30 October 2005

Just Win Baby

I write this as I sit in front of the TV watching my fantasy football team suck it up. Dang it, another loss to Mike Lowe.

My brother and I showed up about an hour and a half before the game yesterday. Under the stands waiting for the game to start, Matt and I discussed whether the circumstances existed which would cause us to miss the game. Rain, snow, blowouts, hot girls--barring a trip to Cancun, we couldn't come up with anything. We love BYU football.

If you love scoring yesterday was a good day. You could be excused if you thought the final score looked like a BYU vs. AF basketball score. Despite the loss last week to ND the team came out with a lot of confidence. I think they realized that they had their chances against ND (a couple of drops away from going up 17-7 or better) and could hang with a Top 10 team. Too bad UW and WSU can't say the same. BYU stayed close for 3 Quarters and proved to themselves that they were better than the team that lost to SDSU. I think that game fed this week's solid offensive outing against Air Force.

Offensive Game Ball goes to Curtis Brown, again. By the end of the season he will have a locker-full of these things. A couple more games like this (219 rush yards, 4 TDs) and he will have MWC Player of the Year Honors locked up. It was great to see BYU gain 300 yards rushing on 42 carries. I think that if there were less balance (read: more passing), this game might have been more like the game against TCU. Running the ball was probably our best defense against Air Force.

A couple of thoughts about defense: The secondary continues to take a lot of heat and some of it is deserved. How our CBs get beat by WRs(Air Force) who are neither faster nor more athletic is completely incomprehensible. What is even more incomprehensible is that the coaching staff insists on blitzing rather than giving safety help to our beleaguered cornerback corp. Our run defense is good enough that they don't need the extra man in the box. We held ND to around 50 yards rushing and they only got that many because they started running exclusively for the second half of the 4th quarter. We shouldn't be so wedded to a defensive philosophy (always blitzing) that we allow deficiencies to become glaring weaknesses. The secondary has made mistakes, but I put the bulk of the blame on the coaches for not putting them in a position to succeed. Why do you allow Maurice Stovall, who already had 3 TDs, to get single coverage? Even my grandmother wondered why they called such an obviously dumb defensive coverage.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i agree with you on the CBs, jake. the whole game, i was standing there watching them get beat by WRs that were much slower. it shouldn't have happened as many times as it did. and the first quarter of the game we had some good passes. i'll admit, i was late to the game, but while walking over, i heard at least 3 first downs called in a span of 45 seconds and as soon as i get to the stadium, we already have a touchdown. great passing game first quarter, although, AFA's defense just wasn't good enough to stop those passes.

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