A classic let down felt entirely normal this week but also so blatantly obvious that any more than a brief discussion in a game preview was worth the time. Anyway, a let down was supposed to be maybe a 24-point win not what transpired before our eyes in South Bend this Saturday. Notre Dame looked out of it for large stretches of the Ball State game and a let down game turned into something entirely worse.
The Irish took a huge step back in week 2 and that suddenly means a reexamination of this football team coming off the high of defeating Michigan 7 days ago.
Stat Package
| STAT | ND | BSU |
|---|---|---|
| Score | 24 | 16 |
| Yards | 414 | 349 |
| Passing | 297 | 180 |
| Rushing | 117 | 169 |
| 1st Downs | 20 | 24 |
| 3rd/4th Conversions | 5/16 | 11/26 |
| Yards Per Play | 5.8 | 3.6 |
| Turnovers | 3 | 2 |
PASSING OFFENSE
I only have 3 points to make.
1) This whole “let’s create a gameplan where Wimbush doesn’t run and is forced to sit in the pocket and make throws” thing is one of the dumbest moves in recent program history. When he’s not suspended, Dexter Williams can barely get reps because they’re petrified he can’t pass block, but we’ll waste spend a whole game ramming a square peg in a round hole with Wimbush in the hopes he’ll prove he can do something he’s never ever showed he can do on a consistent basis.
Yes, the quarterback position is different and crucial to the offense. It’s just, trying to make Wimbush into something he’s not cascades down to the whole offense and it spoils everything. This was Chip Long’s worst gameplan since being hired by Notre Dame.
2) Wimbush is not an accurate passer and in general not a very good passing quarterback. Shocking, I know! I think a lot of people bought into the idea that Wimbush just needed to be a little better and things would open up around him. So far, he’s about 5% better with completions (54.7% on 53 attempts) and it’s really not that different from 2017. Everything is just so hard to complete, meanwhile many other quarterbacks around the country are completing passes and making it look easy compared to Wimbush.
Most damaging, it looks like the run game isn’t going to come anywhere close to last year and in turn the offense needs more from the quarterback to be efficient. Wimbush looks very far from efficient throwing the ball in 2018.
3) I understand that if you want to win a title it makes some sense to see if Wimbush can reach a higher ceiling. I’m also patient enough if you want to work on a quarterback’s weaknesses for a little bit in a game. I just don’t know what the offense is supposed to do when many or most short throws have been ripped out of the playbook because you can’t trust Wimbush. To me, that feels like Wimbush might actually present the lowest floor in comparison to Ian Book.
RUSHING OFFENSE
I feared the offensive line would struggle this year because they lack difference makers and the bar was set so high last year. I just don’t think any of the current 5 starters are anything special or big-time future NFL draft picks. Through 2 games the results are not particularly encouraging and Jeff Quinn has his work cut out for him. The pass blocking I’m a little more lenient with because Wimbush made a lot of poor decisions (lack of throwing the ball away, skittish with clean pockets, struggles with progressions) and the line is constantly forced to block for 3 or 4 seconds in order to set up passes down field. That isn’t putting them in a position to succeed and they’re getting little relief with short, easy passes to move the chains.
Even with Wimbush virtually not running most of this game and Ball State crashing hard this was one of the worst blocking performances in recent memory.
Irish Run Success
Armstrong – 6 of 12 (50.0%)
Jones – 5 of 13 (38.4%)
Wimbush – 3 of 7 (42.8%)
Davis – 0 of 2 (0.0%)
TOTAL – 14 of 34 (41.1%)
Allowing 10 tackles for loss is shameful. The offense lost 45 yards on those 10 tackles!
Without Wimbush’s feet playing much of a role (2 of his 3 successful came on the final drive) this type of performance from everyone else really isn’t something that comes super unexpected to me. Armstrong had 127 yards on 16 touches and I have a hard time believing we should expect much more from him, for example.
Watching 73 of the game’s 117 rushing yards coming on 2 carries is concerning. Still, I think this is more or less what we’ll see from the running backs in 2018. A few great runs here and there mixed in with a lot of average snaps. Not quite this horrible but the brutal truth is that the backs have a lot of developing to do and in an ideal world we’d never be relying so much on converted receivers or quarterbacks.
PASSING DEFENSE
I was impressed with quarterback Riley Neal even if the stats in no way back that up. For example, he attempted 50 passes for 180 yards for a hilarious 3.6 yards per attempt! At one point, he was even in the middle of a 6 of 25 passing stretch, too.
Still, that meant he went 17 of 25 on other passing attempts plus he only took one sack and converted 4 first downs with his feet (3 of them on 3rd down) allowing Ball State to hold possession of the ball for over 34 minutes. The Cardinals broke the all-time record for most snaps (97!!) ever against Notre Dame and if Neal was about 15% less effective Ball State might’ve been shutout. It was frustrating watching him calmly complete 10-yard passes to the sideline when that’s such an adventure for Wimbush, so perhaps that colors my perspective.
The defense in general was very bend but don’t break-y while allowing a bunch of underneath stuff with 8 pass break-ups (super solid) and a pair of interceptions by safety Jalen Elliott. That actually happened!
RUSHING DEFENSE
Any other result where the offense took care of business and this wouldn’t have mattered all that much. However, I thought the defense could’ve tightened things up a bit more on the ground. No doubt, they were not prepared for nearly 100 snaps, an annoying offense just efficient enough to keep the ball, in a game that was supposed to be easy.
Cardinals Run Success
Gilbert – 11 of 19 (57.8%)
Huntley – 2 of 10 (20.0%)
Neal – 4 of 6 (66.6%)
Dunner – 2 of 5 (40.0%)
Hall – 1 of 2 (50.0%)
Pinter – 0 of 1 (0.0%)
TOTAL – 20 of 43 (46.5%)
Some of the Ball State guys ran hard, often scratching out 2 extra yards. The tackling was by no means awful but the Cardinals were falling forward quite a bit. I have high expectations for this unit and if they’re hungry they will notice a lot of room for improvement next week.
SPECIAL TEAMS
Doerer got his job back, kicked one out of bounds again, but otherwise was fine. Yoon missed a field goal and nailed another. Newsome’s punting was actually pretty bad (36.4 average on 5 attempts) while the return game from Chris Finke and true freshman C’Bo Flemister was nondescript. For the most part, nothing here helped Notre Dame gain an advantage and certainly not Finke’s fumbled punt return that wasn’t reviewed and could’ve been absolutely disastrous.
TURNING POINT
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I guess you could say the onside recovery by Tranquill?
3 STARS
#1 LB Te’von Coney – 10 solo tackles (14 total) with 3 tackles for loss and 1 sack. He’s putting up All-American numbers so far this season and is not disappointing.
#2 S Jalen Elliott – A pair of interceptions, what is this?
#3 WR Miles Boykin – Probably one of the more quiet 119-yard receiving games you’ll see.
FINAL NOTES
The funny thing is if Wimbush would’ve run more and cleaned up a handful of decisions this game wouldn’t have been awful as he set a career-high in passing yards (297) and had a healthy 9.58 yards per attempt. Yet, he threw 3 picks and scoring only 24 points against Ball State is unacceptable. Put another way, the offense could improve from Saturday but this performance against better competition could be much more in line with their norm than we thought in August.
We were expecting a lot more freshmen to play on Saturday, whoops! The aforementioned C’Bo Flemister got to see his first action as did corner Tariq Bracy and offensive lineman Jarrett Patterson according to the participation chart. I’m not sure if both were special teams only or not. They joined safety Houston Griffith (almost had a pick!), receiver Kevin Austin, linebacker Bo Bauer, and defensive lineman Jay Ademilola who each played in week one, as well.
Some people expend a lot of energy predicting how empty the stadium will be for games like these. I’m not sure this fan base gets enough credit for putting butts in seats. That stadium was quite full.
NBC refused to show a replay of the Cole Kmet injury so I guess we should assume he’s done for the year?
The intermediate passing game seems okay, right? One major concern is a lack of yards after catch both due to Wimbush’s accuracy and timing, and a lack of speed at the play-making positions. Finke’s 43-yard touchdown against Michigan is the only reception over 28 yards so far this season.
I continue to be amazed by the quiet play of Jonathan Bonner on the interior. Through 2 games he has 3 tackles with only 1 stop and you never hear his name called.
Asmar Bilal has been around the ball a ton so far. He’s missed a couple big plays but if he can average 1 tackle for loss per game that’s a huge win for the Rover position. Bilal’s played well enough that you could say the nose tackle (see above) position is now the weakest spot on the defense.
No one wants to talk about this and I get it–Ball State might be halfway decent for a MAC team, though. In terms of talent on the field that did not look like a 34.5-point underdog. The Cardinals get Indiana and Western Kentucky coming up which will be interesting to watch.
Notre Dame’s defense has allowed 3.95 yards per play through 2 games. It really doesn’t get much better than that. It’s too bad there are so many questions on offense because the defense is shaping up to meet expectations. Will they be wasted?
Okay, maybe not the defense. Everyone else should feel bad.
You don’t need to feel bad: your preseason predictions about the offense appear to be dead-on!
Last year was a pleasant respite from playing down to the competition. i really miss that.
Now 3-0 in one score games in 2018.
Finding ways to win!
Took me a while to find my original gangstas from the old OFD. Nice little place you have here. Anyway, I don’t want to take any hard stance on the QB situation at this point, but I think we need to see Book, because Wimbush 2.0 looks pretty much exactly the same as Wimbush 1.0 so far. Even last weeks 1st quarter touchdown drives required some heroics from receivers to handle poorly thrown jump balls.
I’m probably overly harsh on oline coaches, i’ll admit, but dang, this looked bad. It just looked like the assignments were bad. Ball State guys getting a free run for no other reason than that there was nobody assigned to them. Is Jeff Quinn an experienced oline coach? I don’t know anything about him but those guys looked lost and confused.
A lot of this was hard to gauge because the team just looked so lackadaisical. I think the defense will still be very good, if they can be encouraged to actually care about the game they’re playing in, but I’m pretty worried about the oline and the QB position, which just looked awful today.
Welcome back.
I feel like that game plan was what it was because we thought this would be a blowout and we would save wear and tear on Wimbush by not running him. I don’t know why his decision making isn’t better. That 3rd INT was especially atrocious. I’m still in the camp that if we’re going to get into a NY6 or better it was to be Wimbush. With this line and skill players, Book will struggle.
Easily the most boring game for me in a long time. Every time I looked up someone was punting.
Blah.
The game plan today was just terrible and that’s on BK. I know Wimbush took a ton of hits last week but the idea of basically trying to turn him into a pocket passer today was just stupid. Kelly said him not running wasn’t a part of the game plan but I don’t believe it. There were lanes today for him to take off and he clearly chose not to run. Wimbush is who he is. Let him run it. He just needs to be smarter while running it and avoid some of those heavy hits he took last week.
I am very concerned about our second half play. In both games we were out played. The good news is that our defense is outstanding and is the reason why this team is sitting 2-0. It also looks like we have a real weapon in Armstrong. He has looked really well these past two weeks. He is so explosive with the ball in his hands. He needs to touch the ball 20 times a game at a minimum.
Do we have more than one running play? I never saw us try and outrace them to the edge (I figure Armstrong has the speed for that).
What happened to the read/option? I agree with the comments that it appeared that they decided not to let Wimbush run. If that was deliberate, it was a bad idea. Just having Wimbush keep it once a quarter after faking it to the back would have likely opened some things up (certainly, the play action they began calling for a while in the 2nd half opened up the passing game).
What happened to the pass blocking? There were many plays where Wimbush could not get his feet set. I don’t expect the pass blocking to hold the rush indefinitely, but he was under too much duress back there. Until that stops, I’m not in the camp of “Fire Wimbush!”
I’ve got almost no problems with the defense. They were clearly gassed in the 4th quarter.
I am gradually getting tired of Kelly’s teams coming out with an ineffective game plan, and not making in-game adjustments. I’m tired of hearing Kelly say “we didn’t coach them up enough”. I’m starting to become ok of thinking about a different HC. I hate saying that, but it’s where I’m getting to nowadays. This game shouldn’t have been close at all.
That was a dreadful offensive performance. The skill talent there is lacking, to say the least. And, given Eichenberg’s play, the skill talent wasn’t even the biggest problem!
A bit of optimism: enough weird and interesting stuff happened last night that this got buried in national narrative stuff, so if it ends up being a hiccup no big deal. A bit of pessimism: there doesn’t seem to be an obvious avenue for significant improvement, other than running Wimbush a lot more. But I’m not sure that really gets us to a top-25 level offense.
agreed. Good teams have bad performances every year, but that is not what this looked like.
Sadly, this looked exactly like a BK team. i really dislike saying it, but it’s so familiar.
It’s his 9th year, we know what we are. I don’t think this particular s—show of a game is representative of what the Notre Dame football team is, and we’ll play better. But the fact that we can have this particular s—-show of a game is very representative of BK, and we’re lucky it was against Ball State. He can point to it and tell the boys “if we play like this against Vandy, we’ll lose,” but really, it shouldn’t be necessary to have these moments to motivate us against a Vandy.
After yesterday, I’m now leaning towards the “9-3, but maybe 8-4” side of my prediction, instead of the “9-3, but maybe 10-2” side. That performance gets us beat against half the teams on our schedule, easily. Yes, Duke beat Northwestern handily, but that performance loses to a motivated Northwestern. That performance loses to VT and Stanford and USC, easily. It loses to Wake. It loses to Pitt IF the random wheel of Pittness chooses our game for their annual upset. Honestly, it probably beats FSU, though 🙂
Continuing in a separate comment to avoid the paragraphing issue…
We can play better–we did against Michigan. But as Eric said, everyone but the defense should be doing some serious self-examination this week. It’s easy to point at Wimbush and the line, but the coaches put them in that position–ON PURPOSE–because they wanted Wimbush and the line and the RB’s and the offense to get a scrimmage and play better. It backfired. It’s great to raise your confidence by doing things against a bad team, but you have to do the things. This is why I was concerned halfway through the second quarter–not because I thought “oh no, we won’t reach X number of points I think we should have,” but because the only way we were getting the benefits of what we wanted–the freshman playing and the starters getting rest, the improvement in the passing game and the special teams, etc.–was to go up big FIRST, THEN work everything and treat it like a scrimmage. We should have just run the damn offense and gotten up 28-3 or so at half. THEN you can give Wimbush 2 series or so as a “pocket passer”, then let Book finish the 3rd Q and start the 4th, then give Jurkovec the end of the game. Because we tried to practice scrimmage from the beginning, it never actually became the practice scrimmage.
I think we could have beaten Ball State by 35+, but the gameplan assumed we would, rather than ensuring we would first and then using the time, and so we never actually got to enjoy a pressure free environment to tinker. I don’t think this is just a BK thing, as he’s had games (UMASS, etc) where he did do that, and other coaches in the ND past didn’t do it when they could. But I think this is the difference between us and say a Wisconsin whose identity is pound pound pound, so they may be slow in the first half as they wear down a weaker opponent, and the second half they run away with it. Be the best we are FIRST, get a comfortable gap, and then let’s screw around and experiment.
Agreeance with all of this. Basically, if we play like that the rest of the year, this team is going 4-8. If we play like week 1, we’re going 11-1. It’s probably somewhere in the middle, and we’re probably going 9-3. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Not to defend Kelly or Long, but jeez, we’re playing Ball State and our Oline gets pushed around all but the first series. I don’t care what the game plan deficiencies are, when you have that wide a talent disparity it damn well shouldn’t matter. Our tackles are just not that good, in both games they’ve been consistently getting beat, and the interior line yesterday was only marginally better, even Mustipher.
If the line can’t block the run game won’t go and neither will passing, especially given the mental and physical yips BW has with passing. Take away 2 big runs and we averaged 2-3 yards per run on the rest of them.
Having a one dimensional QB is deadly , unless the dimension is passing. Lots of pass-only QB’s are successful, so long as the RB’s are effective. Having a QB who can only run is easy to stop, thus BW’s drop off in effectiveness as the season wore on last year, and that was with strong RB help. This year, thus far, we don’t appear to have a running back who is dangerous enough to help BW out.
Throw in a weak Oline and what we see is what we get.
It is a weak O line, and I’m not going to defend that. But just like Wimbush’s passing, they went into the game saying “hey, we need to learn to do these things we can’t, so let’s make that the game plan.” The O-line knows that Brandon is going to take off and run if nothing is open–yet the gameplan seemed to call for him NOT to run, as if the staff said “hey, we don’t want you to run, so stay in the pocket.” Since Brandon is slow in his reads and making passes, that’s a few beats more per pass that they’re having to hold on, and I don’t think they were ready for it.
That doesn’t excuse the run-blocking, that was just bad. But I think the gameplan could have helped the O-line a bit more, and by playing our game, we get up, and then run it and all they have to do is lean on the BSU players. I don’t know, I’m not a coach, so I could be wrong. But none of this excuses the bad play by the line. They’re not good.
This is exactly how I feel. It’s also why I still hold out hold for an 11-1 season (I think it is just unrealistic to expect 12-0 because some team will always play awesome against us or we play really terrible one game). I really feel like this game was treated like a scrimmage instead of playing our game in the first half and blowing them out and then working on stuff. So, since I think that I actually believe that we are a lot better than we showed last night and maybe, just maybe we can have the offensive line gel a bit, we can see Wimbush be what he was against Michigan with a few of the better intermediate throws from last night, and maintain the excellent defense to get to 11 wins.
We have shown pretty good depth on the D-line and a bit in the secondary, but we really could have used last night to try some of the backups at linebacker because it is crazy to expect Coney and Tranquill to play the entire game all season. It would be nice to buy them at least one series off each half but we missed our chance to get the backups some valuable in game experience.
Yup KG, i agree with you in general. i still think we’ll go 10-2 or even 11-1, but the playing down to the opponent when the team is actually good is depressing. It happened with Davieweisingham all the time, but those three rarely fielded a good team.
Well said, KG
As ugly as our game was, if anyone is going to get some negative press for a bad win, it’s FSU. They were pretty fortunate to beat an FCS team.
Interestingly, College Football Final spent more time on our game than FSU. I guess because we’re top 10. I still don’t think that our game really reached “national narrative” stage. If we beat Stanford and VaTech, it will be forgotten.
Well, bummer. Oh well.
VT had already exposed FSU as a clusterfrick. Almost losing to Samford (not Stanford) only confirmed what we knew.
In terms of the “buried in the national narrative” thing: we didn’t even drop any spots in the AP poll, which I find surprising. I’m not sure I understand the rationale for us being ranked ahead of LSU, at least.
Yeah, i thought we’d drop to 10…but why do you question being ahead of LSU?
LSU absolutely rocked Miami and much more handily beat up on its inferior competition. On pure results, they have to be ahead of us. In my proprietary “in my head” ranking, I’d say we may still be a better team, but I’m less sure about that than I am sure their first two games were more impressive than our first two games.
i dunno if rocked is the right word. i didn’t see the game, but offensively LSU was 22 of 64 for a 34.4% success rate. That’s all plays other than the kneeldown, but the success rate was about 1/3 the whole game so pulling out garbage time wouldn’t matter much. On defense LSU was 43 for 70 for a 61.4% success rate.
LSU certainly outplayed Miami, but maybe they just got the lucky breaks. Further, their inferior competition this week was way more inferior than Ball St. After week 2 Ball St is Sagarin’s 110th team and SE Louisiana is 164th. SE Louisiana’s rank might only be that high because, at this point, they’ve only played FBS teams even if one of those opponents was really bad.
i can’t agree that LSU has to be ahead of ND on pure results, but i do concur that we might be the better team…with an unfortunately strong “might”.
Very good points by Eric and all of you so far. I am glad this was an afternoon game so I could get to sleep by 1:30 am, I would have hated to pulled an all-nighter for this one.
Couple of thoughts:
Agree about having Brandon run more (and yes more prudently at the end of the runs) as I think this will help what is clearly a confidence issue with him. I slightly disagree with your comment about the 2nd half, Cubsfan, at least to this extent (and I am wondering whether anyone saw the same thing): when we got the ball in the second half, Brandon made a nice designed run. That did seem to loosen him up, and for a series or two he did seem more comfortable, and we scored ten points. Then that deflection on the pretty good ball to Boykin seemed to absolutely put him into one of his tailspins. Agreeance that the truly pathetic pass pro (shades of the 2nd half vs scUM didn’t help… but my fear is that the confidence issues Eric talked much about in the off season are hard for this kid to shake. Especially as very well pointed out, despite what BK said at the season’s outset, the design is clearly not “let Brandon be Brandon”. Though now that I think of it, Long and BK may honestly think it is, that as Eric perceptively pointed out, the passing game has already been much altered to avoid some of his worse throws.
Welcome back, 8FP! Now if we could find First Down Moses again.
Total agreement on the offense looking best early in the 2nd half when they actually let the running QB run the ball.
Notre Dame essentially tried to whip Ball State with their right hand tied behind their back yesterday. They only ran the plays they don’t run all that well. Looked really obvious they didn’t want to run Wimbush to risk him getting hit more in a low importance game, but by doing so that made the task at hand that much harder to accomplish. Plus with the way that line was blocking, it wasn’t going to be an easy day in the pocket. That’s the biggest concern, IMO. Sure you can excuse Winovich and Gary in the backfield every play, but when it’s Ball State players? Very concerning indeed.
Ball St had twice as many sacks as that “best defensive line we’ll play all year”. That is deeply concerning about O line play, especially tackles. They still looked like they were getting beat by speed rushes around the edge all day long. Run blocking was possibly even worse than pass protection.
I agree that Kelly was totally BSing about not planning to avoid running with Wimbush. It was transparently obvious that he would look to take off and then stop.
Since o-line and QB concerns have been talked about, the one thing standing out to me is the workload on Coney and Tranquill, who I believe have played every single snap defensively. Both are playing well and veterans but in a long season you gotta be concerned about wear and tear if they’re literally never able to leave the field. 90+ snaps for Ball State on offense too, no easy day in the park.
But I’m not really as distraught as many others seem to be. ND played poorly, but I think it’s human nature to play down to opponents, especially when the gameplan is different than a normal one in part because you’re trying to just get out of there with the W. Never really felt like the game was in doubt, but it just wasn’t a very impressive performance on a game we all were (rightfully) expecting a big win.
Oh well, take the W and move on. Hopefully the lesson learned is to install a game plan tailored towards the team’s strengths for next week. No reason to try to make Wimbush into a pocket passer when he is not physically/mentally able to do that well consistently. I will give Kelly credit though – for as much as he’s jerked QB’s around before it was good to see him stick with Wimbush. Probably had no other choice as pulling the kid wrecks his confidence moving forward and would have been more costly than anything else.
Thanks for pulling me a bit back up to my normal state of positive energy flow!
Regarding your first point, that’s a large part of my disappointment in this game. While it’s exciting to see what new shiny freshman toys we have, the more important benefit is the rest veterans get in a blow out instead of having to play the whole way.
I’m not happy with the performance, but as has been said, beat Stanford and VT and no one will care. As a fan I want to see signs that we might do that, but this game didn’t give us any. Burn the tape and on to the next.
I don’t really even care about new shiny toys or the fun of seeing new guys, the over-reliance on a single player is frightening to me. What happens if, heaven forbid, Coney gets a targeting penalty in the 1st quarter of next game? Granted any defense is in deep trouble if their best player, senior MLB gets unexpectedly ejected, but Notre Dame would literally have to turn it over to a player with 0 snaps this season. That would be a disaster and the whole defense likely struggles.
I get you have to ride your best players in close games for obvious reasons, it’s just worrisome to me how reliant the defense is on 4 and 23 and that likely isn’t a sustainable idea. It’s not as glaring a problem as bad QB play or o-line play but lurking to me nonetheless.
100% agree. Injury, targeting penalty, measles, who cares–you have to take advantage of these sorts of games to get the backups experience. I think we assumed that’s just how it would happen, and didn’t know what to do when it didn’t.
Wimbush is trying to make too much happen. I understood when Kiser was doing it in 2016 when he knew our defense was going to give up 40 points per game. But with a defense like we have now, Wimbush has to be smarter. No 15 yard sacks. No double pumping on screen passes into the flat. Every time he got into a rhythm yesterday with 2 or 3 nice passes, he’d immediately panic from the slightest amount of pressure on his next passing play.
I wonder if the staff can just throw Lenzy out there to run a few go routes. Nobody is creating separation and nobody is stretching the defense. The offense is going to be a problem all year if that doesn’t get fixed.
Anyone have offensive line jokes? So far I’ve got:
Who’s starting the GoFundMe to hire Harry Hiestand away from the Bears?
And
We really have to use our best blocker to protect Wimbush’s blind side. Given that it’s time to move Chase Claypool inside to left tackle.
Here’s a joke: the left tackle play yesterday.
Thank you, I’ll be here all week.
We are ranked below Boston College in the S&P+. This is not a drill. – https://www.sbnation.com/college-football/2018/9/9/17837688/ncaa-football-rankings-2018-week-3
Market correction. Sigh.
The computers having Michigan at 9 make it easier to digest and laugh off. Needs more data and results to be more accurate.
Stanford beat USC and fell 13 spots in S&P+ this week. I do like it, but it’s a bit bi-polar early in the season.
>No doubt, they were not prepared for nearly 100 snaps, an annoying offense just efficient enough to keep the ball, in a game that was supposed to be easy.
I think this is a big deal here. Not only did they run a huge number of plays, the fact that it was competitive until the end meant we had to keep our frontline defenders on the field for all 97(!!) of those plays. In a game where Coney and Tranquil and Terry Jillery should have been sitting on the bench by the start of the 4th quarter. Missed opportunities. Did anyone besides Kmet get injured?
Finished my rewatch. Here’s a couple turning points:
The sack preceding Yoon’s missed field goal. Lost a lot of yardage and made the kick missable. Next time down. On like 4th and 8 it would have been the same distance (43 yards) but we go for it cuz… screw it it’s ball state? Turnover on downs.
Second offensive possession of the second half. Set to go up by three scores, pass deflected at the line, off Boykin’s hands, interception.
I only saw the 4 qtr live and the 1st on replay but is there anything to the 3-4 scheme causing problems for our o-line? I haven’t seen any one mention it. But I know at least in theory it can be more complicated to go against especially if you rarely see it.
I didn’t watch the game live, but on replay. I also saw before watching what the final score was. It’s interesting, because knowing the final score I was in a complete panic going into watching the game… only to find that there were more positives than I expected.
Defense was great!
Safety interceptions!
A running back who caught some passes for legitimate yardage!
A number of accurate throws and even at least one occasion of going through progressions by Wimbush.
Boykin looks like maybe more than a one hit wonder from the bowl game.
Not all of Wimbush’s interceptions were bad throws (which I expected they all would be).
That said, I echo the need for better offensive line play.
I want to see Wimbush know when to (1) throw it away rather than continuing to scramble if there’s no running lane, and (2) not be so in love with the long ball as to throw it up “in hopes” of a completion.
If I hadn’t seen the score in advance I think I would have had many more of the reactions already expressed, but once my “we’re favored by 35 points” mindset was ripped away, I actually was able to still see some notable positives! I also agree with Eric, I think were going to come to find that Ball St. is better than currently realized.
Excellent points, and a detached POV is always a good complement to first hot takes.
I agree with a lot of Hook’s points above. To me, the coaches felt confident about winning this one, so they came in and told BW not to run at all in the first half, hoping this would (sink/swim) push him to focus on improving his passing. BW’s opportunity to show he could pass was definitely a “sink” performance, but this was the time and place to test him (the coaches cannot do that against any other upcoming opponents).
The biggest problem was the number of snaps, especially for Coney and Tranquil. At this point, I would think that the depth at rover seems pretty good, so how about moving Bilal over to share some of the LB snaps to give Coney and Drue some breaks?
Agree w all abt the LB snaps — wonder what the rumor mill and/or cognoscenti thoughts are on the unproven backups?