I think maybe the thing that says the most about where we are are the records of the teams we have beaten.
With the exception of WVU we pretty much can't be an FBS team with a winning record.
WVU: 7-3 W
ECU: 2-8 W
ODU: 4-6 W
CLE: 9-1 L
BC: 5-5 W
UNC: 2-8 W
Duke: 4-6 W
Miami: 9-0 L
GT: 5-4 W
This is, of course, 20-20 hindsight but it does put that early run in perspective.
I know there is a lot of consternation about the offense today but lets's not pretend DBU did it's job against a QB that's 36/87.
I would say our woes are recently have been a team effort with the Offense and Defense owning roughly 90% and Joey Slye owning 10%.
What say you?
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Uh... GT is a loss. You're clearly still in the denial stage of your 12 steps.
I guess I look at it differently. We are a young team making mistakes and with the exception of TechmoBowl we won almost all the games we should have and lost the games against clearly superior teams.
As a new program in midst of a complete offensive rebuild, this is precisely where almost every program ever wishes their program would be in year 2 of a coaching change. We need new and increased talent, development of said talent and finally execution into wins of the big stage.
Where we are is pretty damn good. BUT Fuente definitely had questionable decisions last game and players had very poor execution.
Learn and move on
(edited for grammar)
12 Steps != 5 stages. HTH.
I hate to say it, but offensive playcalling really screwed us these past two weeks.
The defense always gives up big plays. It's more than a theme at this point.
I'm sorry but rebuild and get talent, but you can't call games like that and win with a bama roster.
This is a coaching staff that is too cute and not sticking with what they do best. Up tempo offense with high percentage quick plays.
Fuente doesn't run an uptempo offense.
Coach Fu has taken a Memphis team 5 years ago that ranked #119 in Offensive plays run to an offense that has been Top 20 the last 4 years.
This is the worst ranked team in 4 years at #20
To me uptempo means getting to the line and snapping the ball fast not total plays run in a game. The no huddle almost hurry up look. Which he doesn't run.
I would think that total number plays is somewhat related to time between snap.
Related but not caused by. We run a lot of plays because we don't have a lot of long plays.
Sorry for confusion, yes technically it is not up tempo. But push tempo with quick plays that are high probability . I think this offense looks more confused now than with stiney.
2015 (Memphis): 13th in adjusted pace
2016 (VT): 17th in adjusted pace
2017 (VT): 44th in adjusted pace
There's been a distinct drop in pace this year.
https://www.footballstudyhall.com/pages/2015-memphis-advanced-statistica...
https://www.footballstudyhall.com/pages/2016-virginia-tech-advanced-stat...
https://www.footballstudyhall.com/pages/2017-virginia-tech-advanced-stat...
https://www.footballstudyhall.com/2015/2/9/8001137/college-football-adva...
Makes sense as JJ's been stepping back a lot (and get hit a lot). I loved last year when Evans just got rid of the ball quickly on very high percentage plays. I guess what keeps us from doing that this year is no Ford and no Bucky?
No Ford, no Bucky, no Sam (often overlooked) and now no Yosh.
Agree in Sam. He was money out of the backfield catching passes which is an element we haven't really developed this season.
We haven't done a single uptempo drive this year. Last year occasionally we would uptempo off a big throw or run but nothing this year.
our O sucks and Foster can't stop a running QB. Same ole Same ole...
Umm Marshal running didn't hurt the team at all. 22 rushes for only 64 yards.
Yep. That 3rd and 18 was a killer. I was sitting there this nking we were about to get a punt and then "oh sh..."
His 2 rushing TD's hurt the team....but I know what you mean
Decent FCS Team
Anyone else think slye was off tonight? Maybe Bradburn as well. Seemed like GT doubled our entire year's numbers for KR and PR.
Fuente said he was dealing with a hamstring issue.
Slye didn't kick most of the kickoffs. If the TV crew was any good or the camera guys had a decent producer we would have seen it or had it mentioned.
The one commentator was busy bitching about things that went our way or celebrating GT plays to comment on Joey being out or the multitude of chop blocks plaguing our defense
Man that guy was the worst. Mrs. dcvt13 said it was okay because it was a GT broadcast until I happened to let her know that it was a ACC Network broadcast
Glad I missed the ACC Network guys. I was on the road all day and forgot how wonderful Jon Laaser and Mike Burnop are to listen to. I feel like I only get to hear them when I go to the bathroom at Lane.
And they did a good job highlighting that Slye wasn't doing kickoffs.
On the bright side at least we aren't FSU this year. I️ can't imagine that losing your starting QB causes you to be that bad overall.
I️ mean being at 7-3 with a young team and still have a chance to get 10 wins is a pretty good "down" year. Everyone wants to close the doors because we got our expectations up super early.
I'm ready to move on to next week. Frustrating as hell game but it is what it is and we are who we are.
Can't stand all the negativity on here lately.
I hear ya. I figured we would be 9-3 or 8-4 this season with the inexperience on offense.
People will be negative after a loss like yesterday because there were baffling decisions. People will get over it and move on.
As a Colts fan, I know how FSU fans feel...
Offense sucked, but defense is also not holding up to well our rushing defense has fallen to #34 now
How?
Opponent Long Scrimmage Plays -
Plays over 20 yards
#51 VT
Plays over 40 yards
#91 VT
Poor middle linebacker play and lack of support from the corners plus Mook always overpersues when he has them dead to rights
Come on with the middle LB crap. Of the three long plays how many came as a result of MLB bust or missed assignment?
No busted plays but Benson was able to pick up consistent yards through the middle. This is going to cause the secondary to have to cheat up and allow for the big busted plays.
Don't everyone's run defense numbers take a hit when you play that candy-assed triple option? Also it appears Miami is better than we thought. I think the defensive stat change is natural given the last two opponents. How they improve against Pitt and loluva should give us a better picture.
Evans (primarily), Ford, and Hodges softened the blow in rebuilding year 1. Year 2 is going, frankly, probably much better than it should, this is perhaps the least talented VT team since 1994.
Fuente is playing with what Beamer recruited his last few years as the heart of his squad and is producing ranked teams. I hate to lose to PJ but program wise, we should be dancing in the streets.
Also for context, Memphis regressed offensively in Fuente's second year there.
I am incredibly pissed about the way we lost to Miami and GT, both games were winnable. But I am not so upset about us going 9-3 given what we lost on offense. The losses were still incredibly painful to watch and the coaching decisions yesterday to leave points on the field and throw deep twice with one yard to go was the angriest i've been with a coaching decision in a long time. I hate that we have lost 3 of the last 4 to PJ, and every loss has been painful. But if we can beat Pitt and UVA and have a chance at 10 wins with a bowl, thats a still a good season. If we win 9 or 10 games this season I think we can say these first two years of Fuente have been a smashing success compared to where we were 2012-2015.
Slye 10%? Eh, no. Yeah Joey has had a bit of a down year but I'm not anywhere close to ready to giving him 10% of the blame. Honestly he isn't even on my "who's to blame" radar.
Has the last two weeks been frustrating as hell? Absolutely. However, if you had told me in August that we would be 7-3 with our only "bad" loss to GT, I'd have taken it in a heartbeat (that loss to Miami still hurts, but after the thrashing they gave ND last night). I'm not really sure we need to assign "blame"...we're in year 2 of a coach rebuild that has gone out of this world so far.
Fuente still doesn't have any of his recruits in the system yet, is starting a (r)freshman QB who has done a good job so far, doesn't have an option at WR to take the top off of defenses, doesn't have a consistent oline, doesn't have a consistent option at RB etc. etc. And yet, we've been in the playoff talk this season and are sitting at 7-3 with only 1 loss to a team we should have beaten. Yes we "could" have beaten all 10 teams we've played so far. And that's fantastic. Think how many programs would switch places with us in a heartbeat. We've got a young team, great coaches, and some great recruits coming in. Yes, it could be better...but it could also be much worse.
I guess after sleeping on it, I don't feel nearly as bad as I did yesterday. Sure it still hurts, but overall we aren't doing any worse than preseason rankings/our thoughts suggested, and quite frankly I think we're doing better than expected. Hang in there fellas, better days are ahead!
We should be 8-2 this morning. We had no business losing that game yesterday.
Settle and Walker played their asses off. Players were getting chop blocked left and right. It was just frustrating to see us get too cute on offense multiple times. I'm not calling for changes on the staff, like I've read all over social media but I hope they at least learned something from this game.
Now lets beat the shit out of Pitt.
Massey has us at 15.
Sagarin has us at 17.
ESPN's FPI has us at 15.
The computers think VT is solidly a top 25 team even after the GT loss. I think we're going to be okay.
Coaches dropped us to unranked receiving the 26th most points from the poll. But I'm here for 1-0 against Pitt
It's a loss. Shake it off, fans.
If this makes you feel better, look at Dabo Swinneys beginning record with Clemson. We are on the right track, it just takes time.
Year School G W L T Pct SRS SOS AP Pre AP High AP Post Bowl Notes
2008 Clemson 7 4 3 0 .571 6.97 2.51 9 9 Gator Bowl-L
2009 Clemson 14 9 5 0 .643 11.73 4.01 15 24 Music City Bowl-W
2010 Clemson 13 6 7 0 .462 7.35 3.74 Meineke Car Care Bowl-L
2011 Clemson 14 10 4 0 .714 6.54 1.18 6 22 Orange Bowl-L
2012 Clemson 13 11 2 0 .846 14.75 1.14 14 10 11 Chick-fil-A Bowl-W
2013 Clemson 13 11 2 0 .846 14.98 3.06 8 3 8 Orange Bowl-W
2014 Clemson 13 10 3 0 .769 11.63 2.86 16 15 15 Russell Athletic Bowl-W
2015 Clemson 15 14 1 0 .933 18.88 5.21 12 1 2 Orange Bowl-W, College Football Championship-L
2016 Clemson 15 14 1 0 .933 20.08 6.55 2 1 1 Fiesta Bowl-W, College Football Championship-W
2017 Clemson 10 9 1 0 .900 21.96 8.06 5 2
It's kind of funny you mention Clemson. Head coaches have to make tough decisions such as letting go of ineffective coordinators.
Billy Napier was Clemson's OC beginning in the second half of 2008 and was fired after the 2010 season at which point Chad Morris took over. The very next year Keven Steel was out in favor of Brent Venables.
Napier and Dabo go as far back as 2006, maybe farther. That means at his firing they had worked together for 5 years. Cornelson joined Memphis in 2012.
Here is what Dabo had to say:
"This was a difficult decision, one that was not made hastily," Swinney said. "But, we must make significant improvement on the offensive side of the ball. I have to do what I believe is best for the program going forward, and make sure we don't experience another season like the one we just had."
It should be noted that Cornelson was never the sole OC at Memphis.
Now I'm not saying Cornelson has to go but Dabo took a hard look at how well his OC was doing and made a tough decision.
Clemson didn't automatically become better without Dabo Swinney taking action.
But it is important to note that Cornelson is running Fuente's offense. Dabo was never a coordinator. He never developed an offense, like Fuente did. He wanted to philosophically change clemson's program, and hired coaches accordingly...he didn't change their offensive and defensive strategy on his own...he hired coaches to do that. He just played the CEO role.
Dabo was OC the year he became HC.
I'm pretty sure he was their WR coach, not OC.
... interim head coach/offensive coordinator at Clemson (Oct. 13 - Dec. 1, 2008)
I'm not really sure what the deal with the defense giving up so many big plays is. There's good talent across the board, and they don't give up a lot of long, sustained drives, but they still give up huge, backbreaking plays that lead to points for the opponent. For that 3rd and 18, every player was up on the line of scrimmage despite them not trying one short pass yet, so I put that one on Bud, but it just seems that a lot of big plays come down to players being undisciplined. Mook regularly gets beat running too hard towards the line of scrimmage, Vinny Mihota crashes in on every play rather than keeping containment, guys get behind Terrell Edmunds too often, etc.
That is the weakness of Foster's Defense. You load the box and play good corners. If you have good LB coverage the issue is minuscule but the LBs carry the Defense to good or bad results
This is not at all what happened yesterday... The LBs played very well. Terrell Edmunds happened yesterday. He just had a really bad game from a coverage standpoint.
Its every game, It has nothing to do with this game or that game or the Ohio state game. Foster's Defense swarms to the QB, a lot. This leaves a lot on the coverage for all pass plays
Our safeties have gotten targeted a ton because even in the early games they have given up big plays. Miami and GT both knew they were the defenses' biggest weakness.
I've deleted the games off my DVR but wish I could go back and call out the plays. Consistent and reliable, perhaps the sole feature of our team to be that this year.
hokietapes has them on youtube
I hotnestly don't know why at 3d and 18 we didn't put a safety back to help. You knew they were likely to throw and the way the front seven were playing not likely they get an 18 yard scamper from the b-back or anyone else. Safety takes a look at the QB see's he's throwing and plays the deep ball. If the QB scrambles for the first so be it, good for him. But it's likely not a TD and if thrown quite possibly an INT. The secondary getting beat 3 times (first was incomplete) was way more head scratching and frustrating to me than what the offense did.
We beat GT at their game but they won due to the big plays. I'll even give them the end around early. 2 big plays that we have no business giving up to GT.
On that 3rd and 18, Terrell Edmunds was in zone coverage, but he was very close to the line of scrimmage for some reason. Then the Jackets only sent one guy deep on a post, but Edmunds ran the opposite way to cover. Had he been lined up deep like everyone says he would have, he would have had better vision of which receiver was going deep, what route that receiver was running, and he would have already been in position to get to the deep ball anyway. Either he went completely rogue, or Bud didn't think GT was going deep despite that being all they did when they passed. Either way, it was unacceptable and could have been avoided.
We did have a safety with deep responsibility on both long TDs... Edmunds.
Another GT gripe! Did anyone else notice the GT tackles grabbing and holding our defenders ankles on their chop blocks? Bullcrap refs sure didn't. Not that it was why we lost.
Seems like to me that the coaches should mention that this is happening to the refs, to make them aware if they're not.
Agreed, there were at least two blatant trips the I couldn't believe weren't flagged. If I remember correctly, Hill came up hurt after one of them.
I never saw a replay but it certainly looked like the tackle straight up tackled Hill by his ankle on the play where he got hurt. It also wasn't the only time I saw that exact motion happen to one of our ends.
Looking back at our shitty schedule, I now find it difficult to envision why the fanbase ever thought there was evidence we were a playoff team.
Yea, we were never a playoff team. We beat the teams that we should have beaten, lost to two talented teams, and dropped a game that was a toss up.
Improvement is the fact that we beat those teams the way we did. Not sure we would have in the past.
I fully expected to drop a game like this one. I just didn't think it would have happened the way it did, which did make it hard. But after looking at the big picture, I got over this loss quickly. Hating GT and having self doubt isn't going to allow me to enjoy the rest of what has already been a pretty good season. Go 1-0 against Pitt, beat UVA, and lets enjoy an interesting bowl match up.
This team is young. I can't think of a single coach I'd rather have then Justin Fuente. Everyone chill out, he's ahead of schedule.