I would even be in favor of just faking a blitz to make the offense at least THINK about something other than a straight up defense. And you can blitz without leaving a corner on an island. We do have linebackers – I think. ; )

But in general, we don’t attack. At all. It’s no wonder teams like Ole Miss and Baylor feel they can have the offensive performance of the year against us.

Seth hit on something I’ve been saying all season – we just don’t have a lot of talent on defense in general. Sure, there are some solid guys in three or four spots. But for the most part, we don’t have many guys who could exepct to be listed on the two-deep at a school in the Top 30 defensively.

Besides, there are other things you can do besides blitz. You can get creative with alignments, you can get creative with pre-snap shifting, you can get creative with personnel packages. Would those work? I don’t know. But the point is if you just line up in your basic base defense 95% of the time, you will be exposed. It’s not hard to adjust to vanilla.

Again…would you rather get embarrased being obvious with the scheme, or would you rather get embarrased trying to attack every so often with the reward being some nice plays that build confidence and attitude? Defense is about effort and attitude more than anything we can do schematically. I get that. But if you don’t have it, you need to manufacture it from time to time.

Lastly, while the recruiting efforts looks decent, do we expect the new crop of DB recruits to step in and start defensively as true freshmen? Heaven help us if that’s the case. Do we give the defense three years to develop? Four years?

I understand wanting to be a little patient with Ruffin. But at what point do you say, “Okay, guy. This ain’t working very well…we’ve got to at least TRY to do something different and creative. Or we need to head a different direction.”

First I love McNeill but Romeo Crannell is lurking out there and if he would come back for a return visit( he as at Tech in the late 70’s) then he might help McNeill scheme better.
Second this season has closed on a tough note as opposed to several years in the past 5 where we closed well. But we have to remember Tech went 11-2 this year. When was the last 11 win season that’s right…1976. So let’s get nothing on next year!!

that Sesay and Perry were suspended for the game, and we were playing with 3 DT’s instead of the usual 5 rotation. Sesay and Perry add some size, and could have been a factor. No excuse, just maybe an explanation.

is late night for you? I wish I could fall asleep before midnight. I actually just got back to Lubbock, just had to poke a little fun.

The TOP discrepancy was a huge factor on Friday. The final score doesn’t show just how poorly we were executing on offense. In the first half alone, Ole Miss had over 20 minutes TOP. Take away a returned INT and and TD late after the game was put away, and we scored only 21 points. We thought we could take advantage of their DBs, and it just wasn’t happening. Our RBs combined for 8 carries. 8. Harrell averaged only 6.3 yards per att. His season average was over 8 yards per att. It was obvious that Harrell lost some significant practice time due to the surgery on his hand. He was not himself. Yet he kept trying to pass us back into the game. Poor decision making. Crabtree was obviously injured worse in the Baylor game than we realized. He was a non factor. I don’t recall a series in which he played more than 2 downs. When Ole Miss realized that Harrell was off and Crabtree didn’t have to be double covered, they started bringing pressure to keep Harrell off balance.

Losing McBath for a half, followed by Wall was huge. As already mentioned, Reed was not available. We had guys out of position, and Ole Miss deserves credit for taking advantage. We would have done the same. Our D stopped Ole Miss early, but we weren’t able to capitalize on offense. They stopped them again late on the goal line and recovered a fumble, but we gave it back on a safety. Our D spent a majority of the time on the field Friday. I think they held up their end of the bargain. It was the Offense that let us down, continually putting the D back on the field until they were worn down uninspired.

Is not the point. The point here is that you have to change the look of the defense, and you have to make the offense decipher where the pressure and where the coverage is going to come from. Unless your front four can just manhandle the offensive line, you won’t get consistent pressure unless you disguise somewhat who is coming.
I haven’t poured over hours of tape from our season (the acid in my stomach is just now tolerable from attending the CB) but, we defintiely changed up our looks much more in other games (2nd half A+M).
I had been upset that Ruffin didn’t make alterations in his gameplan until half (not on the fly), Friday he didn’t make any at all. Do you think Graham would have liked to have seen the same front four with no blitzing all day? Ruffin’s approach made that UT reject look like Peyton Manning.
Why can we be so innovative on offense and so tone deaf on defense and special teams?. Clearly it starts at the top….ML has to demand the level of execution on D as he does on O.

Wow I just read that TTU is not even in the top 30 in recruiting!! Do we need to upgrade that area? We should be parlaying this year into a boom recruiting year!