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Burt Macklin

Burnt Ends
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Everything posted by Burt Macklin

  1. This is a very, very stupid post. We had like 5 defenses in the top 25 of DFEI. Except he basically never makes a play in a game, just gets blown up. Broughton has always been soft. He’s a basketball player in a football player’s body. It was obvious in HS he was massively overrated and soft as fuck. Him being what he is isn’t a surprise to people who were paying attention. He plays high, has a weak lower half, so it’s no surprise he’s soft and can’t anchor. Collina is a disappointment, but it sounds like he just hasn’t put in the work.
  2. I see you’re still fucking this chicken. I’m sure the season will play out to your expectations. I don’t think a single person on this site has ever said that, but it’s not your fault. You’re way too busy cashing this fat checks to actually read Surly.
  3. Actually it’s stupid as fuck to think we have any shot at having a shut down defense this year.
  4. Lol wut. These kind of takes will go better for you on TexAgs.
  5. These two could only dream of limiting a team to 7 YPC on outside runs.
  6. No idea where you got this from other than just pulling it out of your ass. I haven’t seen a single source say anything close to that. By all accounts, Hutson and Banks are the ones pushing for playing time right now, which isn’t surprising since it’s the only EE and the best player of the group.
  7. It’s not slander if it’s true.
  8. I’m really not sure where you’re getting this from. Gbenda almost always looked lost when he played and there wasn’t a noticeable jump in performance. Ford was the one who improved as the season went on.
  9. Well his OL coach left and they replaced him with a raging asshole who’s a way worse coach.
  10. I think the real takeaway is that it looks like Hutson is forcing the staff to find a way to get him on the field. He looked really damn impressive in the spring game for a guy who just enrolled a few months prior, and he might have been the best performer of the entire thing. Angilau has had a lot of mental blunders at Guard, and I can think of some notable ones last year, so I’m a little skeptical he’d be a great option to step in at Center, but it could also be possible for Hutson to step in at Guard and Conner kick out to RT as a way to get Hutson on the field, especially if Christian Jones hasn’t made big strides in his technique since last year.
  11. Yeah, my stat was something like passes of 15 or 20 yards plus. Either way, all these similar stats show we sucked at defending the deep ball. That’s a very interesting way to spin the fact that we were constantly getting torn up on 1st and 2nd down runs.
  12. Ian Boyd actually wrote a really good article the bot posted on the fall camp thread, and I started to write a response and then realized it got way too long, so I decided to make a thread to discuss. A lot of people on here and elsewhere have been asking about Texas' run D this year, and it seems like many are worried we'll drop off in that area in 2019. A lot of national pundits have lazily thrown out the stat that we lost 8 starters and 70+ percent of "production," however much of that "production" represented weaknesses in our defense that good offensive coaches could easily exploit. Overall, we were actually pretty good against the run last year, finishing 33rd in the country in adjusted line yards per Football Outsiders (https://www.footballoutsiders.com/stats/ncaadl/2018). However, Orlando's defenses are generally elite against the run and 2019 was a big drop off from Orlando's previous two years, where he finished 2nd and 17th. More than anything, the dropoff was personnel related. I'm going to focus on the reasons why that drop off occurred and highlight how this year's team can use the Dime package, to get lighter, faster, better in coverage, and most importantly, improve against the run. Below is a picture of our Dime package with Overshown (and possibly Brown) at Joker and Foster at Nickel. In this scenario, Ossai will be the Rover, though he and Overshown could switch positional alignment and responsibilities pretty seamlessly. With Foster at Nickel and Overshown or Ossai on the other edge, you're basically using a 3-4 even though you're in dime. Foster would probably be considered the best 3-4 OLB in the conference, besides Ossai, if he actually played that position. He was unbelievable in the run game and blitzing last year. I remember one play against OU where he got under their LT, who was drafted in the third round, and just drove him back like he was on skates even though Foster was giving up 100 lbs in that matchup. I think Overshown will be similar, even if not quite as good. Ossai showed really impressive off-ball LB ability in the spring game, and his performance against UGA makes me think he's just a flat-out great football player. I think he'd be fine with run fits at Rover. Combine that with the ability to have Ossai and Overshown essentially switch between Rover and Joker without tipping it off pre-snap, and Orlando has a counter for someone like Gundy who may try to isolate Ossai in coverage over and over. If you have to take one of Ossai or Overshown off for Dele, then I think the defense gets quite a bit worse against many opponents. Dele might be one of our best 11 against LSU if they revert back to the power scheme they ran last year, but against most Big 12 opponents, he'll never get a chance to play the run inside the box because guys like Gundy will spend the whole game picking on him like they did to Wheeler last year. Regardless, Dele coming along this fall has been a big (and hopefully true) development. He gives us added versatility against teams that decide to line up in extremely heavy fronts to counter our Dime package and I think he would likely still be an upgrade over Wheeler, even if he probably can't hold up for a whole game against most Big 12 opponents. The 4 biggest weak spots in our defense last year were Hager, Wheeler, and the Nickel (usually Locke, but Josh Thompson played there some too and absolutely killed us). Our NT spot with Nelson and Wilbon was generally good against the run, especially when teams like Georgia and USC tried to attack us more traditionally, but when the spread gurus of the Big 12, like Gundy and Holgo, played us they became a liability. Utilizing the Dime package will allow us to strengthen all four of those spots and make it much harder for offenses to identify weaknesses and exploit them endlessly in the run game. The switch from Hager to Graham will be huge. Both Graham and Roach have a ton left to show on the field before they live up to the hype they've been getting this offseason, but the two of them will be better against the run combined than Omenihu and Hager were last year. Gundy ruthlessly picked on Hager and Bimage (as the play side DE) and Wheeler (as the weakside LB) last year and ran Outside Zone over and over. Hager and Bimage were too small to set a hard edge and that extra space meant that Wheeler couldn't make it to the ballcarrier as an unblocked weakside LB. We might as well have been playing 11 on 10. The other problem was that while people generally consider Nelson and Wilbon to be good against the run, their lack of athleticism really hurt the in Orlando's scheme at time last year. While neither would get moved off the ball much, Orlando's run D involves a lot of slanting and penetration. Orlando prefers to counter a run heavy team by betting he can create enough negative plays to kill drives, even if that leads to some chunk runs by the opponent. Wilbon and Nelson's lack of quickness meant they couldn't slant into gaps that someone like Poona, or hopefully Coburn/Ojomo, can this year. As an example, below is a play where OSU ran outside zone successfully against us that highlights many of our personnel deficiencies from last year. I could've found about twenty other plays to show, but wading through OSU film to find a good example was making me want to punch a hole in my screen. On this play, Wheeler was actually the strongside LB, but his poor play still shows why our 2019 D has so much room for improvement. Wheeler, as often happened, was way too slow to read the play and made the RG's job easier than winning a spelling bee against a room full of Sooners. Now, watch Bimage run himself so far out of the play that he looked like he was sprinting to the sideline for a sub. Not every play had Bimage and Hager looking that bad, but they were generally getting driven way out of the play and failing entirely to set an edge. Wilbon does ok on this play, but there were many others where he and Nelson were too slow to get play side and allowed a clean running lane. Look at 27:54 for an example of this. Finally, watch how Locke plays patty cake with the 190 lb slot receiver and then try to guess a side to jump, instead of stacking and shedding his man, so he could make the play. If you compare this to our personnel in 2019, either Ossai or Overshown should be better at speeding over from the backside than Wheeler in 2018 and will likely also be better at diagnosing the run plays earlier than Wheeler did. Graham should hold the edge better than Hager did last year and Coburn/Ojomo should be more effective slanting on run plays than Nelson/Wilbon were. I expect Foster will be a pretty huge improvement in the run game, and I think he'll be an improvement in coverage from the Nickel as well. He just has a better sense for the game than either Locke or Thompson did last year. There's no doubt that CB is more of a question mark than last year, and McCulloch could struggle in his first year at ILB, however, even if a few of our new starters struggle, we likely improve at more positions than we downgrade, and the defense overall should have less obvious weaknesses for good offensive coordinators to attack.
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