I wanted to collect my thoughts before I posted but yesterday was not totally a shock to me. Many of the things that happened where things I was concerned about, however, I didn't believe that FIU was the team good enough to expose them. This football team has improved, but it hasn't made the leaps that many thought. We've now played two teams with winning records and we are 0-2. Here, in my opinion, are the biggest issues that cost us yesterday and issues I was worried about for much of the season.
1. The play of Chase Litton
Sure he threw for 363 yards and 3 TDs but, almost all of that damage was done after being way down.
He missed open receivers all day, mostly because he held the ball too long.Even when he did complete the pass, he killed our receivers chance at any YAC because of holding the ball too long, allowing defenders to close gaps. Or just being off the mark, forcing open receivers with room to run to have dive or make leaping catches instead of being able to catch the ball in stride. He stared down his primary target way too much. But, these were all issues Chase had coming into the game.
The real problem was up to yesterday, Chase had taken care of the football. Yesterday he didn't. His 3 turnovers (1 a pick 6 and another an unforced fumble which gave FIU the ball 12 yards from scoring) gave FIU 17 points. And the pick 6 was because of directly staring down Brady.
The presnap read should have dictated that the ball go to Willie Johnson who was isolated on the wide side of the field with single coverage and no safety help as the 1 high safety was severely cheating to Brady's side.
Litton may when it's all said and done have numbers that look nice, just like he did at the end of yesterday. But, he is not the type of QB that can put a team on his back, he's not the type of QB to make a play when he absolutely needs to, he's not awful but he's not great either. But, he's the best we have and everything isn't all his fault he gets no help from what I consider our biggest issue #2.
2. Offensive Play Calling - Again lots of folks will say we put up 500 yards and 30 points and blame the loss solely on the turnovers. But, the fact of the matter was the offense was needed to come through in a game that the defense was struggling for the first time all season and they couldn't. And a large part of that was due to Legg's play calling. FIU, for the most part, played cover 2 coverage, we did not attack the holes in this coverage. The holes here are intermediate and shallow routes over the middle of the field and in the gap between the safety and corner. In this coverage, the corner is assigned to the flats and the safety has everything over the top with a linebacker dropping back into the deep middle. So Slant routes, Dig routes, Crossing routes, Curls with the receiver sitting down in the hole and things like that are the best routes to use against that coverage. We didn't run enough of those, we threw too many outs and we threw too many streaks where there was safety help. Now you can throw the go route against this coverage but it has to be thrown earlier between the safety and corner and that window can get tight, Litton and most college QBs aren't good enough to consistently and accurately hit those throws.
On top of that our route combinations are awful a lot of the times. I have never seen a team that will have so many WRs clumped into one 7-10 yard space as often as we do. Effectively, allowing the defense to cover more targets with fewer players. And I won't even get to the run play calling because it's the same as it is every game. We have about five run plays and that's it.
3. Big WRs - These are a problem for us. We had played two big receivers prior to yesterday, Gardner from Miami Ohio and Harmon from NC State. Both went for over 100 yards against us. FIU's Owens who is built a lot like Terrell Owens and was in the top 5 in the league in receiving yardage coming into yesterday, killed us. FIU had 14 completions for 178 yards and 2 passing TDs. 7 of the 14 completions, 144 of the 178 yards and both TDs went to Owens. All three games Heater has chosen to leave a sophomore Chris Jackson, more often than not, in man coverage against bigger, stronger receivers that he was clearly outmatched against. It's ok to give him help.
4. Defensive line - For the first time all season, those guys were manhandled. I saw Ryan Bee get rolled onto his back no less than 5 times and that never happens. Because of that FIU was able to run effectively and we got no pressure on McGough allowing him to play a mistake-free game. This one is lower on the list because I want to believe it was just a bad game and not a symptom of a bigger more prolonged issue.
I was concerned our defense may not be as good as the numbers indicated because we had played such inept offenses, who had even more inept QBs and I think yesterday proves that true. However, to give some credit, I think the defense still played good enough to win. FIU had their first 7 handed to them and of the 13 second-half points the Panthers scored, only 3 can be pinned on our defense and their only TD came on Litton's pick 6.
We have our work cut out for us this week, hopefully, we can get some of these things cleaned up before Friday.
Home
Help
Members
View the memberlist
Search For Members
Login
Register