Which was playing not to lose on offense and hope we got a big play somewhere that would tilt the game to us. And it just about worked as it did most of last year.
Our offense hasn't been stellar so far this year, but it looked a lot better than last year and showed a lot of new wrinkles in the passing game. All such play calling was killed off tonight, I assume b/c we didn't want Wes to throw a pick. Notice how all the patterns were to the ouside and short?
No quick slants over the middle or the WR quick hitch. Nothing over the middle to the TE's. Basically anything that had a 5% chance of being an INT was thrown out of the playbook. Granted if we won 5-3 somehow I'd be happy, but you can't always play scared. I know Croom committed to Carroll, but he was 10x worse than he's ever been so I think somewhere there you HAD to give Lee a series to just to see what he could bring....but that is somewhat a tough call b/c of the socre and Carroll's penchant for somehow putting together a good 4th quarter drive after looking horrible for 55 minutes before.
I'm not sure what's up with the running game. We didn't run a lot of sweeps, we didn't run misdirection. It just looked like the goal was to stuff it up the middle intoa big pile of humanity and hope they missed a tackle or we could plow out 4 yards. Even with that our OL never got a push...Ducre hit the hole hard most times and was still lucky to get 2 yards most of the time. I'm not sure the solution to this, but wouldn't you have liked to have seen Elliott get on a field for a few toss sweeps just to see what would happen. I'm sure his fumbling problems in the past kept him out of such a close game...but at some point when you're offense can't get out of reverse, you have to try something.
I was very suprised to see that AU had over 300 yards of offense, but kudos out to the defense. They did all they could.
Our offense hasn't been stellar so far this year, but it looked a lot better than last year and showed a lot of new wrinkles in the passing game. All such play calling was killed off tonight, I assume b/c we didn't want Wes to throw a pick. Notice how all the patterns were to the ouside and short?
No quick slants over the middle or the WR quick hitch. Nothing over the middle to the TE's. Basically anything that had a 5% chance of being an INT was thrown out of the playbook. Granted if we won 5-3 somehow I'd be happy, but you can't always play scared. I know Croom committed to Carroll, but he was 10x worse than he's ever been so I think somewhere there you HAD to give Lee a series to just to see what he could bring....but that is somewhat a tough call b/c of the socre and Carroll's penchant for somehow putting together a good 4th quarter drive after looking horrible for 55 minutes before.
I'm not sure what's up with the running game. We didn't run a lot of sweeps, we didn't run misdirection. It just looked like the goal was to stuff it up the middle intoa big pile of humanity and hope they missed a tackle or we could plow out 4 yards. Even with that our OL never got a push...Ducre hit the hole hard most times and was still lucky to get 2 yards most of the time. I'm not sure the solution to this, but wouldn't you have liked to have seen Elliott get on a field for a few toss sweeps just to see what would happen. I'm sure his fumbling problems in the past kept him out of such a close game...but at some point when you're offense can't get out of reverse, you have to try something.
I was very suprised to see that AU had over 300 yards of offense, but kudos out to the defense. They did all they could.
