOR A RIGHT FOOTED KICKER........ he didn't hold it correct from the snap.... wasn't the kickers fault.... that's a coaching error..... just like leaving Golson in... after half time... :twisted:
Re Morgan: He had 10 tackles but he could have had 50 had he hit the right holes. Watch that game tape, Louisville picked on him all night. They ran at him. When we'd try to overload to compensate for blown assignments, they ran against the grain. They threw at him. The kid did not have a good game. I have no idea why people seem so hell bent on pinning so much on the defense, but I have a lot more hope for the guys playing defense down the road (even with these coaches) than I do the offense. Here's the deal. We thought the defense would be bad to so-so. Turns out, the defense looked great. They tackled great. They covered scheme great. It was all great. Even with the loss of Springmann and the suspensions.. but then the injuries started... and we began to make more mistakes in assignment. Then we had a series of absolutely crippling injuries to players who are/were the backbone of the defense and now we're blowing assignments and tackles.. The defense has been getting progressively worse and it makes sense. They've gotten younger and younger and younger by the snap. You have a fairly complex scheme that our 2 deep looked GREAT running. The problem is, we haven't been able to use our 2 deep in a month. They're gone... But they're the problem... and not this 501.3c we call an offense. I think Terry makes a good point, but I didn't think ST would be a strength of ours. If you look back at KB's career, even when he was at the top of his game, he would shank one easy kick every now and then. He was the strength of the special teams. Our kick returns were a nightmare in recent history.
Corey, injuries aside, poor tackling is poor tackling. And these guys are not scrubs. Most would be starters at many other D-1 schools. But the offense gives them no help. Quite the opposite.
After what I witnessed yesterday.... let's take Brian Kelly off the Gator's coaching search list. Golson might as well have been white with the number 6 on his jersey. Looked eerily similar to a bad day from Jeff Driskel and a stubborn coach riding him into the ground.
It's so hard to process what is going on this year. Kelly is being blamed for pretty much everything and anything that is wrong with the programs. We aren't playing Max Redfield, which of course is Kelly's fault. Everybody knows Redfield is a great talent and if he's a goof off in practice or has other behavior problems, it's Kelly's fault. Kelly is holding him down, I keep waiting for somebody to throw down the race card, since Kelly loves the white boy back there (Collinsworth). It's Kelly's fault that Chris Brown fumbled on the goal line, after all he doesn't run that jet sweep, and if you don't run it then it's natural that you will fumble. It's Kelly's fault. Of course I'm not clear on why when Brown gets the ball and is running with it on the Jet sweep, how is that different from when he gets the ball on a crossing pattern or on a short out and turns to run with the ball? But it's Kelly's fault. Give the ball to McDaniel in a crucial situation, what an idiot doesn't he know that Cam is the worst fumbler on the team? Oh wait he isn't, he rarely fumbles. I tried to find out how many he's had but I can't but I can't really remember him fumbling the ball this year. If I'm right that makes it all the stupider to let him touch the ball in that situation..he was due. Didn't Kelly know that? Anyway you can see where this is going, Kelly has never really been popular unless he's winning. He was really popular after UM, Stanford and FSU. He's an idiot now, guys should transfer rather than play for him. He's lost the team, he's a tyrant, he's abusive to the players...do you see him talk sternly to them on the sideline rather than hugging and slapping them on the back like he should.
Ah...while it's always hard to find positives from a loss and certainly much easier to find fault with everybody concerned. So I took heart from Coach D's post on ISD.
Terry, thank you for your last two posts. You get my personal "Voice of Reason" award for this week. You are the first and last recipient this year. :lol: I like Mike Mayock. I'm sure not everyone does. Following the game, he made what I consider to be sensible comments. He said that before the season started, he was looking at next year as THE year and that this year would be developmental for the young athletes. After we won our first 6 games, he thought, we're a year ahead of schedule. After the results of the last 5 games, he said, the team is where we thought they'd be before the season started. I'm sticking hard to my original belief that this exceptionally young group of outstanding athletes is paying its dues and will emerge a substantially better team over the next couple of years. The ugly and disappointing losses will turn into stepping stones to a better future as the young guys mature, gain strength, gain valuable experience, and some develop the leadership qualities necessary to fuel a consistent refuse-to-lose attitude. Better times ahead, folks.
Don't get me wrong there is a lot of blame to go around, I just don't believe that our current losing streak is all on the players, it's on the coaches as well. I'm not exactly sure why coaching is so hard, but every week all over college football we see coaches who have spent 80 hours preparing for the game seemingly have no viable plan or who inspite of being veteran coaches make mind numbingly stupid decisions. Take the Texans for example, Bill O'Brien is down 2 scores and has very little time left at the end of the game. Every coach should know that you don't go for a 14 play drive to get 1 score and totally run out the clock, that's exactly what he did. You kick the FG as soon as you get in range and then go for the onside kick. O'Brien is a veteran coach, he's a Bill Bellichek disciple, Joel said he was coming back to NE when BB retires. Yet he failed to manage the most basic of end of game strategies. He's also had some bad time management issues at times. Again that seems like it should be Coaching 101. I want to like Kelly, I want Kelly to succeed of course. I'm not as prone to blaming Kelly for any and all of the problems we've had since the FSU game. I'll give him some rope since we have had injuries, suspensions, etc. Not to mention players have to play and not fumble, take care of the football. But Kelly himself is sometimes a little arrogant and condescending when it comes to his press conferences... now granted sportswriters are prone to mind numbing stupid questions that would make me want to slap them upside the head. That's what I always liked about Area, he was in control, now who knows if Ara could have survived the 24/7 scene we have now. As much as I like Lou, I grew very tired of some of his act with regards to dealing with the press. The University of Navy, the other team has scholarship players, the poor mouthing of our chances vs anybody. I don't really care all that much for him now on ESPN either. That whole deal with Mark May drives me nuts and I refuse to watch it any more. Coach D said that our current defense would have been fine for the team he expected to coach when they arrived in August. But since then his defense has been gutted and his defense is too complicated for the true freshmen and sophs that are playing. That's on him, he should be able to simplify it on the run go back to basics. The offense was going to be a strength, clearly the OL has been a disappointment. Maybe if Nick Martin hadn't started the season with an injured hand forcing some of the changes things would have been different. But that didn't cause Gilson to be so careless with the ball. Godson and Kelly are starting to remind me of Holtz and Ron Powlus, the only way Lou was not playing Ron is if he was injured, no amount of fumbled snaps or anything was going to put him on the bench. Oh well on to USC, they have a lot of their own problems. Maybe Kelly will be able to get the team to play well AND win. That would be nice. I fully expect that the next fan outrage will be us not staying home and going to some lowly bowl game that back in the day we'd have never even lowered ourselves to even considering. Pinstripe Bowl anybody?
In the stats are for losers categories...Coach D posted this on ISD. Everett Golson's 66.7% completion rate against Louisville was the highest against the UL defense all season. The previous high was 58.6% by Brad Kaaya in the first game of the season. In fact, it was the highest against the Louisville defense since October of 2012. His 9.8 yards per attempt was also the highest against UL all season, next closest was 8.4 by Florida State. It was the highest against the UL defense since 2012. Golson's 168.44 QB rating against the UL defense was the highest against UL all season. Previous high was 131.53 by the Murray State QB in early September. It was the highest rating against UL defense since November of 2012. Between that game and the Notre Dame game, the next highest rating was 141.22 by Blake Bortles last October. Tarean Folston's 134 rushing yards was the most by a back against the UL defense all season. Only one other RB went over 100 yards (Dalvin Cook, FSU). This was the most yards allowed by a UL defense since 2012. Will Fuller's 109 receiving yards were the most by a opposing WR against the UL defense all season and was only the 2nd player to gain at least 100 yards all season.
If anyone is interested in reading about our LB recruit Asmir Bilal, here is an article on how he influenced Ben Davis HS's decisive win over previously undefeated Carmel in the Indiana 6A championship game. http://www.indystar.com/story/sport...ll-of-ben-davis-6a-championship-run/19645029/