1) Impossible to evaluate the offense. Interior three weren't awful, so that is something. The tackle play was abysmal. I don't know how Garrett can be a starter next year. Clements is the easy target, but Garrett was rotten too and he played all year.
2) I loved seeing Emmett Laws making plays and Gerard Johnson not looking out of place. But, the experienced edge guys were either busting calls or the linebackers and safeties went back to being clueless. There were a lot of head scratching things happening.
3) I do not understand the safety position. Time and time again, the Hokies were in single high safety with man, or in cover 3, and over and over the centerfield safety was 10-15 yards deeper than the deepest receiver. It forces the defense to cover and defend the run 10 on 11, which makes less sense when the whole concept of the defense is to spill the ball to an unblocked hat. Whenever Minnesota needed to throw the ball, they would run and there wasn't an alley defender because he was 30 yards down the field, or they would run layered posts from each side of the field and hit the shorter post because the centerfield was deeper than the deep post. I loved Pierson P as a player, but they can't replace him quick enough.
In a game where young guys were counted on, it was veterans who had to take on more responsibility that really fell short.
Comments
After listen to the two deep you were on i really feel the comment that we play defense as 3 different units.
Unfortunately, its becoming clear that Pry completely bungled the composition of his Staff.
Beyond the obvious mistake of hiring 2 Rookie Coordinators, the Staff as a whole doesn't seem cohesive.
Year one, you had Bowen, Glenn and Rudolph clearly not on the same page (Rudolph probably with one foot already out the door by mid-season) and everyone but Bowen gone after. Defensively, I agree that there appears to be discord, particularly between the LB and Secondary...combined you have 4 coaches for that group and have to wonder if there are too many cooks.
Need JSJ (DEs) and Dex (DC and S) very fast. Shore up DE and S play asap, Bud as top consultant. I thought the LBs played more fundamentally sound overall but are just undersized/can't bring down a bigger guy. Dex/JSJ recruiting can fix that.
Yeah I think this is the way:
JSJ: DE / Head of High School Recruiting (Defense)
JC: DT / Head of Portal Recruiting (Defense)
Quinn: LB / STAR Coach
Bud: AHC / Senior Analyst / Off-Field LB Coach
X: Asst. LB Coach
Cheetah: DB Coach / Head of Player Dev. (Defense)
Dex: DC / S
I thought the LBs and Safeties looked terrible yet again. Safeties looked like they were constantly in the wrong position for the play and the LBs, especially Keller seemed to be hesitant with the exception of a few nice plays.
Which is why I was surprised how little they gave up in the second half. Pry mentioned they made some adjustments to coverage in the second half to make their QB hold the ball just a little longer. Did French or anyone happen to notice what those changes were?
We don't have any natural LBs currently at that spot which is a major recruiting issue. We have a bunch of safeties we have hoped will work out there. Keller is continually hesitant in his play. And we are very undersized.
For all the talk about getting OL portal players...we have to get the defense right! I hope the DC is ready to get to work.
Went back and rewatched all of Laws snaps. Apparently he only had 15, but I noticed him so many times watching live.
And I regret to inform you about the tackle availability in the portal...missing out on Johnny Williams from wvu is devastating to this team
This team has soooo many holes to fill on the roster right now. Between losing players, recruiting whiffs, and simply not developing the talent on the roster, I'm unsure if we can put together two units that can play complementary football.
To this point, the portal has been fairly useful by adding missing pieces. Now we have to essentially retool the majority of the roster via the portal. I don't think we have enough sex appeal as a program or staff to accomplish that in one off-season.
LB again is going to be a problem without any portal upgrades. Obviously we need a couple more OL, and at least starting level one tackle. Then the D line needs a couple more starting level players, could take 2 guys at each spot imo.
Apart from that (QB, RB, WR, TE, DB) I think we're pretty set, although a gamebreaking WR would be really nice.
Pause
Having enough sex appeal is different than having enough sex.
Time to take a page from the SEC. Ramp up the Tackle tampering this Spring. They have proven if you ain't cheating you ain't competing
It's only tampering if you get caught, it's just offering a guy a wad of cash until that point
It's only tampering if you are not in the SEC or Big 10.
In all seriousness isn't it only tampering for the staff to reach out directly to a player not in the portal? I can only think of like 15,000 wide open loop holes if that's the case.
With Marve gone or not- a P4 college staff had a month to gameplan for a pedestrian, basic Minny offense- missing some players of their own, and they totally bungled the prep. Very concerning that the kids on defense aren't being coached and prepared better than this. Like all season, whenever Minny actually needed a first down, they got one.
I will disagree on one point. Minnesota has a very sophisticated pro-style offense with a lot of unique looks, and ended up using a lot of new wrinkles that I didn't see in the film. Fortunately, Minnesota only had one real plus athlete (Taylor) and one other skill guy with some ability (Spencer.)
Minnesota won the game because their defensive scheme was outstanding. Whatever they were doing to get Watson or Nitta to set the protections away from the blitz over and over, it was as good a defensive play calling performance that I have seen since the 0-0 miracle that Mike Elko pulled on Frank Beamer.
Taylor looked like he ran the same off tackle play Stanford ran on us with some sucess. Was that one of the new looks? Was it just Minny looking at film?
The Minnesota defense was quietly very impressive all season long. They held 8 opponents under 20, and only gave up 30 once, hilariously, to IOWA of all teams.
I watched a few of their games, and I thought they played very tight and in control for a 7-5 team. They really played Penn State exceptionally well. Penn State won that game because they pulled off a fake punt a critical moment in the 4th quarter.
They also beat Illinois which after watching the Illini take it to SCAR seems like a really big win for Minnesota.
whatever they did, it worked. Pop had zero time in the pocket and I dont know how much that would have changed with a better OL. In real-time, Schlee fared much better, but outside of the one big play he didn't fare much better. After watching some of the highlights it was just clear that we were way undersized and inexperienced.
Minnesota was missing three starters on offense. Two linemen and a WR. The Hokies were missing 7 or 8 starters and an additional three from the two deep on defense. A starting QB at a Big10 school going up against a brand new secondary and you didn't expect the first half to be challenging?
That same defense held Minny to 3 points and 137 yards of offense in the second half. I would say they did a pretty good job of adjusting.
Also -we learned in the first half the refs weren't going to call PI, so that little tidbit helped in the second half as well. But your point about personnel and adjustments is very valid.
I finally took the time to look up where the officiating crew was from: SEC. Part of me would love to see Pitt play a game with that officiating crew just to watch Narduzzi's head explode. He whines about PI nonstop when the officials are calling it.
I would also argue that I don't think our game plan was necessarily bad, it would just have been very helpful if our guys could tackle. There were a lot of plays where our players hit their running back early, they just didn't bring him down until he got 6-8 yards out of it.
Mind you, given how bad our D was, it seemed like we were in position more to make plays, so it seemed like that was what the coaches worked on (since during the regular season, a lot of our guys, especially LBs weren't even in position to make them), and if we'd had time to work on tackling, we probably would have done a lot better. Also, S&C to add weight and strength would help with tackling also.
"There were a lot of plays where our players hit their running back early, they just didn't bring him down until he got 6-8 yards out of it." because we have a bunch of small skinny guys on our roster.
Should I have bolded that?
We had mostly underclassmen trying to tackle a 230+ lb running back with good blocking ... we will see what the offseason brings in terms of S&C, but I will give a player more than the first season out of high school to bulk up to final playing weight
"We had mostly underclassmen" yeah this isn't a thing anymore. You are going to have underclassmen that need to play when half your team transfers every year. Also in this new world these underclassmen are going to be playing against 5, 6 7 year seniors now so get used to it.
I thought the same thing while watching the game. On both run and pass plays, our defenders were often in the right place, just didn't make the play.
It was frustrating then, but in hindsight, with some conditioning, coaching, and experience, this defense might have a decent floor to work from.
That's where I was at. It's easier to teach tackling than being in the right place. I think we took BIG strides in being in the right place, now get em some S&C and tackling and we're in a much better spot.
I note that Minnesota did not score a touchdown in the second half. Can any of that attributed to having Bud Foster helping make adjustments or am I stretching for the glory days?
You damn right some of that can be attributed to having Bud Foster helping make adjustments.
I think you can attribute that to the fact that I stopped watching after the first half. If I had been watching, figure we would have given up more TDs.
It's as plausible an explanation as anything else.
Maybe- although we don't know how much Bud was involved really. More likely is the fact that they didn't need to score. VT's offense was doing nothing and punting after 3 downs, and Minny wanted to run the ball and throw to the TE- they never really tried to stretch the field, and they were up 2 scores.
This what I saw too. Their offense was more focused on keeping possession and draining the clock in the 2nd half than adding points. The final score was a lot closer than the game actually was.
I had a different take. Pre game I was worried they would just run it down our throats and we would not be able to stop. A lot of their first half possessions struggles when they tried something else and lost yards or got no gain on first. When they stopped throwing and just ran over us to set up there second score, I thought "well, that was fun while it lasted." I thought their adjustment was to do what worked best and control the field possession, as our Offence was not much of a threat.
Personally I like the idea of punting after 4 downs. /s
The Colorado way
IIRC, there is/was a high school team that adopted a no punt philosophy...I could get on board with this.