Friday, September 23, 2005

Its not a good week to root for my teams

Obviously, a complete embarassment today. I'm staying away from AZZ until at least Saturday just to fight off my tendency to wallow in the Jonestown that it will, no doubt, be. Today was another road failure, and by far the worst loss in the Meyer/Brandon era. I put this on the coaches. We were completely and totally out prepared for this game. Boise had a game plan for us...we had no game plan for them.

Special teams play for us was atrocious. We didn't adjust on offense. The defense is putrid--a complete embarassment for the third week in the row. In fact, this score could have been a lot worse if Boise doesn't stall out on the first two drives.

The plus side is that UT rallied from a similar debacle to win the MAC last year, so we can still do it. But much work remains to be done. At this point, we are absolute upset fodder in MAC play. Every game is a challenge, and I don't see how we beat the better teams in our conference right now. The offense has to get more consistent, and the defense just has to get better. We don't tackle at all.

There's still 5:00 left as I write this. I'll post the Coach's quotes as soon as they are up. Nothing to be said except this--it was a complete humiliation.

Update II:

Some more reflections after some sleep.

Maureen Fulton has her story in The Blade.


Here are some Brandon quotes from the article; The Sentinel has some additions to the quotes.

"We were completely dominated. We were completely out-coached in every phae of the game, offense, defense, kicking...It's embarrasing. Out coaches had no answers and our players had no answers."

"This is the first time since I've been here we didn't have any answers," BGSU coach Gregg Brandon said.

"If we can't stop the run we're going to struggle the rest of the way," Brandon said.

"You can't put a good football team like Boise out there over and over and over," Brandon said.

"We couldn't find a single coverage guy, and when we did he couldn't get open."

"Its disappointing on special teams we continue to give up the big play."

"They were doing lot of things to confuse us and this is the first time since I've been here that we didn't have any answers. We've got to check that real close."

Other personal observations:

The KO return was a killer. That should never happen, but coming off a score where we tie the game after being man-handled and thinking we're back in it, it was just a killer. But, there's little doubt we would have been completely dominated.

Not only did we not stop the run, but we didn't run, either. we had 84 net running yards, but 40 of those came from Anthony Turner and Bobby Thomas in freak circumstances. Pope, Lane and Omar were 15 for 44.

If teams are going to drop into coverage, Omar is going to have to run more to loosen it up. It was there several times.

Corey Partridge seemed to struggle. It was almost like he was stopping every time the ball got close.

Boise averaged 5.3 yards per rush. I just think everyone over-estimated how good our defense would be this year, because right now they are woeful, and I don't believe they have the talent to be much better.

On other update:

Sentinel says PJ was injured again in the game. I am worried he may suffer from these ankle sprains the entire season.

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