@Liberty City El I thought we called a much better game on defense tonight. I could be wrong but it looked to me like we kept it relatively vanilla and sound UNTIL IT WAS THE RIGHT TIME to gamble. We weren't just out there rolling the dice every play. I saw tighter coverage most of the night. On Bolden's INT we were in Cover-1 with Bolden at the single-high Safety spot, which was nice for a change. I don't recall seeing the blitzes from 18 yards away either.
I gotta watch the condensed version of the game but it almost seemed like they re-evaluated **** after the first couple games and approached tonight with less gimmicks.
Facts.
After the first drive we pretty much sat back & dropped 6/7 in coverage for most of the night, we recognized that Blackman couldn't beat us with his eyes or his legs so we forced him to sit in the pocket & sped up his progressions.
We were winning the L.O.S. battle with the front 4 so we didn't have to dial up too many unnecessary Blitzes, we did Blitz early on with Keontra, but he came up closer to the line on pre-snap & was able to get home & hit Blackman. We also had a couple nice overload Blitzes with McCloud on his sack & we sent Bolden from the Strong side on his sack as well. We did exactly what we been calling for, disguised looks & played with much better spacing on pre-snap alignment from the Backers.
We did have one CB Blitz from Blades but he was short side of the field & closer to the hashes than normal.
Baker played mainly Cover 1, 2 & some Cover 4 in the 2nd half, but you can tell we liked our matchups on the front 7 so he was more comfortable just playing regular vanilla Defense, FSU has no speed on the outside whatsoever, so we didn't need to compensate for the Deep ball.
The only success they had was with Jordan Travis on those designed QB runs & on the quick Bubble screens, one of those runs they got away with a blatant hold on McCloud & on the others, if our CB's could learn how to hand fight & disengage with their blocker we could've cut most of those runs short. Fighting off blocks needs to be emphasized in practice all next week, our Corners were getting hemmed up lol.
But yeah overall, the Baker man called a good game, he did the same thing last year, so he pretty much has FSU's personnel & play sequences mapped out easy.
He's gonna have his hands full vs Clemson though, because they will take advantage of every weakness we have on Defense.
