They've done it again, folks. Broken our hearts on Holloween weekend. I know what a rational person would say: "hey, if you had told me they would go 3-1 against OSU, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nebraska, I would be ecstatic!" But folks, that's not good enough at this moment.
You see, they could have played much better. But the Spartans weren't even close to competitive. They got blown out, just like against Iowa last year. This game was over by the middle of the third quarter.
At this time, I blame the offense -- almost every component of the offense. Cousins played his worst game. Forcing balls into double coverage, taking sacks instead of throwing the ball away. It didn't help that the O-line played poorly. But the O-line and Cousins were made to look worse than they were by the futility of the wide receivers.
Boy did I get this one wrong. I anticipated that the Spartan receivers would dominate a weaker Nebraska secondary. But the receivers could not get open and the few times they did, they dropped several passes. Granted, I thought that the Nebraska corners were too physical. They should have been called for pass interference more often. Nonetheless, Cousins had no one to throw to most of the day, and the O-line could not protect him all day.
As bad as the players played, though, I think this loss comes down to coaching. Of course they blew it with their lack of urgency in the fourth quarter, but that was actually a relatively minor issue. The big issue is that this game was essentially a battle of offensive coordinators. Theirs was on fire, ours struggled. We saw what theirs did to befuddle the Spartan defense, and we saw Dan Roushar stubbornly stick to what wasn't working.
I'm no professional offensive coordinator, so surely there are things the Spartan coaches are aware of that I could never hope to understand. But in my mind, it looked like the play-calling stubbornly kept going towards things that weren't working, while not sticking enough with the things that were working.
What was working from the very first drive was running between the tackles. I felt that the Spartans were having a lot of success pounding the ball up the middle, and I kept saying to myself, "just keep doing it until they find a way to stop it." Well, we didn't even give them a chance to find a way to stop it because Roushar seemed eager to show his "unpredictability" by throwing on first down or trying to run the ball to the outside. That's fine when you find that those things are working. But if they are not, you have to recognize that. Many drives stalled when the Spartans couldn't complete a pass on first down or when they couldn't run around Nebraska's speedy defense.
Funny thing is that Nebraska actually appeared to recognize that running up the middle was working for them, as well. They ran the ball up the middle quite a bit, especially on their scoring drives. Meanwhile, the Spartans never seemed to recognize what was working until one of the last drives in the game, when they ran up the middle several times in a row. By then it was way too late.
In the end, this outcome can probably be chalked up more to the fact that the Spartans were playing their 4rth tough game in a row. That fact alone probably gave Nebraska a scouting advantage that turned out to be the difference. They did seem to be well-prepared, almost as if they could anticipate too easily what the Spartan offense was going to do.
Oh well. Onto Minnesota.
No comments:
Post a Comment