--- On Tue, 10/20/09, ke...@baldwinnc.com <ke...@baldwinnc.com> wrote:
Good question. That depends a lot on the quality of the opponent. Kentucky, Vanderbilt, and less talented teams - fear everything and hope to catch us napping. But the better teams - do they fear our defense? What about after the Arkansas game? The only real offense we have played this year. >From my perspective, our defense played well on Saturday. They did >uncharacteristically give up some big plays, but they had to bail the offense >out a lot. four turnovers, and some very short drives (the long touchdown pass >to Deonte was on the first play of that possession) had them tired by the >fourth quarter, when Arky did most of their damage. Spikes was out for >practically the entire game and our starting defensive tackles didn't dress >out, and the guy that plays nose tackle in our joker package got hurt also. >Still, we held the top offensive unit in the conference to 20 points after >gifting them four fumbles. Do they fear our offense? Obviously they are psyched out about Tebow. But what if we played Brantley instead of Tebow - would they fear our offense? Tebow brings a unique skill set to the table. In my opinion, next year we will see something completely different, but possibly just as spectacular, with Brantley at the helm. Do they fear our special teams? Use to be - whenever Brandon James would go out to field a kickoff or a punt - everyone was on the edge of their seat. And when it came time for our opponents to punt - everyone sat on the edge of their seat - wondering if we would block it? The low number of blocks this year may be due to our reputation causing the opposition to spend extra time preparing to take that away from us. Our return game, while probably at least average, has been disappointing to say the least. You'd think if teams were going max protect for their punter it would make it harder for them to contain the return game, but that hasn't been consistently dangerous looking this year. For the most part the kickoff coverage has been good. Not so much on saturday, but I noticed that most of the kickoffs were close to the middle of the field, as opposed to the corner where we usually go with them, so that may have accounted for some of the difference. Or do we suffer from a phenom of where we have so many talents - that no one talent stands out - so we have nothing special about us? After all we are ranked #1 and lead the SEC in many categories. That may be a part of it, but I think that the coaches have been reluctant, at least on offense, to really open things up. Our tendency to turn the ball over, which is something we rarely have done the last few years may make this offense look a lot less potent than it is. I saw flashes of opening it up onSaturday, but we seem to always have one unit that seems to have an off day, making the whole thing out of sync. It was the offensive line (either by execution or by scheme) that held us back this time. Not to mention some untimely dropped passes as well as the aforementioned fumbles that happened when everything else was working. I would say the latter - but "college football experts" see that in Alabama - but not us? In this case we're being penalized by competing against the unrealistic "best team ever" expectations going in to the season. If you look at the numbers, against similar competition Alabama isn't outperforming us on either side of the ball, but since we're not blowing teams out, everyone wonders what's "wrong" with us. All IMO of course. Steve M. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ GATORS: ONE VOICE ON SATURDAY - NO VOICE ON SUNDAY! 1996 National Football Champions | 2006 National Basketball Champions 2006 National Football Champions | 2007 National Basketball Champions 2008 National Football Champions | Three Heisman Trophy winners: Steve Spurrier (1966), Danny Wuerffel (1996), Tim Tebow (2007) - Visit our website at www.gatornet.us -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
