BG Special Teams be on alert for next week!

[BGSU33]

Tennessee simply torched us on punt returns today. Guess what? Next week's opponent, Maryland, their punt returner William Likely set a Big 10 record with 233 yards on punt returns today!

[MarkL]

... against Richmond.

[BGSU33]

... against Richmond.

Yeah, and, so? After seeing what we saw from our coverage units yesterday, there isn't an FBS or FCS team out there that I would say we're any better than in coverage. Tennessee had three...THREE... TD drives shorter than 30 yards as a result of how bad we were on coverage units. And don't think for a second that when this kid from Maryland watches our game tape this week that he won't be salivating to get his hands on the ball against us on Saturday.

I can only hope like hell we get this fixed this week in practice and learn how to tackle instead of surrounding a guy in a circle and letting him run right through us. On one of the punts out gunner ran down field and froze right in front of him before getting knocked off his feet to spring the big return. On what I believe was the next punt we had several guys corral their returner only to stand there looking at one another like who was going to tackle him and none of them did and he took off for another long run.

[Flipper]

f**k the kid from Maryland. I hope he is excited.....I hope he spends the week strutting around campus like a boss thinking he ha another easy week ahead of him.

[Falconwriter]

... against Richmond.

LOL...are you trying to say that Richmond is worse in coverage and made more dumb mistakes (penalties) than BG did against UT? I kind of doubt that's the case. And even if it is, nobody from BG has any right to claim superiority over another team in this particular area so long as we continue to see the ridiculously bad coverage and penalties we've been seeing over the past couple seasons.

I fear we will see the same issues against Maryland that we saw with UT. I have little faith in this coaching staff when it comes to correcting this problem. Why? Because a lot of these same issues plagued this team a year ago, and I haven't seen it corrected -- yet.

[kenyon]

First question that needs to be asked as to why Special Teams has become a joke in the last two years . . . who coaches special teams.

[BGSU33]

First question that needs to be asked as to why Special Teams has become a joke in the last two years . . . who coaches special teams.

Tom Kaufman coaches special teams.

[MarkL]

I said it on a previous post, ST is the aspect of the game where the deltas in overall athleticism shows the most. I feel like our 1s matched up with Tennessee's 1s pretty well (with notable exceptions on the defense going up against their line and their backfield). But on ST you see depth. And the deltas in overall athleticism of our teams was notable. BG 2s vs any SEC team (sans Vanderbilt) 2s is just not favorable.

The delta in overall athleticism between Maryland and Richmond is enormous. Richmond's 1s would have problems with Maryland's 2s, perhaps even 3s. The delta between Maryland and us is far smaller than the delta between us and Richmond. We'll match up better.

Note: I am not happy with the ST performances yesterday outside of our kickers. Great as always. The return D got exposed badly. There's work to be done there and nobody is denying that, least of all Babers. He addressed that in the post-game press conference. This would have been a totally different game if the field position battle weren't so drastically in Tennessee's favor. However the sky-is-falling attitude from people on this board is irritating and obnoxious. We scared the hell out of Tennessee. It wasn't until after the rain delay and the fumbled exchange at their 5 when Tennessee finally pulled away. Tennessee's fans right now are higher on our team than some vocal people on this board and I call that utterly completely pathetic.

[ikenyon]

I'm surprised our head coach thinks its necessary to carry a punter given his hubris over his offense.

[kdog27]

However the sky-is-falling attitude from people on this board is irritating and obnoxious. We scared the hell out of Tennessee. It wasn't until after the rain delay and the fumbled exchange at their 5 when Tennessee finally pulled away. Tennessee's fans right now are higher on our team than some vocal people on this board and I call that utterly completely pathetic.

[Falcon Fanatic]

However the sky-is-falling attitude from people on this board is irritating and obnoxious. We scared the hell out of Tennessee. It wasn't until after the rain delay and the fumbled exchange at their 5 when Tennessee finally pulled away. Tennessee's fans right now are higher on our team than some vocal people on this board and I call that utterly completely pathetic.

I expected to read a LOT more "the sky is falling" posts than I found here today. Figured, like in the past, a loss means "our season is over and we might as well forfeit the rest of the season" posts.

Nice to see a few positive/optimistic posts on here.

[BGSU33]

However the sky-is-falling attitude from people on this board is irritating and obnoxious. We scared the hell out of Tennessee. It wasn't until after the rain delay and the fumbled exchange at their 5 when Tennessee finally pulled away. Tennessee's fans right now are higher on our team than some vocal people on this board and I call that utterly completely pathetic.

I expected to read a LOT more "the sky is falling" posts than I found here today. Figured, like in the past, a loss means "our season is over and we might as well forfeit the rest of the season" posts.

Nice to see a few positive/optimistic posts on here.

I agree, I don't sense a "sky-is-falling attitude" from anyone on here whatsoever. In fact, I think most of us are pretty much universally on board with a similar thought process of the offense looking good, the defense looking suspect for the most part and the special teams looking bad. If not in full agreement, something relatively close to that. We all saw the same thing.

One thing I do disagree with though is the notion that we "scared the hell out of Tennessee." Pulling within a point of a team near the end of the second quarter is way different than being at that point in the fourth. Now that would have scared the hell out of them. That said, when we went for it on fourth down that deep and scored that quick, yes, we sure as hell got their attention and showed we weren't gonna roll over and that they were gonna have to play to beat us. Hell, I was shocked at what happened at the movement, everyone was (BG fans, UT fans, TV announcers, etc.). That was a crazy moment in the game that I honestly have a hard time comparing to ever seeing before at that stage of a game. But we never led after 3-0, they kept at least a two-score lead on us most of the game, we couldn't stop their run, they nearly doubled our point total of 30 by scoring 59 (should have been more with their missed FG's) and a whole lot of guys were chumming it up on the sidelines. We certainly made it interesting in the 2nd and 3rd quarters but it was a far cry from scaring the hell out of them.

[bgsufalcon24]

Outside of our kicker (Tate was a boss yesterday)...I'm starting to see an alarming similarity between our ST units under Babers and those under Brandon. Gregg Brandon didn't give a rats rear about special teams, to the point that I think there were a few years where we didn't even have an ST coordinator on staff. Our kicking, punting, and coverage teams were absolutely abysmal in 2005 and 2006, and though Sinisa Vrvilo and Nick Ianello coming on board in 2007 helped stabilize things a little bit, our coverage teams still stunk until Brandon's firing. It seemed to me as though defense and ST wasn't a priority to Brandon, and I'm not seeing anything that suggests its a priority to Babers either. You can argue that offensively we may be better now than 2006-2008 (Not sure about 2005, that offense with Jacobs, Pope, Sharon, Sanders, etc was something to behold), but history is starting to repeat itself in a bad way in the other phases of the game.

[BGSU33]

Over on FalconBlog he broke down the mishaps. There were essentially 9 special teams mistakes which is even more than I realized:

Allowed punt returns of 47, 34 and 21 yards which all led to 3 TD's drives less than 30 yards by Tennessee!
A kickoff return of 67 yards plus a penalty, just after BG had cut the lead to 8, led to another Tennessee TD
A blocked FG
A kickoff out of bounds
Penalties on 2 kick returns
A player who ran out of bound on the 4 fielding a kickoff that was headed into the end zone for a touchback or out of bounds

This is a recipe for disaster no matter who you play on our schedule this year. The idea of us just using our offense to outscore teams is useless when you fail on defense (allowing 400 rushing yards) and special teams (9 mistakes/breakdowns). We racked up 500+ yards on an SEC team and still got blasted. We can fine-tune our offense all we want but if our defense and special teams don't improve, it's not going to matter much at all.

[BGSU33]

Outside of our kicker (Tate was a boss yesterday)...I'm starting to see an alarming similarity between our ST units under Babers and those under Brandon. Gregg Brandon didn't give a rats rear about special teams, to the point that I think there were a few years where we didn't even have an ST coordinator on staff. Our kicking, punting, and coverage teams were absolutely abysmal in 2005 and 2006, and though Sinisa Vrvilo and Nick Ianello coming on board in 2007 helped stabilize things a little bit, our coverage teams still stunk until Brandon's firing. It seemed to me as though defense and ST wasn't a priority to Brandon, and I'm not seeing anything that suggests its a priority to Babers either. You can argue that offensively we may be better now than 2006-2008 (Not sure about 2005, that offense with Jacobs, Pope, Sharon, Sanders, etc was something to behold), but history is starting to repeat itself in a bad way in the other phases of the game.

I thought Tate looked very good for the most part (FG's looked real good, especially after seeing him so off in the spring game with FG's and PAT's) and his touchbacks were huge. Just imagine if they were able to return some of those kicks that he sent out of the endzones with how bad our coverage units were. And I thought Davidson had a few solid punts mixed in there too but they were completely wiped out by the coverage unit. But you do bring up some interesting observations above. Both Babers and Brandon are certainly offensive minds. The thing is with this year's ST's unit is, we have a helluva kicker and good punter. We also have a very good PR and solid KR's. The only real problem, and it's a HUGE one, is the coverage units. We're solid everywhere else, but we need to be practicing the hell our of the coverages this week (and season).