Falcons Lose: The Offense

Coach Babers said after the game that some of the UT Coaches were not going to sleep last night due to the play of their defense.

That's pretty interesting.  BG had a good game on the offensive side with promise for more.  There were two key additions.

The first is the deep ball.  BG had trouble consistently nailing the deep ball last year, which meant we were trying to run our offense in a very crowded field, which is the opposite of what it is supposed to be.  BG nailed a number of long passes against 1-1 coverage from the Vols, who early on were crowding the box, seemingly confident that their guys could cover our WRs in man looks.

Which turned out not to be true.

The other difference was Matt Johnson's running.  Coming out of the delay, BG installed an option look where Johnson would read the defense and either give the ball to a RB or pull it at the last second and run.  He had a number of successful plays doing that.  Johnson also moves around in the pocket very effectively, avoids rushes and throws on the run.  It is just a new dimension.

BG finished with 6.6 yards per play which is very good, especially on the road against an SEC team.  That's 557 yards.  BG was 29 of 51 passings which is not a great percentage, but that equals out to 14.9 yards per completion, which is spectacular.  Because of what Tennessee was giving BG, the Falcons threw more deep balls than you might have expected.

BG did struggle to run the ball, at 3.6 yards per rush.  To their credit, however, they did not abandon the run, still taking 34 shots.  BG ran 85 total plays.

The other area where BG struggled was on pass pro.  They have up 3 sacks for 27 yards and there were other times where there was pressure on Johnson and he was scrambling.  We have a solid line and I expect that to improve as we play other teams.  It is common to blitz spread teams and we just need to get ourselves in sync for that.

BG did struggle on 3rd down, going only 4 of 18.  They did go 3-3 on 4th down, leaving them 7 of 18 overall and those decisive plays.

Individually, Fred Coppet led BG with 63 yards and over 5 per carry.  Travis Greene struggled a little with 3.8 yards per carry.  Also, he was injured on a big hit.  It didn't look good, but looks can be deceiving.  Travis has been a warrior for us and I only hope that he gets to enjoy the senior season he has earned.  (I've heard nothing about his status).

We talked about Johnson already, who had a career high 424 yards passing.  Also, if you remove sacks he ran 7 times for 49 yards.

As for receivers, Gehrig Dieter led the day with 7 for 133 and 1 TD.  Ronnie Moore had 5 for 95 in a half of play.  Burbrink added 4 catches and Gallon 3.  Roger Lewis only had 2 but I do believe he still has a strong impact on the game.  He caught one early and after that my guess is they are focused on him which opens it up for the other players.

There's no doubt that the refs were not calling PI.  Coach Babers lost his usual Hawaii-cool demeanor at one point and got called for a penalty and was as being cursed out in the earshot of 63.000 people.  BG lost one TD pass on that play on a clear interference.  In general, I don't like to complain about the refs and BG committed enough stupid penalties that the subject really isn't beneficial to us.

Defense next.