Today, and for what it’s worth, Joe Rose said that he’s worried about the Canes upcoming game with Georgia Tech for more than a few reasons.
He pointed out the normal fall off teams have after a big win, especially one when it’s against your biggest rival at their place after having not beaten them for 7 straight years. This fall off is exacerbated by so many well meaning family, friends and fans offering effusive praise, thus focus and desire can be negatively impacted.
Additionally, Georgia Tech’s abilities are under appreciated and they are better than advertised. Of course, the additional week of preparation and healing for Georgia Tech is of great benefit to them.
As a final point, Rose indicated that Georgia Tech TRULY believes they can win the game and TRULY believe they should win the Coastal Division.
To be sure, I am not running around with my hair on fire bellowing that the sky is falling. But, as we all know, over the last many years after our annual war with FSU we have seen a significant deterioration in the quality of play by the Canes for at least several of the following games.
I know the coaches are fully aware of the aforementioned and will be hammering those points home during this week of preparation. The real test will be…is this Canes team different than those in the recent past and do they have the ability to not just give lip service as to how seriously they are taking the opponent, but do they immediately shift their focus to the next challenge on their schedule?
If the answer is YES…then we are most probably looking at a very special season.
The biggest takeaway from the game against FSU was our weaknesses and strengths. I've streamlined it.
Weaknesses:
1) We're only good against the pass not great, and we're only good with the starters in;
2) Offensively our talent is thin, and now with injuries this only exacerbates that; and
3) We're not much a of drive down the field type of team, we're a big play chunk yardage type of team (this could be seen as a strength and weakness).
Strengths:
1) Depth on the front seven and our willingness to tackle (not talking about proper tackling, talking about our willingness to get our nose dirty);
2) We can attack every spot on the field, short passes, intermediate passes, deep passes in all quadrants of the field, and run the ball inside and out; and
3) Turnovers, we get quite of few of them (even some of the them the refs blow dead.... SMH).
Now with the above stated, the positive and negatives going into this game.
The chunk/big play offense we have hurts us against a team that likes to lives off the TOP, conversely we have a deep enough front 4 that can rotate and be fresh.
They run a significant amount and their passing is limited, that runs into the teeth of our defense.
They have a weask defense, this is based off the game I watched vs. Tennessee. This benefits us since we'll be without Mark Walton (and likely Navaughn Donaldson), so I think we'll be ok.
If we can shore up our tackling and stop making the QB from making big running plays (cause he's the engine that make this motor going, he's real slippery) I think we'll be ok.
