Defense

It's amazing how everyone is slamming the offense, but the Defense just had over 650 yards put up against them. Offense, against Tech, didn't look bad, but giving up over 650 total yards tells me the DC must go!

 

I have seen claims that if we give up 350 yards to Baylor, it will be the most yards we have ever allowed in a season. However, I have not verfied this claimed statistic yet.

 

D played well until Jenkins and Malik went out. They are our only 2 LBs with speed. But D has been a disaster all year. Thomas should be a leader and he can't cover a grandma. We missed Brown and Hicks in a big way.

 

dbacks,

I'm sorry you didn't see the game I attended. Bedford has coached our D up to where it can "mouth" with anyone. We are certainly Top 5 in the talking stats. Can we stop anyone? No, but that isn't as important as running your mouth. Get beat? Not a problem, get in their face and tell them how great you are. We don't wrap up. The backbreaker last nite was a play my 7 yr old grandson's flag team runs four times a game. When Tech lined up, the whole stadium knew what was coming except 11 players in Burnt Orange and their HC & DC. That's ok though, because Duke Thomas told Tech how great he was.

Bedford needs to either change careers or change locations. His players need to shut the f**k up and let their play speak. After watching 11 of their performances, except for the show in The Cotton Bowl, maybe they are better off to talk, because their play is deafening.

 

All you have to do is look at 3rd and 4th down conversion against and see how pitiful the Texas back seven are/were. With Jefferson as the exception, one has to look at player selection as an issue.

Jefferson cannot cover period, but he had to be kept in on passing downs as a blitz threat. The new DC has got to be able to teach him how to cover and how to read the offense.

 

Jefferson wasn't the issue. Tech wasn't exactly rolling us at the half either. They had a busted play for a TD which would have been a pick if Hill got to the ball a split second earlier and Tech's WR hadn't turned into a DB. Same goes for the "victory formation" TD near the end of the game, which was neither the victory formation nor a fumblerooskie like the announcers were saying. The defense just wasn't lined up because they didn't know what was going on. If we had coaches that creative, they'd be hailed as wizards.

The issue was gap management. For all of the crap Bull Reese endured in 2003 for "not knowing how to cover the spread," when we were basically trying out 5 freshman DBs, he was a master of not letting misdirection runs go through an uncovered gap.

Looking through the play-by-play, it seems as though about 50 percent of their runs were just stalled zone plays where the runner (either Washington or Mahomes) would look around, find the weak spot, and go for 6-15 yards. Their TD drive to go back up by 10 early in the 4th quarter was a good example of this. We were down 27-24 and Washington rolled us on 3 separate plays that drive, including the TD. Guys totally out of position. The purpose of a DL in those situations is literally to create the gaps for the rest of the players to fill, hence the "mugging" that Reese always espoused and posters here always hated. Our 3-man front would create the gaps, usually unintentionally, and no one would fill them. No LBs. No safeties. Nothing. Washington could literally look around and spot which gap had no orange in it.

I'd love to pretend that "our personnel is so gashed by injury that it was impossible for us to defend those adequately," but we all know that the Allen Eagles and Carroll Dragons and the Westlake Chaps know what to do on those plays. They have coaches who understand what it means for players to take responsibility for gaps. Bedford is failing on multiple levels. First it was blaming fans for not buying up tickets. Then it was playing Tampa-2 zone when you knew that ND was going to isolate the safeties on those deep passes. Then it was allowing every 3rd down under the sun to be converted. Now it seems whenever he "fixes" something, he allows something else to be exploited. Manny Diaz wasn't that bad. Manny sucked at two things: odd blitz packages and run defense. Vance sucks at those and more.

 

Agree with your assessment H11 with the exception of first half. Jefferson and Jenkins (both of whom have had problems all year) were filling those gaps in first half. In fact I think Malik was having his best game ever before going out.

In fact my short assessment of game would be offense lost first half and defense lost second half.

 

Nash,

How can you say that the offense lost the first half? Norvell's playcalling was incredible. Tech put 11 men within 5-8 yards of the line of scrimmage the entire half. Before Warren's 91 yard run (which you can make an argument for being very well defended - he was hit at least 7 times), we had a total of 58 yards total offense against what was statistically one of D-1's top five defenses - as in five worst.

Norvell's continually calling the running plays with 11 men on the line? Shear generous, and a classic example of why he resides in Travis County and not Cleveland County.

 

I'm confused. Calling running plays nearly won us the game, and would have if the defense checked out at halftime. Most passing plays failed badly. I'm not sure we needed more of them - just a better distribution of them. They were almost all either horizontal passes or bombs, with basically nothing midrange.

Jefferson and Jinkens have arguably been our two best / most consistent defensive players all year, so there's no way losing them had no impact on us.

His flag team has 5 giant guys on the offensive line to line up unusually tight to hide a tiny guy behind them so the D can't see the guy is there? Also Tech committed multiple pre-snap violations on that play. At least two of the OL were still moving at the snap, for example.

 

Giants? No, but OL stands up at line, smallest (also fastest) kid lines up facing the sideline behind center & guard. Ball is handed to him while the QB sprints right. Kid with ball goes left. Our defense was not ready or DT would have crushed it.

Yes, calling running plays almost won the game in the second half. In the first half, Tech dared us to throw the ball and it resulted in a whopping 58 yards total offense until Warren broke for 91 on a play that was well defensed, Warren just broke a bunch of tackles with desire and heart and hunger. We weren't moving the ball, why not try something to open up the defense? We even had a pass where Tech didn't cover one of our WRs not to mention having Johnson standing on the goal line in the Southeast corner of the field with the nearest defender being on the Tech bench.

I shall give Norvell or Traylor or someone credit for going to the power set to block for Warren.

 

I think we threw deep at least 5 times in the first half with Swoopes. 1 was way off target, 2 were just inches past our guy's hands, 1 was dropped, and 1 was the interception that was perfectly covered and should never have been thrown. I think running and passing failures equally were responsible for only having those 58, and our passing was so consistently bad all game I'm not sure it ever would have helped to pass more. Perhaps passing differently, though.

I remember a couple of ones where we had a guy wide open and just missed him, don't recall which WR it was though.

 

We did try passes, had people open and either the pass was off target or dropped.

Once the Tech defender just took the ball away from Marcus Johnson, for an interception.

 

You know, if we could somehow magically combine our first-half defense with our second-half offense, we'd have a pretty good team. Actually, we'd have pretty much the identical team that beat Oklahoma last month.

 

Jefferson plays hard and makes tackles. However, his lack of understanding of his responsibilities on passing downs has been one of the issues on third down. The hole in the zone where he should have been has been exploited in almost every game he has played.

He just needs some quality teaching to reach his fullest ability.

 

Sabre what I mean is any production by offense in first half and we end it way up. Not saying who is to blame personally, just that the offense wasn't there first half and D wasn't there the second. You get two turnovers, deep in Tech territory and you come away with three points, yeah I say offense lost first half.

 

Just read this in an Austin American Statesman article:

"Barring a stifling effort against the Bears, Bedford’s defense will finish the season statistically as the worst in school history. Texas is 343 yards shy of setting a school record for total yards allowed. Baylor averages 644.1 yards per game."

I trust their facts, so this might end up being the worst season defensively.

Here is a link:
http://www.hookem.com/story/at-4-7-texas-coach-charlie-strong-can-look-ahead-to-2016/

 

Well said and on point.

 

All it really takes to understand how Bedford coaches as a DC is to watch our 2005 game against OK State. He was acting like a madman in the first half when they staked a lead. And then he was throwing around headsets and watching gape-mouthed as our 3rd string RB made his front seven our ***** in the 4th quarter.

He doesn't "do" adjustments. He waits until the opposing offense makes stupid mistakes. I think the "capitalizing on offensive mistakes" scheme is what's going to relegate him to a FBS position coach job when he (or Strong) is fired.