For me, I’m just less concerned about playcalling and more concerned about late game execution on both sides of the ball. You can feel the players tightening up and playing tense with a lead. This team is still learning how to win and they are having to do so against talented opponents.
Someone said it earlier, but in each of these games, there have been moments where the kill shot happened or would have happened on offense without poor execution or bad officiating, frankly (Lofton missed block, Brown slip, Brown TD called back, Marion procedural penalty, etc.). However, when we DON’T get these kill shots, it feels like everyone kinda loses focus a bit.
A perfect example to me of our lack of focus/execution creeping in is the unfortunate pairing of our opening 4th quarter drive and FSU’s first scoring drive.
Offensively, we started the 4th quarter with a drive that ate ~4 minutes and was ultimately thrown off by a Lofton holding penalty and a Marion drop. Not good by any means, but not disastrous in terms of using clock, and again, it was killed by penalties and poor execution.
Now, to preface everything that’s about to be highlighted, I am not wholly BLAMING the defense for allowing the FSU comeback.
But to start the 4th after our drive, the defense gets on the field and lets FSU score in LESS than 3 minutes on a drive where you let up two third and longs.
At the end of the quarter, the defense was clearly gassed and it was undoubtedly exacerbated by the offense not being able to stay on the field, but you could argue if they didn’t let up the 2 minute touchdown drive to FSU on their first possession of the 4th when the defense should absolutely not have been gassed, the game could have more definitively been over.
Overall, the defense ended up letting FSU convert NINE 3rd/4th and longs in the 4th quarter alone and to me, you just HAVE to put part of the blame on poor execution.
Again, I am NOT blaming the defense. The offense did the defense absolutely no favors, and our defense is absolutely incredible and a joy to watch and has won us games. But in the second quarter our offense similarly had a stretch where we punted 3 times with penalties killing drives, so it’s a recurrent issue with the offense, but I’d argue it’s more of an issue with execution across the board and not conservative playcalling late in games.
The big difference I “feel” is that last year our issues were just totally unfixable and it was abundantly clear from VT onward.
This year feels fixable in terms of players executing late in games and learning how to continue to play loose with a lead. And it feels like the entire program is aware of that.
I’ll caveat all that, though, with the fact that I agree with Cribby — we need to find more rotation on the DL to avoid fatigue factor because it’s making it that much harder to clamp down with a lead. You saw it on the Jaden Baugh TD drive. These starters are being asked to do too much.