Game plan wasn’t good against FSU, and I’m not as worried about the explosives yet.
But big picture:
LBs are just all kinds of bad. And will stay that way if this is who you run out there.
Blitzes sometimes come from too far away.
We allow too much easy stuff almost by design. Which, even when it has worked this year, it eats up too much of the clock. You’re shortening the game and allowing teams to flip field position too much.
Whether it was Stanford, Wake, Clemson, or FSU. Too many drives into our territory. And yeah, you got the 4th down stops. But you have now limited how many times the strength of your team (offense) is going to make an impact and actually put them in a bad spot by forcing them to drive even longer.
And when it doesnt work, you saw how bad it can look. So much of the, “we will allow you to take that” approach is based on the idea that we will eventually get you behind the sticks and stop you. But without that TFLs, FSU just kept sustaining drives.
Third down defense has to get cleaned up ASAP. Even a little bit of improvement would be huge.