Ay-Ziggy-Zoomba.com

I did a little research. In the last four seasons, we have played ten teams who ended the season with a winning record. The only win against one of those teams was Purdue. That's 1-9 on the road against teams with winning records.

Now, against teams with losing records, we are 13-1, so obviously, we can play a little on the road. Just not against winning teams.

This is very disturbing. I don't like the mental aspect of our team yet at all. I beginning to believe that our high powered fast scoring offense has put a false sense of security in our defense. Basicly in the back or their minds their thinking, we don't have to really shut anyone down , when our offense is going to score 50 a game. And ultimatly its Coach Brandon's responibilty to get the players minds off the great 1st half they might have played and play the next half like there's no tommorow. But it seems Coach Brandon hasen't yet learned that yet. Some of you here are right on about Brandon being a great OC but a mediocre HC at best. Coach Brandon has alot to learn yet about the job of Head Coaching. I don't know if this is a possibility but why don't we put Brandon back up in the coaching box and Stud back on the field? Does this make sense to anyone?

And as far as calling for a coaches head , it might realisticly directed at defensive coach Beckman not Coach Brandon , at least at the moment. Because offense is not our problem it seems. Our defense or lack therof in 2nd halves of big road games is the problem. And I think its more mental than anything. I don't think I'd be crying at all if Beckman left , and I wouldn't have said that 2 years ago.

This is only Coach Brandon's second year as a head coach!!!!! It probably took you that long to get thru the second grade!!

I am as pissed as anyone - but there is NO WAY we should talk about firing coaches.

Whoa whoa whoa! Who's firging coaches??? Brandon has done a bang-up job. Are we elite? No. But the man has been at the helm for 2 seasons. That's just crazy talk.

Don't look at me. All I did was point out the numbers on road games in response to those who thought it was "only one game."

We should not be firing anyone. Obviously. We'll be lucky if Coach Brandon is here next year anyway. What we must do is have our coaches buckle down and figure out what we have to do to win on the road against good teams, and to do that we have to admit there's a problem. That's all I'm talking about.

Falconboy speaks for himself.

A coaching change is the last thing we need right now. We need to build some continuity into the program. We're building an excellent program. Another change at or near the top would not be helpful .

I agree with Flipper, but I'll also acknowledge that I've been thinking a bit about Beckman the past couple days.

If our team scores more than 40 points, we ought to be able to win. I know this is the new wacky MAC. But, still... it bothers me to score 41 points and lose.

Our M.O. has been to score quickly and force other teams to throw. We've traditionally had a secondary that was effective enough to hold a lead against an air attack.

But on the ground we seem miserable. Whether you agree with Brandon's decxision to try an onside kick with more than three minutes left and three timeouts or not, you can't argue he has much faith in his ground defense after making that decision.

I think what frustrates some of us is that Brandon talked in broad generalities and a bit about Omar in explaining what went wrong Tuesday. Yet they scored 41 points.

Brandon didn't talk about the defense which gave up 49 and would almost certainly have given up more had it not been for the clock expiring.

Maybe there is a method to his madness in focusing in naming Omar and no one else. Maybe he figures Omar can take the pressure and that players on the defense don't need to be called out.

But, to me and obviously to a few others, it is a bit worrysome that Brandon could lose 49-41 and start talking about what the offense didn't do.

I never thought about that, Schad, but you're right. It was all about the offense not clicking in the second half, nothing about the DB's getting beat by at least 3 steps on two seperate touchdowns, or the defense giving up 6 or so yards a carry, mostly on first down! It was as bad a "night and day" situation I think I've ever seen from one half to the next, and while the offense *did* struggle in the third quarter, the defense was given a pretty good cushion, and they let that go in about 10 minutes.

Now I just hope we get a bowl bid, mostly so all this talk can go away for awhile, rather than having it stew until at least the spring game...


Oh, and about the onside kicks... not whether or not they were a good coaching decision, but what was the deal with the tee? we talked about this in the stands at the game, and figured one of two things were wrong. Either A) shaun was getting screwed by an official that thought the small tee was illegal, or B) he had been practicing using an illegal tee (and apparently used the same tee vs. OSU last year) and no one figured it out otherwise. Either way, having to switch up tees for such a "delicate" play as that can't be a good thing. (As we saw in the resulting kicks.)

At least some of the 41 points were garbage points scored once UT was in severe prevent. The offense didn't click as we expect it to in the second half, especially in the 3rd.

The defense was abysmal. No question there.

As for the onside kick, as I told my brother Thursday, you never lose the game on an onside kick decision. If you're even THINKING about an onside kick, you have already played your way into deep doo-doo. You're probably going to lose either way.

On other hand, those morons ESPN had were arguing about whether to go for 2 or 1 when we cut it to one score. Couldn't believe it. In my mind, you kick the point to go down 8, because if you go down 9 with 4:00 to play, you know you won't do it and everyone quits. You want to prolong the game and hope for the 2-point with 0:00 on the clock.

You know, this is just a year that we couldn't stop the run. If I recall, there were many of you on this board complaining from the beginning that you didn't think that we had enough size on the defensive line to compete with a good running attack. And hey, look what happened, we got beat up by two running attacks in the two biggest MAC games of the year for us. So I don't think that this should really be a surprise. I say, let's give the program some time and see if they can land some recruits to shore up the size problem up front. I really hate to hear when someone says fire this coach or that coach because of a couple of bad games. These are men that are putting their livelyhoods in the hand of 18-22 yr. old men. Until those that are calling for the heads to roll try to go out there and get more out of them, please don't ask for someone to be fired.

I'm not calling for anyones head either right now. It IS stupid to talk about that at this juncture. Our coaches just need to be honest with themselves and do a little soul searching and find out if they might need to change some philosphies here and there. One of which would be this stupid bend but don't break defense. Hopefully , (I seem to be saying hopefully alot lately) next year a couple of bigger DT's will join the defense in Brandon Curtis and Nick Davis who are both already 280 and can bulk up the D-line. Our secondary is going to be quite young at saftey. Dozier will likely take Newsomes spot. I'd like to se Nate Waldron challenge Jordan for the one corner spot , which shouldn't really be that hard if you know what I mean.

falconboy wrote:And as far as calling for a coaches head , it might realisticly directed at defensive coach Beckman not Coach Brandon , at least at the moment.

falconboy wrote:I'm not calling for anyones head either right now. It IS stupid to talk about that at this juncture.

Senator Kerry, may I remind you we are on the record...

I would like to see us go to more of an attacking style of defense. I don't see us attacking. I see our philosophy being more of a read and react defense. I would like to see us attacking more. Of course, to play that style of defense, we have to have db's who can cover one-on-one, which we don't appear to have at this time. It doesn't help us either that we can't seem to stop a decent rushing team. I would agree with others on this thread that the problem here is defense, not offense. Heck, 41 points should be enough to win any game, even against Toledo. 41 points would have been enough to beat Oklahoma!

Yes calling for a coach's head after 11-3 and 8-3 seasons is one of the most absurd things I have ever heard of.

I happen to agree with GB that Tuesday's loss was because of the offense. IMO the offense really did not play that well. The score in the first half should have been at least 45-7. Than they come out in the third quarter and sit on their thumbs. Obviously you have to put some blame on the defense because giving up 28 points in one quarter is totally rediculous. However, we are a team built around offense. I would like to say that we win games with defense but that just simply is not true. Typically we blow teams out in the first quarter and force them out of their gameplan with our high powered offense. Look back at our 6 losses over the past 2 season. In every one of those games our offense let a down in one of the two halves. Our defense lets us down all the time but usually the offense picks up the slack.

Of course this is a problem. No matter how good your offense is there are going be days when things dont go right. Tip passes, fumbles, penalties, etc. It would be nice to say that we had a defense that could endure that vs good teams. We do not. We are an offensive team, who's main defense is scoring so much that other teams must change their gameplan to keep up. So that being the case I really must blame this loss on the offense's inability to put the ball in the EZ in the second quarter and its failure to move the ball in the third quarter. I dont blame this loss on our D because we do not have the athletes on D to stop a team like Toledo if our offense is not scoring. Our athletes are on offense. Maybe that needs to be tweaked some.