Texas-Texas Tech 2010 Post Mortem - Defense/Special Teams

Great write up as usual

I was watching the game with Walt Anderson’s son. We both thought that targeting call was bullshit so I told him to ask his dad about it. Sticking with the code (the same one that cops abide) Walt said it was a good call and that call can be made if it’s even close. What a bunch of shit. I think Gideon is having a hell of a year, and I’m not really a Gideon guy.

I have a man crush on the entire defense.

Can you imagine what it would feel like to write/read a “Post Mortem – Offense” that read something like that? I’m not holding my breath.

Nice analysis. Thanx.

Can you imagine what it would feel like to write/read a "Post Mortem – Offense" that read something like that?

In other words, “can you imagine what it would feel like to be Bill Little?”

“If you’re one a dimensional passing team, we will destroy you. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

After reading the thoroughly depressing offensive post-mortem, I needed to read this. Thanks.

I’ve always felt the highest compliment you can pay a D is when you feel like they are playing with extra guys, due to the speed and gang tackling, plus the violence with which they arrive. The 2000 Ravens had it. The Blackshirts back in the day had it, and this team has it. It feels like we are playing 13 on 11.

We are going to see teams forcing the run on us to try and wear down Randall, and the defense will be tested, but I feel confident our ability to island the two corners will allow us to pack the box and succeed. While we are all focused on Gilbert’s maturation, Scott and Vaccaro are quietly growing up, too. In a way that Taylor Martinez is probably going to find very upsetting.

This is one gargantuan helping of poison cheese. I have no doubt Muschamp will say “We’ve played three games. It’s a long season. We’ll tally it up at the end and then I’ll tell you how good we are.”

If Chykie stops hand wrestling that Leong guy and just turns around to play the ball they don’t score on offense at all.

There seems to have been a huge dropoff in the Tech o-line.

I imagine the offense we might have some trouble against would be the corn. I would be interested in seeing how you think we will scheme against them, especially given our ineptitude vs jj last turkey day. D. Johnson containing, maybe AJ or K. Robinson as a spy on Taylor?

“If you’re one a dimensional passing team, we will destroy you. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

So, Nebraska — 1,032 rushing yards 15 TDs vs 508 passing yards 2 TDs — should be in the bag. Corners on islands and attack the run.

Scipio, your thoughts on a hypothetical: If Leach had been on the sidelines Saturday, would you expect their offense to have put up more points against this defense?

“Scipio, your thoughts on a hypothetical: If Leach had been on the sidelines Saturday, would you expect their offense to have put up more points against this defense”

Parlin
 - don´t be stupid. Having a fired ex coach on the sideline during the game would have been a distraction and they would have played even worse.

Ohio State defended the 2005 Vince Young championship offense pretty damn well. Can Texas create a comparable scheme against Nebraska? The big plays included the long run by VY in the first series, a long completion to a WR across the middle, a short completion and run to JC, and the Limas Sweed touchdown. Maybe there were other big plays, but I don’t recall Texas moving the ball with consistency against Bucknuts.

I assume that containing a badass QB in a ZR system involves a spy, but I don’t really know how the allocation of a spy (either LB or safety?) influences other decisions at other spots in the defense. Are there other ways to defend against ZR? What kind of personnel choices should we expect on October 16?

Guh -
 
Lots of poison cheese. But I have a feeling Muschamp will find ways to motivate them.
 
BEHorn -
 
If running and passing were the same thing, but they’re not. Nebraska’s offense is problematic because it has an improvisational element with built in counterpunches. We have to play it honestly. Tech allowed us to load up one phase of the game to the exclusion of all others.
 
Nebraska can create enough offense to win that game if our offense lays up again.
 
parlin -
 
No, I don’t think so. They had bad matchups across the board. Wider line splits would have just made our four man stunts more effective. We weren’t getting pressure off of the edge -it was coming from inside. And we weren’t blitzing to do it. When you get pressure with four and cover with 7 where your DBs are better than their WRs, it doesn’t really matter who is calling the plays.

At least that’s my rudimentary analysis. Maybe Tech people differ.

After rewatching the game, the overall defensive intelligence/cohesiveness of this team is hive-mind frightening. I counted 3 times when Tech lined up 3 WR huddled together on one side, the corner and nickel immediately signaled the rest of the defensive backfield, Tech ran a proper bubble screen and we promptly blew it up. Having the other side call out the plays right before they happen is so much more fun from the defensive perspective…

The offense built to score against us is Okie State. If you’ve watched them play this year, you are not sure we can outscore them. Their defense stinks but their offense can and will score on anybody. Kind of like 2008 except we wont be as good on offense.

“After rewatching the game, the overall defensive intelligence/cohesiveness of this team is hive-mind frightening.”

Resistence is futile, motherfuckers.

“Having a fired ex coach on the sideline during the game would have been a distraction and they would have played even worse.”

Not to mention it would have been very uncomfortable on the Tech sideline when Leach would have run out on the field to fistbump Gideon.

How gratifying it is to check around the various Internet sites devoted to college football and see how many people are viewing our game with Tech and coming to the conclusion that of course, the real story is that Leach is no longer running the offense and the Tech O sucked.

I expect that (along with blaming the refs) from Tech fans, but it sucks that pretty much no credit whatsoever is going to the Texas defense.

It shouldn’t rankle me, but it does.

I have never seen a team that is so well-coached on one side of the ball and so horribly coached on the other side of the ball.

I don’t know, the 1991 Texas squad comes to mind, but probably not to this degree. We had reall personnel (i.e. “talent”) shortages on that team.

Except that the fake field goal is a real tendency at this point. If TT wasn’t expecting it, it’s because Tubby hadn’t yet paid attention.

I have never seen a team that is so well-coached on one side of the ball and so horribly coached on the other side of the ball.

The 2008 Tennessee Titans?

exuLT -
 
Fake punt.
 
Not on our side of the field with a three point lead. We do it at midfield and past the 50 on the opponent’s side of the field.

I’ve gotten to where if it’s fourth and two or less, the fake punt is in play.

The 1991 offense could actually be coached worse because those pieces fit together. This year’s offense can be simply summed up as the cluster fuck scheme. No one position where you have multiple players who participate in a game at the same time all fit into the same scheme. Mix in the conflict between what the head coach wants to run, what the co-ordinator wants to run, the poor job of coaching by certain positions, the lack of cohension and consistency, and the lack of mental focus and I think 24 points is pretty damn impressive.

The fake punt from our 20 was a balls call by Mack, but one made less risky by the dominance of our defense.

Oops—our 30.

“Nebraska can create enough offense to win that game if our offense lays up again.”

IF? I’m actually going to that game with my soon to be 6 year old son and I am so worried about the depantsing Davis is going to get that my only goal coming out of that game is to make sure no TV camera catches my son. He must not be known as crying Longhorn kid.

There didn’t seem to be nearly as much holding from Tech this year as compared to most years, especially in Lubbock.

I think Tech will be solid on offense this year but you can already see that losing Leach is hurting them a lot on that side of the ball. I hope things work out for them because Tubbs is a great guy and a hell of a coach, one of the few who actually kept his nose clean while in the SEC.

How much did Okafor play? He got a sack but I hardly saw him. Cant wait to see how the D matches up with the Nerdbraska running game.

Who is this Nebraska team of which you speak? ‘Cause I watched a Nebraska team on Saturday whose defense looked as bad as our offense, and whose offense didn’t look much better – against eleven bags of shit with cleats.

If the game was in Austin, I’d pick us to win by 14-17 points. Martinez would be scared shitless after getting walloped in the backfield a few times; after all, we ain’t exactly Western Kentucky. Or Idaho. Or Washington, for that matter. And his passing motion is…iffy, at best. Think “Steven McGee bounce-passing it off the turf.”

In Lincoln, I expect him to have some temporary confidence, with eighty-thousand of his closest friends surrounding him. But I expect him to realize fairly quickly that there are 79,999 people in that stadium who aren’t getting the shit beat out of them on every snap – and he’s not one of them. “Everyone who’s walking out of here under their own power, raise your hand. Martinez – not so fast!”

We’ve got an off-week before the game in Lincoln. And we (almost) always look strong after the ou game. Put those together, along with a healthy dose of Nebraska reading too much of its own press, and I smell yet another gut-wrenching loss for Big Red at the hands of Big Money.

My life for an “Edit” feature….

Nebraska’s eye-popping offensive outputs have come against (wait for it….)

1. Scoring Defense Western Kentucky
2. Scoring Defense Washington
3. Scoring Defense Idaho

Two out of three of our wins have come against stiffer defenses than Nebraska has faced. I’m tempted to write the Idaho ranking off, since their high rank is due to holding North Dakota (whose sole win was over an FCS team) scoreless and UNLV (who is averaging less than 13 points/game and is winless) to a touchdown.

Overrated, overrated, overrated. No way they score enough points on our defense to win this game, unless our offense completely shits the bed. And I mean, like, an o-fer. Even an attempt as pathetic as the one on display in Lubbock Saturday should provide us a comfortable win in Lincoln.

You guys are missing something if you don’t connect the fake punt and our shitty offense. Mack knows as much or more than we do how bad it sucks right now.

I’m just glad you finally made a reference to Monahans, TX. Awesome!

adt2- Washington and Western Kentucky are probably not great defenses. Part of the reason they rank so low, however, is that Nebraska put up a ton of points on them. One of the reasons the defenses we’ve faced rank better is that we did not put up a ton of points on them.

Also, an OU fan used this same logic on another thread to show that the quality of offenses we’ve faced has been inferior to the quality of offenses they’ve faced. Would you accept his argument?

Defense this Nebraska team much as OU defended us in 04. Send lots of pressure off the edge with corner and nickel blitzes, and remind them that they’d prefer to keep trying the edge rather than keep getting detonated by Keenan, Eacho, Scott, or Vacarro.

Martinez can’t pass yet. One dimensional offenses are in for a world of hurt when faced with Muschamp. JJ succeeded because he was running and completing crazy passes on our d.

Over decades as a Texas fan, I’ve dreamed of the kind of defense we are getting now.
It is rare, special, elite, and will be gone as soon as Muschamp is.
But he ain’t gone yet. And we have 10 or 11 more games still to enjoy this season and (PLEEEEEASE, GOD!!) many more after that.

Idle thought: Would it make sense for the offense just to punt on 1st down like in the old days until the defense sets them up for a score? (Only half tongue in cheek)

It’s really…really…fun to watch this defense play. I’ve reached the point to where I don’t worry about how we’ll play when the defense is on the field. Contrast this with when our offense is on the field and I’m on the edge of my seat the entire time.

Not that we were bereft of talent going into 2008, but WM has really turned them into a machine. What’s really impressive is how versatile and deep they are overall – generally able to adjust concept and player groupings to match the offense, and able to wear out the other team with fresh legs.

I’d like to see what they would look like with a solid 2-deep at DT.

This defense is awesome and while we are right to praise Muschamp we kind of seem to forget that Mack has had some decent defenses over the years. Granted, they weren’t dominant as this, but its not like the pre-Muschamp defenses were shit. Of course the ’07 defense was absolutely atrocious and that was the last defense before Muschamp came around. Good God that defense was horrible. How we won 10 games that year was beyond me.

The ’04 Greg Robinson defense was, in my opinion, the best defense that Mack had in his tenure before Muschamp. Apart from the bowl game against a very good and balanced Michigan offense and the first half against OSU nobody really had any success moving the ball on them. We would played for a national championship if Vince Young and Greg Davis actually showed up in Dallas against OU. God that was such a tremendous defensive effort. One of the best in the MB era. Derek Johnson played one of the best games I have ever seen a linebacker play in college.

The ’05 defense was vastly overrated in my opinion. We got shredded by USC which there was no shame in that. Aggie shredded us on the ground. For about a half, Okie State moved the ball up and down the field on us. We allowed Justin Zwick to move the ball on us until the red zone. It was a good defense, but for the talent that we had not good enough in my opinion. Not surprising considering that if the quarterback even hinted at a hand out everybody would rush to the line of scrimmage.

I love Muschamp, but people seem to forget that Texas has had some really good defenses under Mack Brown. Granted, they are no where near as good as this. The ’01 defense was really really good and only had one poor game and that was the bowl game. We allowed Colorado to push us around more than anything, but that was due to Simms giving them the ball on our 20 every time. We held OU to seven points.

The ‘02 and ’03 defenses while not exactly stellar were not horrible. It was obvious that it was time for Carl Reese to retire as his man coverage principles were out of date. The ’02 defense got a lot of flack, but from my memory only really played poorly in about one game. We got shredded by Tech, but we didn’t even have a nickel back in that game due to injuries. We dominated OU for three quarterbacks, but got worn out due to GD running Benson up the middle two times and then running a 4 yard hitch when we need 5 yards. We had a great defensive effort against Nebraska and pretty much shut down K-State that season.

Very nice writeup Scipio.
The 1991 defense was something special and a lot of fun to watch, but good God, watching that offense, you felt like Alex in that scene from A Clockwork Orange when he’s being “conditioned” with his eyes clamped open.

This year’s defense has a chance to equal and even surpass that ‘91 D. The offense? Well, we have so much more talent on this year’s team, but there’s always the GD Factor.

Wow!

@primetime, I mean.

Notwithstanding Simms’ INT’s, Colorado had about nine miles of rushing offense against us that night, as did Washington in the Holiday Bowl, even though we won that one. Bull Reese refused to start Derrick Johnson as a freshman and thought Reed Boyd was Tommy Nobis. His D gave up the third and thirty-something play to Arkansas at home that was the nail in the coffin, among his other atrocities. Mugging, anyone?

Yeah, he had a few moments, but our level of defensive play is a constant now, which was never the case before Muschamp arrived on campus. Robinson was an improvement over Bull, but eveh his D was nowhere near what we are seeing now and Chizik’s defenses were somewhat vulnerable to play action, as I recall.

I think we should put the fake punt formation in as one of our regular running plays as we actually seem to gain yardage on it. Plus, running out the punt team on 2nd down is sure to confuse a few people.

WIll Muschamp loses Earl Thomas, Lamarr Houston, Sergio Kindle and Rod Muckelroy..yet we have a better defense than last year. We lost basically McCoy and Shipley off the offensive side of the ball and we have taken a huge step back….hmmm….

Muschamp gets his players ready. Period. Doesnt make excuses about them being young or whatever. He just gets the job done. The offensive side of the ball continues to have poor development along the OL and I think Kennedy has done a poor job with our receivers for a while now.

Is the offense getting any better by facing this defense every day in practice? Maybe we should practice the offensive 1s vs the defensive walk-ons. Kind of like a fat guy doing push-ups from his knees: It’s not a real push-up but it’s probably more productive (physically and mentally) than spending a few minutes lying on his stomach and straining unsuccessfully.

Coach Boom and this D make GDGD look even worse than usual. I am tired of him and would like a change, too.

However, the talent on O is at least one quantum step below the D. The QB is green, the RBs are not Div1 good, the OL is ……well, mediocre, and there are no TEs in sight.

@Texas

And the beauty of Muschamp is that if you told him that, he’d say, “Did you see the Aggie game last year?” He will not be satisfied.

If things keep trending downward at Georgia, will Muschamp come home?

Stop talking to yourself Whistling.

I’m just say’n !!

georgia dawg – go lick your dick..

Asthma Field
Being a dawg this is possible!

Lucky bastard..

Do enough yoga, you’ll get there.

Aspiring autofellators have ribs removed. Or atleast that’s what HenryJames told me.

dawg,

Assuming you’re actually a UGA fan, don’t y’all want Kirby Smart? I mean, Bama did whup our asses in the Rose Bowl last year and Smart is a UGA alum too. Plus it’s a double whammy in that taking Smart would give one of your rivals a punch to the junk.

Think about it.

“If Chykie stops hand wrestling that Leong guy and just turns around to play the ball they don’t score on offense at all.”

This. Does anyone else remember this exact same play last season against OU, but it was A. Williams on the coverage? He planted, turned, deftly jumped, and plucked the ball out of the air, leading to a beautiful INT.

Instead of that, Chykie plays paddy-cake for a few minutes, then throws acts shocked and throws a fit that they called def. pass interference. I was pretty disappointed with that one, considering how Chykie was right in step with Leong.

The Coordinators’ Corner is up. Guess who said each of the following (no cheating):

On his role in making sure his coaches are doing the right things: I think we all are responsible for various aspects. Mine is the [redacted] as a group. We do have to do a better job. We constantly talk to the players about being accountable for the steps that they take and where they put their hats, and all of that is a reflection of us. So we have to do a better job of getting that done in practice, and typically if we can get it done in practice, it carries over into the ball game.

On the team’s effort: We just demand effort from our players at all times. If they don’t play hard, they don’t play. We’ve got good depth so we’ve got good guys behind them, so if they don’t play hard then we’ll jerk them out and get someone else in there that’s going to do it. It’s not a right to play here, it’s a privilege, and it’s a privilege to step out on the field. So you’ve got to honor that every time you walk out.

Sorry.

The Coordinators’ Corner.

I guess I’m in the minority on this, but I think UGA is kind of a shitty job right now. Come in and play third to fourth banana to Meyer, Saban, and whoever else out of the rest of the crooks bought the most decent team.

Toadvine
UGA is a great job. Ga is the 4th best recruiting base in the country , our program has tons of surplus money and Athens is a great town.

Bigdukesix
Smart burned lots of bridges during our DC search and would not be welcome in Athens. I am still loyal to Richt but preasure is building for changes and I’m sure Muschamp would be on the short list. I always pull for the horns except if they were playing UGA which doesn’t look likely in the future.

“Is the offense getting any better by facing this defense every day in practice? Maybe we should practice the offensive 1s vs the defensive walk-ons. Kind of like a fat guy doing push-ups from his knees: It’s not a real push-up but it’s probably more productive (physically and mentally) than spending a few minutes lying on his stomach and straining unsuccessfully.”

Outstanding! Haha. I think this definitely applies to our OL. I think those guys must have so little confidense (in run blocking) that they need some whipping boys to get their heads right.

I love Athens. It is a great town. And Atlanta has plenty of talent (in a number of different ways). All that being said, it is kind of a shitty FOOTBALL coaching job right now. Florida is ahead. Alabama is ahead. Any one of LSU, Arkansas, South Carolina, or Ole Miss will be competing with you for third place in any given year.

Georgia is in the next cut of teams that doesn’t control its own destiny. They are dependant on Florida being down. Georgia and Florida can not both be top 10 teams at this point. Not with all the otehr big programs in the area sniping at recruits too. ti is a great job, but not inthe top 8or so where your destiny is entirely in your own hands.

I have nothing to add, just noted the number of comments was 66. This agitated me for obvious reasons this week. You can all thank me later for jumping on that grenade. BTW, Les Miles and Mark Richt … best ever.

You live in a static world, Toadvine.
 
Check what Alabama’s record was three years ago.

Dude, you’re harshing my mellow.

Not discrediting the overall Texas defense in the least, but the Tech O-line play was bad, borderline atrocious. I wouldn’t rate the quality of the Texas DL based on there performance against a group of guys who tripped over each other.

“Ga is the 4th best recruiting base in the country”

I’m sure some of the other stuff is true, but this is just completely wrong. Texas, Florida, Cali, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, at the least, are far, far ahead.

Eh, I think I disagree with that Blake. Pennsylvania’s reputation stems from it’s QB glory days. Ohio is good, no doubt, and it may be close to GA., but I would rate GA a solid 4th. The Southern part of that state is basically Northern Fla. This year and many other years, Louisiana is in the discussion.

Of course, you might come back with some per capita based numbers that refute what I just typed.

The NFL numbers are pretty clear in favor of Georgia.

You know what else is in Georgia? Stone Mountain. That ain’t going to help with recruiting.