forums

How different would the conversation be if we had stepped on the gas and stomped ND?

Advertisement
OrangeBowlMagic said:
You know what's funny, is we didn't play the ND game any different than we played any other game all year. It's crazy to go back and think about how it played out. It's incredibly consistent to how the entire season has gone.

To your original point, I think it's a good one. I'm usually a "just win" guy, but I do think there's validity to what you're saying. To be clear, I still don't think a bigger win against ND would've vaulted us above them. They're 3 spots ahead, and we do have a head-to-head win, so would let's say a 10 point win do anything? Probably not. But it is a valid question.

But on the whole "playing not to lose" thing....look at this:

We go up 21-7 after playing the middle 8 perfectly. Long drive to start the 3rd quarter, we score halfway through, it's a 2-score game.

We get a 3 and out. Now it's time to pile on.
Run for 6.
Pass for 3.
It's 3rd and 1....anyone have any guesses on what we're gonna do??
Yayyyyyy, it's heavy personnel run, Marty slips (there wasn't much there anyway), and we punt.
We did this ALL **** YEAR. Short-yardage, just run into a pile of humanity and hope you get 2 yards. This was very much a harbinger for things to come.

But OK, we punt, and ND gets a TD. Now it's 21-14.

Fletcher run for 6 on 1st down. Holding call. Where have I seen this before???? It's literally a microcosm of the entire season. Now it's 2nd and 14, we get a pass for 7, it's 3rd and 7, we get sacked. A good play on 1st down, and then a drive is totally torpedoed by a penalty. Think we'll see that ever again going forward?? Nahhh, probably just a one-off LOL.

But wait, we get a pick! It's 1st and 10 on their 28, and we're up 7, about 5 minutes into the 4th quarter.
Fletcher run for 6. OK.
Fletcher run for 1. Now I'm sad.
3rd and 3, what do we do? Fletcher run for 1. I'm gonna throw up.
We did this every goddamned game for the first 9 games of the year.

Field goal, go up 10, they hit a 65 yard pass on the first play of their drive, and now you're in a dogfight. No blowout, let's just hold on and try to win the game.

It's insane to me how this game played out exactly how the rest of them did. Zero creativity in short yardage. Zero tendency breakers. Penalties killing drives. At the time, we all said (me included) "Well, it's Game 1 for Beck. It was raining. That's a really good team, you just do what you need to in order to get a win." But the staff never adjusted once from that game. We did the same exact **** in the same exact situations for the next 3 months. We continued to get awful, backbreaking, drive-killing penalties to totally torpedo drives. Just maddening to go back and play that game over in your mind and realize, holy ****, we really thought we could just play the exact same way over and over and over again and it wouldn't bite us in the ***.
Click to expand...
Lying One Hundred GIF by Charli Gurl
 
Mario's brain doesn't even have the ability to have these thoughts.

There's no concept of "run the score up to make the committee value us."

The most he's capable of not blowing out a coach who's his friend.

Carson Beck had 3500 passing yards against SEC defenses last year.

Mario wanted to run up the middle.

He's not ever going to understand what it takes to win.
 
SinCityCane said:
We were well on our way, then let up and end up with a 27-24 win that lets people pretend it wasn't a big deal & lets them say ND has won or been in every game...which is just not true. It would be a much tougher argument to have ND at 9 & Miami at 12 if that had been a 38-10 win...which we could have had if this staph didn't play scared to lose. Ironic that it might have lost us a spot in the CFP.
Click to expand...
how different would life be if that SAIGON ***** didn't bite half my nose off!?
 
coffeecane said:
Unfortunately those are three ****** teams. I think our best bet is a VTech win.
Click to expand...

Auburn has a much better shot of beating Alabama than VT does of beating UVA.

Auburn is not a ****** team at all. They're a 6 point dog. Auburn's losses this year are by 7 (at OU), 6 (at A&M), 10 (to UGA where they got flat robbed by the refs), in Double OT to Mizzou, by 7 (Kentucky, not great), and in OT at UVA.

They haven't lost a game by more than 10 all year, they have 3 other one-score losses and two losses in OT. They can beat Alabama, especially in that weird *** game where the only thing they're playing for is ruining Alabama's season and Bama is likely going to be white-knuckling trying to get to Atlanta/the playoffs.
 
Advertisement
PennsylvaniaCane said:
A lot of that is because I’m thoroughly convinced Dawson doesn’t have a big bag of plays or ideas to pull from along with him and Mario not having a good feel for the game. Look at the game plan Brohm had for us vs what we came out with vs them. And then we struggled with the same against Stanford and did the exact same against SMU. Either our staff is lazy at planning or they just don’t have it.

How often have we seen head scratchers on 3rd and medium, like a tunnel screen after we draw the safeties and LBs in with our A gap runs and then throw right into that pile of humanity.

As I’ve said multiple times, Mario’s inability to evolve and get an OC who runs a system that benefits our talent gap and then gets out of his way, he will be limited in his success.
Click to expand...
We need an OC with Heatherman’s DNA and limit Mirabal to coaching the OL.
 
SinCityCane said:
We were well on our way, then let up and end up with a 27-24 win that lets people pretend it wasn't a big deal & lets them say ND has won or been in every game...which is just not true. It would be a much tougher argument to have ND at 9 & Miami at 12 if that had been a 38-10 win...which we could have had if this staph didn't play scared to lose. Ironic that it might have lost us a spot in the CFP.
Click to expand...


It would have made a difference in September.

But Galloway and all the other ND fanboys are actually saying that ND is a "different team" now. And that Miami is a "different team" now. So they are making a case for IGNORING the actual game result, whether Miami won by 1 or 100.

Let's not forget the early ND loss that was largely ignored in 2024. Or the fact that Alabama had an early and ugly loss to F$U this year.

I don't even know why we play a full season anymore. Let's just have everybody play 4 games in November and then make a bunch of snap judgments that rely on **** like "quality losses". It's insane. **** SEPTEMBER, IT NEVER HAPPENED, THE TEAMS ARE "DIFFERENT" NOW...

Ridiculous.
 
TexasCane90 said:
In today’s college football you need to pile it on… until it’s halfway through the 4th run your starters and keep playing

If it finishes 60-7 so be it
Click to expand...


The clock runs for almost the entire game. We are seeing fewer plays per game, and fewer possessions per game, then we saw in the 70s and 80s and 90s.

We need to TERMINATE this outdated concept of "running up the score". **** it. If a losing team wants to keep passing the ball in the second half and "trying" to make the game "closer" than it actually is, then the winning team should do the same.

No mercy. ****, even let your second and third stringers try to score. The season is longer and there are injuries. We should NEVER have to apologize for scoring points. If the other team's defense can't stop us, that's on them.

We should never forget where the MODERN complaints of "running up the score" began. When JJ's Miami Hurricanes kept scoring in the 4th quarter against...Gerry ******* Faust and NOTRE ******* DAME.

WAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH...
 
OrangeBowlMagic said:
I've said it for weeks but our success last year really screwed us this year. Which is INSANE that a coordinator would just pretend that what happened last year carries over, but that's exactly what he did. We ran the ball a ton on short yardage plays last year, and they were almost always successful. I pointed it out a million times. 1 or 2 yards to go, we ALWAYS ran for a first down. So coming into this year, this guy really thought we'd just do the same exact thing. But it's been far less successful this year. Again, going back to the first game. But did we adjust, at all? **** no.

I stopped keeping track because it was making me physically ill, but at one point we ran the ball on short-yardage situations 26 times in a row. 26!! And it's not just "running the ball". It's all the same plays. None of those were jet sweeps, or tosses, or wildcat runs, or zone-read where Beck keeps it. No, they were 26 consecutive interior runs to a running back. What planet are you on where you think it's OK to be that predictable?

I praised the **** out of Dawson last year. He has been BAD this year.
Click to expand...
One of the biggest differences between last year and this year‘s offense is the amount of time the play clock dwindle down to, I truly believe it gives a defense time to communicate and get that personnel in the right position
 
This only matters if you aren’t in the SEC & BIG10.

It’s clear they don’t think much of conferences not named above.
 
SinisterCane said:
One of the biggest differences between last year and this year‘s offense is the amount of time the play clock dwindle down to, I truly believe it gives a defense time to communicate and get that personnel in the right position
Click to expand...

We were 77th in pace last year. We are slower this year, but I don’t think it’s a massive difference.

IMO if you forced me to point to the main thing offensively that’s different, it’s efficiency and explosiveness in the run game. Namely the latter.

Last year, in 12 games, we had:

63 runs of 10+ yards
21 runs of 20+ yards
9 runs of 30+ yards

This year, in 11 games, we have:

41 runs of 10+ yards
5 runs of 20+ yards
1 run of 30+ yards

Of all 136 FBS teams, only 13 of them don’t have a single run all year of 40+ yards. Miami is one of them.

Last year, we had the best passing game in America, Cam Ward was throwing it all over the yard, but people don’t understand how good the run blocking was. 21 runs in 12 games of 20+ yards as a pass-first team is insane. There were only 15 teams who had more of those runs, and none of those teams had Cam Ward.

IMO this is the biggest difference. Not pace, not even Beck. We’re not explosive at all, but even more so in the run game. Everything is way harder this year, and Dawson has done us no favors through the middle part of the year by not understanding that and doing something different. It’s the same exact scheme and approach as last year in short yardage situations, but our ceiling on these plays is 4 yards where last year the backs were breaking explosive runs regularly. Yards before contact has been a MASSIVE decline.
 
OrangeBowlMagic said:
We were 77th in pace last year. We are slower this year, but I don’t think it’s a massive difference.

IMO if you forced me to point to the main thing offensively that’s different, it’s efficiency and explosiveness in the run game. Namely the latter.

Last year, in 12 games, we had:

63 runs of 10+ yards
21 runs of 20+ yards
9 runs of 30+ yards

This year, in 11 games, we have:

41 runs of 10+ yards
5 runs of 20+ yards
1 run of 30+ yards

Of all 136 FBS teams, only 13 of them don’t have a single run all year of 40+ yards. Miami is one of them.

Last year, we had the best passing game in America, Cam Ward was throwing it all over the yard, but people don’t understand how good the run blocking was. 21 runs in 12 games of 20+ yards as a pass-first team is insane. There were only 15 teams who had more of those runs, and none of those teams had Cam Ward.

IMO this is the biggest difference. Not pace, not even Beck. We’re not explosive at all, but even more so in the run game. Everything is way harder this year, and Dawson has done us no favors through the middle part of the year by not understanding that and doing something different. It’s the same exact scheme and approach as last year in short yardage situations, but our ceiling on these plays is 4 yards where last year the backs were breaking explosive runs regularly. Yards before contact has been a MASSIVE decline.
Click to expand...


Just to make a comment on "pace"...

We had nearly 40 more explosive RUNNING plays last year. If you work out how long it took to make up that yardage THIS YEAR, it contributes a lot to the slower OVERALL pace.

Again, I'm not saying we have "10 fewer possessions this year". But even one or two are meaningful, particularly since we have a high efficiency rate overall.

If we score 10 more points in every game...we are undefeated...and likely ranked #2 behind Taint.
 
Advertisement
TheOriginalCane said:
Just to make a comment on "pace"...

We had nearly 40 more explosive RUNNING plays last year. If you work out how long it took to make up that yardage THIS YEAR, it contributes a lot to the slower OVERALL pace.

Again, I'm not saying we have "10 fewer possessions this year". But even one or two are meaningful, particularly since we have a high efficiency rate overall.

If we score 10 more points in every game...we are undefeated...and likely ranked #2 behind Taint.
Click to expand...
He's talking about seconds b/w snaps though, not # of plays. Former not affected by more/less explosives, latter would be.

We did play at 3.1 seconds between plays faster pace last year than this year, and while that still wasn't super fast relative to the rest of the country last year it's a lot faster than the pace we have played at this year, which I think supports what @SinisterCane was saying. Lack of run explosives a big issue for the offense this year, but don't think it's related to the pace of play question
 
People keep talking about this 3 pt win but we absolutely mauled ND in the trenches. That was the narrative after the game. Everybody was talking about how badly we dominated them and that the score did not reflect the actual game.
 
flips said:
He's talking about seconds b/w snaps though, not # of plays. Former not affected by more/less explosives, latter would be.

We did play at 3.1 seconds between plays faster pace last year than this year, and while that still wasn't super fast relative to the rest of the country last year it's a lot faster than the pace we have played at this year, which I think supports what @SinisterCane was saying. Lack of run explosives a big issue for the offense this year, but don't think it's related to the pace of play question
Click to expand...


I know what he's talking about. And I've mentioned this MULTIPLE times in multiple threads. "Pace" is about more than just "seconds between snaps". You also look at the pace of our drives overall, as well as the number of possessions per game.

There is a big difference between a 14-play drive that takes 9 minutes to go 70 yards and a 7-play drive that takes less than 5 minutes to go the same distance.

I believe that we should be working on ALL of these things:

a) not spending as much time between snaps
b) working on more explosive plays
c) using a faster tempo in certain situations, particularly after our defense holds the other team to a short drive/punt situation

I respect the point of view that says if we ran a bunch of 2-minute scoring drives, our defense wouldn't have a lot of time to rest, and the game might turn into a shootout. Fair enough.

But aiming for 5 minute drives on offense would give our defense enough time to rest. We don't need 10 minute drives to give our defense MORE rest. Watching our games, this is why we frequently give up big yardage early in our opponents' drives, our defense comes out flat and then tightens up after a few first downs have been earned against us.
 
Based on the narrative “ND is the better team now and would be favored on a neutral field” it didn’t matter how much we beat ND by

Galloways idiotic “Miami really beat VT by 10” is a perfect illustration of creative writing to support their overall agenda
 
Back
Top