[Husker] Has there ever been a worse defense on 3rd down?

[Nick Chevance]

On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 9:12 AM, Scott Stewart <fourtwophd at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think that repression and denial have caused you to forget how bad our
> defense was under Cosgroves. No problem, his defense gave up 58 yesterday
> and we will see in a couple weeks how many we can hang on him.
>
> I can't believe how quick people are to turn on the coaches. The Pelini's
> were God's Gift to Defense the last two years and now = Cosgrove?


Finally, some sanity.

Have we returned to the bad old days?  Geez, I hardly think so.  I think
some of the comments here are from hurting fans who may have an unrealistic
view of what happened last night.  The comments about the defensive line,
especially the ends, being too slow.  What I saw was a defensive line making
pretty significant penetration and forcing their QB to move out of the
pocket.  Something that 1) he does pretty well, and 2) had designed roll
outs to get him away from the pressure.  Those running backs for Wisconsin
are pretty good, and  have the ability to get out of trouble by bouncing
outside or spinning away from trouble.
That doesn't fall on the shoulders of the entire defense, but is mostly due
to quality backs, much the same way Rex gets his extra yards.

C'mon guys, that's a very good team that took us to the woodshed, not some
directional state school that was living on the edge.  I doubt we see anyone
quite like them the rest of this year.

Defensively, they took advantage of our agressiveness and designed running
plays that used the cut back run to get past the line and linebackers.  Our
guys bit on the motion a lot of the time.  And so did out DB's.

Our offense was not good.  Again, that series of plays at the end of the
first half, early second half were killers.  Three interceptions, a missed
FG (50 yarder) spells bad something. Wisconsin got 21 points off of those
turnovers.  I repeat that what we saw was a kid who is very mobile,
experienced, and smart.  The Wisconsin QB is like a free agent they got from
NCState to play one year.  It was perfect for them - an experienced line and
great backs.  We have a kid who can play QB but he's not a prototypical
"QB."  His motion is all wrong, his footwork is bad, and it leads him to
make mistakes throwing.  Like throwing behind the receivers.  But he's also
not making good reads, and is forcing the ball.  I don't know if he's
excited, or panicing, but the results are not good.  If they can't fix his
throwing motion, these are going to linger for the time he's still here.

So that gets me to the game plan.  My mistake but I thought we'd run the
ball to set up the pass, but we've seen at least in the last three games
where we come out throwing on first down, then second, and then obviously
third.  But last night we kept it up, almost refused to go to our strength.
That was just plain curious.  All in all, I didn't expect to win, but I
thought by controlling the clock better we'd be able limit the damage.  But
we seemed to panic and tried to get back into the game by going the way we
got into trouble.

I think we need to decide if we're a team that runs (which we can seem to do
pretty well) and throw to keep the defense honest, because if we're a
balanced throwing/running team, we have the wrong kind of QB.

But I haven't seen enough of Carnes to know whether he's the saviour, but I
seriously doubt it.  I don't think the coaches are stupid, and think
Martinez is the way to go.  I would agree as long as we understand what it
is we do well, and what we don't.

Ohio State is next.  I think we'll see whether we've regressed all the way
back to the old days.  I doublt it.

Nick

-- 
"If a million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."
Anatole France