Point Blank – November 28, 2016
What a “Bettor Better Know” – NCAA #13...Time for the jukebox to supply the Heart that many defenses didn't...
The post mortems from this past weekend’s NCAA action are among the toughest ever for a single board, not just the difficulty of reconciling results far from the market expectations, which always presents challenges, but because of the particular patterns involved. There were a whole lot of teams that only played 11 of their 12 regular-season games, despite putting the uniforms on and walking out on the field for the finale, in particular when we look at the defensive units. We just finished a weekend in which two different teams scored 56 points or more and still lost their games in double figures. That is just the beginning.
There were 17 games on this NCAA card that finished more than three full TDs off of the market expectations, and this was not just a case of bullies crushing the weak to get those margins – there were 12 outright upsets in which the underdog beat the closing line by at least 22 points, and six them beat the spread by more than 30.
There is a common theme through this – a lot of defenses simply brought no fight to the field, call it heart if you will. That is the way that I will classify it because that is how it looked on the eye test, far too many teams not bringing much will to compete from the start, and then essentially giving up once the games got out of hand. So with a long read ahead, and an important one because this kind of closing week might become an annual event, we’ll need something from the jukebox for background as you sort through. Right on theme we can go to Ann and Nancy Wilson with another strong band put together behind them, continuing to create great music because they do bring the effort (it is not easy to accept the realization that it has been 40 years since “Dreamboat Annie”). Let’s go to “Heartless”, live from Lewiston, New York two years ago -
By the way, if you have an aficionado of classic Rock and Roll on your Christmas gift list, or want to hint at something for someone to get for you, there are both audio and video versions of Heart Live at the Royal Albert Hall, backed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, being released on Friday. I was able to take an advance listen last night – wonderfully done, and it is difficult to tell the difference between the Wilson’s of the 70’s, 90’s, or this very year.
The hope was that if played loudly enough it might make the images of some of the weekend NCAA football disappear from the conscience…
Item: Some Post Mortems really were Post Mortems (far too many teams no longer had a beating heart)
Let me start with the general here, as we put components together. A. There is less contact than ever before in both football pre-season practices, and practices during the season, in order to keep the players safer; B. While it likely will work out that there will be fewer major injuries, it also means that defensive players do not hit nearly as much, and hence do not build up the physical stamina nor the necessary levels of technique to go out and keep tackling for a full season. Then add C. When some of the players lose the will to want to fight off blockers and make tackles anyway, defensive performances can get ugly.
It wasn’t just defense, of course, with Connecticut, Marshall, Mississippi, UNLV and UCLA being examples of teams that did not show much passion on either side of the ball. And I am not talking about merely under-performing, but for long stretches simply not competing at all. Some of the results create major statistical headaches, box scores that can junk up a full season if you don’t lower the weighting a bit.
You can understand where this comes from for bad teams heading nowhere, and playing an opponent that does not excite them in any way. Outside of the usual Senior Day notions, neither UConn nor Marshall had much reason to play with passion, and they sure didn’t. But teams like Ole Miss and UNLV were playing their primary rivals, and substantially favored in a similar range, the two teams with Rebels as their nickname chalk of -10 (Miss) and -9.5 (UNLV). And they went out and lost those games 55-20 and 45-10. How the hell does that happen? I’ll get to that in a moment, but first the simply shocking Saturday night that came from the Mountain West Conference…
Item: San Diego State and Wyoming really are playing for the MWC Championship this week. Seriously.
Rocky Long’s Aztecs and Craig Bohl’s Cowboys knew after Air Force upset Boise State on Friday afternoon that they were going to meet for the Mountain West Championship this coming Saturday. And until those teams kicked off on Saturday night there was something for the serious fan to look forward to, after Wyoming won a 34-33 thriller when these two played at Laramie last week. The prelude was to have begun this past Saturday anyway, when each team had a chance to clinch the home field advantage for that game. And then…
San Diego State was favored by -11 at home vs. Colorado State, and got bulldozed 63-31. Wyoming was -3 at New Mexico and suffered a rather similar fate, falling behind 35-7 at halftime, with the final 56-35. How do two well-coached teams get torched for 119 points in games that really mattered? Wyoming was shockingly inept on defense, allowing 13.5 yards per play. That is correct – “per play”. How does a Long defense give up 8.2 yards per play, five passing touchdowns (of only 16 passes thrown by the Rams), three rushing touchdowns, and the special teams a punt return TD, in a home game in which they were double-digit favorites?
“I can’t explain it. They (the defense) haven’t played well the last two games. I don’t know why, otherwise it would have been fixed. I can venture a guess, that we’re tired and worn out.”
And therein lies that common thread that likely connects many of the teams that played so poorly this weekend. If good teams with positive energy and a lot to play for performed on defense like they only had 10 players on the field (on some plays for Wyoming it honestly looked like eight or nine), then what was going to happen to some of those without such motivation? Welcome to the handicapping darkness of making some sense of it all…
Item: Sorting through a pile of bones
Now time for some tales of true football ugliness to help put this weekend in the perspective it deserves.
TENNESSEE – I would be remiss to not update the stunning late-season failures of the Volunteers defense, which has been a topic here each of the last two Monday’s. They put up little resistance in falling 45-34 to a pedestrian Vanderbilt offense, and over the last three games allowed 118 points and 1,886 yards. And those three games just happened to be vs. SEC non-heavyweights Kentucky, Missouri and Vanderbilt. This week the mode changed – the Commodores had been next-to-last in the SEC in passing yards at 173.8, but Kyle Shurmur threw for a career high 416.
CONNECTICUT – The good news for the Huskies was that Akeel Newsome broke a 62-yard TD run in the middle of the third quarter, ending a streak of football ignominy in which the UConn offense had gone 51 consecutive series without a TD (out-scored 123-3 in that span). The bad news is that the run came when they were trailing 24-0. At home. To Tulane.
They went on to lose 38-13. At home. To Tulane.
Now the program faces a dilemma impacting many teams – the time may be proper for a coaching change from a purely football standpoint, but does not make fiscal sense. A buy-out of Bob Diaco’s contract would cost $5 million now, or $3.4 million after the next season, the administration getting punch-drunk in giving him a contract extension after a humdrum 2015 that ended 6-7 after a bowl loss.
Diaco’s somber tone after Saturday’s loss lays it out well - "It was a long, long season in which the expectations were spectacularly high and the results and production were spectacularly low.”
By the way, that bowl loss last December came to Marshall. Which makes the defeat look even worse in retrospect. Let’s go to Huntington next…
MARSHALL – The Marshall fifth-year seniors came into this season having gone 38-15, with three bowl wins. That collapsed into a 3-9 free-fall, and keep in mind that one of the wins was a walk-over in the opener vs. out-manned Morgan State. The Thundering Herd played lousy most of the way, but may have saved their worst for last vs. Western Kentucky on Saturday night, allowing the opening kickoff to be returned for a TD and never showing much interest in playing the game out. How bad could it have been? The Hilltoppers led 41-0 at halftime, but only snapped the ball a season-low 58 times, holding back because the CUSA title game vs. Louisiana Tech is up next.
This time I won’t quote anyone from the Marshall side trying to offer an explanation, but instead this rather stark take from Western Kentucky RB Anthony Wales - “The fire here, it wasn’t like how it was the last time we was here (the Hilltoppers won a 67-66 thriller here two years ago). To me, it kind of seemed like they already gave up before we even kicked the ball off. That just put icing on the cake and got us fired up, amped up. I mean, that’s what we’re all about.”
There is something to track this week that perhaps puts the Marshall season in perspective better than anything else – Doc Holliday’s undisciplined team leads the nation in penalty yards with 921, but it is still tenuous, Baylor having 843 with a game to play at West Virginia this week. So how about those Bears?
BAYLOR – There does not need to be much said here because the disintegration of the Bears season has been a previous topic. But the markets pushed them from -2.5 to -4 against Texas Tech, and if the players had some pride left they were up against an opponent that they could beat. Even when things are going bad, the opportunity to win a game often creates some competitive spark. It didn’t – the Red Raiders jumped out 34-7, and Patrick Mahomes averaged 12.7 yards per pass attempt, with six TDs and 0 interceptions.
Here is why there is a need to rehash – there are serious long-term implications for this collapse, and the reasons behind it, which makes the hiring of the next coach so critical. For a note on how dire the picture is getting, the 2017 Baylor recruiting class is now down to a single player. And of course the Bears still have to go through one more week of practice drudgery, for a trip to West Virginia that I doubt that many have much interest in taking.
There may be a reasonable fix here, SMU’s Chad Morris, a former Baylor assistant that knows the state well, and a coach that has been putting a positive stamp on the Mustang program. But that just means that we have to go to that horrifically inept showing by their defense on Saturday…
SMU – The Mustangs had a chance to clinch bowl eligibility by beating Navy, and since the odds makers gave them a reasonable chance, the Midshipmen only favored by seven points, there was the expectation of at least a close game. Instead if was Navy 75-31, that option attack rolling for 605 yards on only 52 snaps, a crisp 11.6 per play. SMU ran off 31 more plays and lost by 44 points; just try to re-grade that game based on each team having the same number of snaps.
I won’t be overly harsh in grading the Mustangs in terms of effort – what I saw was more a case of a team that just didn’t have a tactical clue on defense. And of course Navy does not make it easy this late in the season, that offense having reeled off 66 points vs. East Carolina the previous week, and managing to go through four November games with only two punts. So SMU gets a slight excuse, but there is none for the showing that Arizona State put out there on Friday night, and coach Todd Graham at least admits that…
ARIZONA STATE – As truly hideous as the Wyoming defense was vs. New Mexico, and SMU vs. Navy, they were not the worst I saw this weekend (no, not even either unit in Pittsburgh’s 76-61 flag football win over Syracuse). I might chart the ASU second half showing at Arizona as the worst 30 minutes of defense I ever saw, considering the quality of competition and the style of play. The host Wildcats were not talented or creative on offense, yet their first five second half drives went like this -
3 Plays, 75 yards, TD
4 Plays, 81 yards, TD
3 Plays, 9 yards, Punt
3 Plays, 70 yards, TD
2 Plays, 73 yards, TD
That is 15 plays for 308 yards, or 20.6 per snap. They were all runs. And unlike New Mexico’s or Navy’s complex option schemes, they were all basic runs. Arizona gouged the Sun Devils defense with simple vanilla plays, the ASU defenders aggressively blitzing run gaps that got them caught up out of position time and time again. That was not new for this bunch – I chart “home run TDs” as any scoring plays of 40 yards of more, and Graham’s defense gave up 19 of them this season, the most I have ever recorded.
A basic defense might have been able to hold the Wildcats in check – they hadn’t scored more than 28 points in a Pac 12 game all season. The limitations of that offense were such that I had ASU in pocket at kickoff. Hence why there was also some digging afterwards to find out just what Graham would have to say about it, and to his credit he did not offer any excuses. Perhaps because it would have been almost impossible to come up with any.
"That was embarrassing. No excuses, but that was very, very difficult to watch. We let our university down. We let our program down. We just absolutely didn't show up at all defensively. You can't play that bad and make up any excuses. I have no excuses. We just absolutely played atrocious. We did a poor job of preparing them defensively. To give up that many yards rushing is just absolutely ridiculous.”
Arizona State had a reason to go hard on Friday – the Sun Devils were playing their arch rival and could have also wrapped up a bowl bid. A night later Mississippi was at home facing an arch rival with some added motivation to send out their DC with a win in his final game. That also did not work out well…
MISSISSIPPI – In the week leading up to the Egg Bowl vs. Mississippi State, Ole Miss DC Dave Wommack announced his retirement, after a long and distinguished career - “I’m grateful to God for more than 38 rewarding years as a college football coach. I worked alongside remarkable men to shape the lives of my players for the better. I’ll carry with me the relationships and lessons this game has given me as I look forward to enjoying this next chapter with my family.” So even though Ole Miss has had such a disappointing season, the Rebels would surely bring some fire against State, in particular the defense to send Wommack out with a win, right?
55-20 State, the biggest win for the Bulldogs in the series in a century (they won 36-0 in 1916). And how about yet one more team that averaged over 10.0 per rush, MSU gouging Wommack’s defense for 462 yards on 42 attempts (11.0 per pop), QB Nick Fitzgerald accounting for 258 of them.
At least Wommack can clear out his desk without having to concern himself with watching those game films, but Hugh Freeze faces a big challenge after the way this season spun out of control, culminated buy the lack of effort in front of the home fans in Oxford on Saturday night.
"It's been the toughest (season) of my professional career. Whether it's from the disappointment to the injuries to everything that's going on around our program. It's been a very difficult season. ... It's a battle. It's difficult. It's tough on your families. It's tough on everybody around the building. You find out a lot about who you are and who everyone is that's with you. I'm glad the season is over now. It's been difficult and can't wait to hit the road recruiting, get the necessary changes made and get to spring ball."
It is rare that any coach has the honesty to admit that he is “glad” that the season is over, but that does help to get into the mindset of what goes on at times like this. If a dozen games is going to prove to be too much for the physical stamina and concentration level of many of these teams going forward, then a big part of the handicapper’s challenge for these close-outs is to identify likely suspects. Like…
NORTH TEXAS – Unlike so many of the other teams already mentioned this week, the Mean Green did not allow 10.0 per rush, but they came damn close, UTEP rolling for 384 yards at 9.6 per attempt in an easy 52-24 rout, Aaron Jones closing out an under-rated career in style with TD bursts of 83, 58 and 48 yards. And yes, it was indeed North Texas favored by -4 at kickoff for that game, looking to wrap up a bowl bid by getting that sixth win.
How about this for the ultimate in silliness – even after that dreadful performance, and with the 5-7 resume of the Mean Green including such weak wins as Bethune-Cookman, plus needing overtime to beat Rice, Seth Littrell’s team might be going bowling anyway.
There is something important to take away from this one, and it was part of the thread discussions last week – must-win games for C-level programs are not necessarily a positive. Players that are unaccustomed to success often find the pressure of needing to produce in order to reach a goal something that hurts more than helps. You can file this away from Littrell as a classic take on that front, and should laminate this to have on your desk each late-November - “They battled and fought in a tough situation. We have had our backs up against the wall the last two weeks. They wanted it bad. We squeezed a little too much. There was a lot of pressure on these young men to reach the mission.”
UNLV – The Rebels weren’t facing any pressure to become bowl eligible, but did have the chance to get a signature win over their arch-rival that could have put a positive stamp on the second season under Tony Sanchez, showing real improvement to get to 5-7. At least they can claim begrudging progress, Sanchez taking over a team that went 2-10 the season before he arrived, and producing back-to-back counts of 3-9 and 4-8. For perspective, Brian Pollian went 23-27 over the past four seasons in Reno, and even that 45-10 rout was not enough to save his job, his dismissal coming on Sunday.
In staying with the theme let’s go to Sanchez, for something that can also be laminated, because it could have been attributed to so many different coaches – “Obviously an extremely, extremely disappointing performance. I’m disappointed in our lack of preparedness and physicality. We looked like a tired, worn-down football team and it’s unacceptable in a game as big as that. Those are the kind of games you want to come out and perform well in. They just took us out to the woodshed today. There are no excuses.”
PITT/SYRACUSE – Might as well close out the defensive portion of this missive by combining these two, naturally a 76-61 game providing plenty of food for thought about lacking the will to tackle opposing ball carriers.
For the Orange it is something that you could see happening – Dino Babers forcing that blistering tempo may indeed be a way to inject some life into the program, the prospect of recruits in the skill positions that want to play fast on offense getting many of their games in the ideal conditions of the Carrier Dome, which can enhance NFL prospects. But it was a disaster for this season’s defense, which got run into the ground by the pacing, and it was fitting that it literally happened at Pittsburgh, the Panthers another team to crack the 10.0 yards per rush barrier, 38 attempts for 396, while also getting 13.2 per pass attempt. It provides yet another game in which grading is difficult – Syracuse had 42 more offensive plays, yet lost by 15, so just try to find a scoreboard equivalent with the two teams having equal snaps.
There is just as much intrigue coming from the other side of the equation. Two weeks ago in the Monday review I noted that while Pitt was having success under Pat Narduzzi, it was not necessarily for the expected reasons – his hard-nosed defense not much part of the uptick at all, and if anything looking out of place in the ACC. Hence why this post mortem got interesting, because I have rarely seen a coach as unhappy in winning a game by 15 points - “We've got to get back to ground zero. Like I tell our players, every week there are going to be ups and downs. We didn't plan to have that many downs. I've never been in a game like that, and I don't want to be in a game like that again. Half of me is jumping for joy for what our offense did out there today. The other half makes me sick.”
Narduzzi does have a lot of work ahead. His defensive schemes were built to stop the power ground games on the Big 10, not the way that teams like Clemson, North Carolina, Syracuse and others in the ACC spread sideline to sideline and throw the ball. Hence some focus when spring practice rolls around as to how much those designs might be changed, and whether there may be some fresh blood brought in for the defensive coaching staff.
UCLA – And as we head to spring practice next for those that are not going bowling, how about some intrigue on offense out west. Jim Mora Jr. made a rather curious move after losing OC Noel Mazzone to Texas A&M, elevating former RBs Kennedy Polamalu, who favored a pro-set attack, bringing TEs and FBs into the mix, which did not necessarily feel like the best fit for a team that had a potential Heisman candidate at QB in Josh Rosen.
The entire season on offense was a muddled mess, first under-achieving in struggling to get into a rhythm with Rosen, then having to scrap those schemes for a spread attack with Mike Faufal at QB, after Rosen’s campaign was shortened because of injury. There wasn’t much energy or design in that 36-10 loss at Cal, the first time in the careers of the fifth-year Golden Bear seniors they had held a Pac 12 opponent scoreless in the first half.
So what happened in the aftermath? Polamalu’s first season as OC in Westwood proved to be his last, getting dismissed on Sunday. UCLA finished #127 of 128 teams in rushing yards, despite the offense being tweaked to enhance that part of the flow. Hence now one of the more important coaching searches of this off-season. Mora Jr. has a prize in Rosen, but now will be saddling the QB with his third different OC. And it also puts pressure on Mora Jr. as well – does he bring in an OC mostly based on Rosen’s skills, or does that fact that Rosen may opt for the NCAA draft after 2017 mean more of a long-term focus gets taken?
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