Falcons Lose: The Defense

So when we started this year, the defense was the big issue.  They struggled last year and lost a bunch of guys on top of that.

You're not going to see anything in the numbers that's going to suggest that the game was a positive, yet I am going to tell you that I honestly felt it was.

Yes.  UT had 6.2 yards per carry, 6 rushing TDs, 18 of 23 passing for 205 yards, 9 of 16 on third down and had no turnovers.  Etc.  The numbers are not good.  I am not sure, however, they are much worse than they were last year in the opening at WKU and that was, well, WKU against our everybody-back-MAC-title defense.

I just felt like the defense was beaten by  team that was bigger and faster, but I didn't think there were as many mental errors and I thought we were competitive and got some stops, especially when we needed them after falling behind.

Coach Babers said after the game that he thought our defense played as well as Tennessee's.  That might be a small stretch, but that's not completely out of line.

The defense forced three punts and got two other stops that resulted in missed FGs.  The biggest issue was that they played nearly the whole game with their backs against the wall thanks to BG's horrendous kick coverage.  Tennessee had four TD drives of less than 30 yards and none of them came off turnovers.  Just incredible.  They were 29, 24, 29 and 18.  And the fifth one was 45 yards.

Also, we have a very short rotation on the d-line (and Schweiterman was out) and I think that started to show after a while.

That's going to make it hard to put up good numbers.  There were a couple long drives, too, but if the defense had some longer fields to work with I think they would have forced a couple more punts, too.

I just felt like there was a more solid effort.  I thought BG tackled pretty well.  Hurd and Kamara are hard to tackle and they got away some times, but I just felt like BG competed pretty hard with them.  I have optimism that the defense could be better than we expected.

BG played a ton of guys. Valdez and Greene led the team in tackles.  Eilar Hardy was third and Darrell Hunter was fourth.

Hunter is a good example.  He missed a year with injury and got passed on the depth chart last year, but I thought he was much tougher on run support than in the past.  In all 21 players made tackles for BG and at least 2 of them were true freshmen.

And welcome back to Zach Colvin who had the team's only sack.  Love the perseverance, great story.

Anyway, the challenges will get easier if not easy moving forward.  The defense was better than I expected (and note, I'm not saying they were great) and I look forward to watching that store evolve as time goes on.