Great job by the defense. The stats for the defense in this game are very hard to figure out. The rush defense was really good, but the punt botches skew those stats to the gaudy number that it ended up. However, when you look at total yardage most of the yardage Miami gained was when the game was pretty much out of hand. The stats don't really tell an accurate tale, but watching the game, the defense was phenomenal. I think Gibby said in the post game show that Miami was 2 of 12 on 3rd down & 1 of 7 on 4th down. That's 3 of 19 in drive extending situations. Awesome job by the defense on those plays. The front 4 was able to get pressure on Betts, even without blitzing on a number of occasions. The secondary & LBs also took advantage of some poor throws when Betts was pressured. Most importantly the tackling was the best it's been all year. There might've been one or two misses, but not like the epidemic we've seen most of this year.
STs was mostly solid. We got all our punts off, and made a FG. However, missing 2 XPs is never good. We did have much better coverage on our kickoffs than we're used to seeing. Chuck had some good returns as well.
The offense worked with a short field for much of the night and did a great job cashing in once they got into the redzone. I think they were 6 of 6 with only 1 FG. That will win you a lot of games
They are still not near what they were last year, and that's disappointing. Omar missed some throws, but the 2nd TD to Sanders was a BEAUTIFUL throw...not sure how he threaded that needle. PJ gave us a lot of carries, but little production for them, BJ looked to have much more explosion when he got the ball. The Sanders reverse was a perfect play call and it was held to a 9 yard gain only by a great play by the Miami Safety, that looked like it could've been a huge one. Good call on the Partridge TD pass as well...caught Miami off guard on that one. Maybe it was just the weather, or Omar being rusty, but this offense is still not what it was last year. All in all, it was a good job by our coaching staff to finally get a road MAC win, an ESPN win, and keep hold of our own destiny.
