Ay-Ziggy-Zoomba.com

Where do I begin?? Hammb and I having been telling you all about the D-lines ineffectivness against the run all time. All I can say is we've told you so. Small DT's who get engaged at the LOS don't have the strengh to fight off a 315 OT , so that negates any quickness they might have. By the way WHERE THE HECK WAS LEINEGER!!!!!! When I saw
#92 Brad Williams in the starting lineup on tv last night , I did a double-take!! Matt was supposed to be back in business! :shrug: Which I guess can make the mauling of our defensive line even more understandable. I saw our front four getting pushed around like rag dolls in this game. Guys on thier backs , guys getting held too, but mostly justing getting mauled.

Our linebackers are also an area of concern. Who in their right mind thinks a 5'11 213 pound OLB can be a force to reckoned with at all. I thought they were supposed to be fast to ball? Well , again I'll say it , size and strength negate speed at most positions. NIU was likely running two TE's alot , which means a big , fairly mobile run blockers is running down field abusing tiny LB's with now big effort. Thats why our guys couldn't tackle. I don't even think it was a question of effort at all. It was just that they ran down our throats , daring us to stop them. Oh , yeah and somebody tell me why they still think Jelani Jordan is a D.1 cb. . How many times did he let Sheldon burn him?? As far as our coaching, I don't the coaches ever thought we were this bad on D. In fact Coach Brandon I think has given the defense a pass way too many times. You'll hear that when he speaks to the media a times before just before heading the locker room at halftime. He'll say that the defense is playing lights out. What!!!!! Hardly! I hope Tim Beckman isn't saying that or we're in goin' to be an world of suffering in the future. Our DB's should be getting better with this new db coach Joseph. It appears there getting stagnet.

Somone mentioned what I've been wondering alot too, why are we conveting a DT when he gets big and make him a OG?? :coo-coo: Guys like Grubb should be staying at DT. No offense to Mike Williams here, but your son is not been given a chance to succed on defense. If he came here as a LB , he should've stayed a linebacker. Brad Willams size is a typical middle linebacker size just about every where else, B10, B12, Pac10 , whatever, not DT in the least. Brad maybay a strong dude, but it's not helping him to put up against 320 OT/G's. I dont' know why the coaches aren't seeing this. Are they too stubborn to realize what we all know is blatenly obvious?

There were definetly other things that caused our demise on Fri. ,like the offense choking on the 1 YARD LINE!! Omar did his thing as best he could , a few erros in judgement but not anything that should've taken us out the game. Pope ran very well in the first half. Why the heck we abandoned it in the 2nd half I'll never know. Man , why do we avoid playing anything that resembles an offense in the 3rd qtr. like the plauge? For one thing Coach B needs to get extremely tough on the defense this week. Inserting Leinager could be a start as well. Curious that we have no sacks without him. No Leinager = no pass rush. Mmmm........

falconboy
LETS GO BG!!!!!!! MAUL TEMPLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I know the defense has it's problems, but as Brandon said, we were whipped on all sides of the ball. Our offense had only 7 points at the half and only 10 at the end of the 3rd quarter. I believe we all knew that we would not beat NIU with a mere 17 points of production and I'll remind you that the last 7 came against soft defense by NIU, because they were already well out of reach.

Our scoring woes appeared, to me, to be poor coaching and play calling rather than poor play overall. It seemed our play calling was unimaginative to be kind.

Also remember that our defense (and in some respects our offense as well) allowed NIU to play their game. We scored 3 times, and had one FG blocked. That's 4 possessions. What did we have about 6-7 for the entire game? You cannot let a ground it out ball control team like NIU do exactly what they're trying to do. You MUST do SOMETHING to increase the tempo of the game. We're a high flying team, not one built to grind it out in 6 possession games. We cannot win that battle against a team like NIU.

Are we a high flying team? I think we used to be, but we were less so at the end of 2002 and most of last year.

Last year we beat NIU by going deep early, but the wins against UT and Northwestern were more ball control wins than anything. We seemed to function best when we ate the clock and kept our defense off the field

I definitely agree we need to open things up a bit though. I don't know if it's play calling or Omar settling for the safe throw. I suspect it's the play calling on balance simply because most coaches probably want a virtual rookie QB to not have a lot of decision making in his hands.

It will be interesting to see how the teram react this Saturday. It will be more interesting to see how the fans react on the 16th...

We played completely differently defensively this year versus '03. You hit long balls last year because you took advantage of our blitzes and hit us on bad matchups and coverage breakdowns. It was like you knew what was coming and when.

This year we stayed back - I think we may have blitzed exactly once - and let you hit 'em underneath and then came up and smacked your receivers. The idea is that eventually a couple back to back short plays or incompletions will result in a punt, and it did. We simply weren't giving you deep plays to make.

falconboy wrote:Oh , yeah and somebody tell me why they still think Jelani Jordan is a D.1 cb. . How many times did he let Sheldon burn him??

Most of our DB's were playing short zones, probably to help stop sweep plays to the sides. When in short zones, if the receiver goes past you, it's the safety's job to pick them up from what I understand. This could just be for the slot's and not wide-outs but if it is the case, I don't you should say he was the one getting burned. If we were in a man-to-man defense all night and he was getting burned, then I would complain along with you. But our inability to stop the run seemed to be keeping us in a zone so it's not entirely his fault.

hammb wrote:Our scoring woes appeared, to me, to be poor coaching and play calling rather than poor play overall. It seemed our play calling was unimaginative to be kind.

I think scoring woes are the inherent problems with our type of offense. The goal of the spread offense is to spread the field and create mismatches. The QB finds the mismatch and we gain yards. But as you get closer to the end zone, there is less field to spread the defense out over. So you can't just take that 6-8 yard underneath stuff. The defense is not falling as deep and therefore are now clogging that underneath stuff up. Not saying that is a problem with just our offense, but it is a problem with the spread offense in general. Another reason that we need to throw deep more often so that we don't get stuck inside the 10 trying to run the spread. I wonder what kind of TD percetange we have (not just this year but the last few) when we get inside the 20 compared to other teams that run a more traditional offense.