[personal] [Husker] the D

[Skylar Dodds]

Hello Husker Fans,

wjc> And no, it is NOT Courtney Grixby and our d-backs.  We will never really
wjc> know how good (or bad) Courtney or any of our d-backs are because of the
wjc> total lack of coaching.  The coaches are questionable and the schemes are
wjc> "high school"at best. 

I really think there is a two part answer to this.

1) I don't think our coverage schemes are the greatest. I don't know
about 'High School at best', but they're not great. I personally think
Coz subconsciously was saying, "If you want press/bump-and-run
coverage, I'll give it to you".  Grixby was up on the receiver at the
line of scrimmage all night and I think we now know why they play 10
yards off.

2) Grixby is part of the problem, he just is. He got abused all night
because he's not big enough to play physical with Big XII wideouts.
Like it or not, good guy or not, he just doesn't have the tools to be
a cover corner in the Big XII.  He would probably make a STELLAR
nickle back, but unfortunately we have sustained too many injuries to
move him into that role.

OU's safety play wasn't all because of the scheming / coaching. Bottom
line, on all but 1 of Zac's INTs, he made a BAD PASS.  Especially down
by the end zone, he REALLY under threw both balls.  He puts enough
ketchup on both of those and we probably win the game.

Heck, they were SO out of position, that even when Taylor made a bad
pass the safety still had to come from the other side of the field and
make a diving catch just to get to it.  When you have to come from out
of nowhere and make a diving catch on a vastly under thrown ball,
that's not genius scheming, that's luck that the pass wasn't very
good.

How about when Tefatiller (sp?) was all by himself in the endzone?
Was that brilliant scheming too?

I'm not trying to take anything from Stoops, he's a great coach.  I'm
not trying to take anything away from OU's safeties, they've got some
bigtime talent.  Let's just not give them too much credit.

wjc> And what is worse is Cosgrove never changes anything, never mixes
wjc> coverages.  Every "blue moon," we go to a nickel.  We blitzed OU ONE time
wjc> and got Thompson to panic and throw an interception.  Where was that
wjc> blitz a 2nd time?  

I hate to break it to you, but we blitzed Thompson probably 20+ times
that night.  The difference is we only ran 1 SAFETY blitz and 0 CORNER
blitzes.  Our Linebackers came on a blitz constantly, but OUs strategy
for the most part was pretty simple, when the middle linebacker(s)
blitz, rollout and buy yourself time.  Since we hardly ran any blitzes
on the edge, that strategy was very successful.

There was 3 or 4 times on that 99+ yard back-breaker where they had
passed on every down and our middle linebackers bit HARD on the run
fake.  If they don't bite on even one of those, we could probably have
held them.  There was one specific where Stew bit on a run fake up the
middle on 3rd and 10 or so.

Blaming the defense on Saturday is not a very good idea.  We flat
out sucked on offense and pissed away opportunity after opportunity
that the DEFENSE provided the offense.  There's plenty of chances to
jump all over this defensive staff, THIS is not one of them, IMHO.



-- 
Go Skers,
 Skylar                            mailto:Sklarbodds at cox.net