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Thoughts on Toledo

L

LDopaPDX

Active member
If Toledo had a good offense, they'd be merciless in the MAC. Their team speed on defense was better than anyone else's Eastern has played against in a long while. I admit to not watching much MAC football, but I can't imagine that kind of defense is ordinary for that conference.

It really hurts us that our defense is so miserable to start games. Last year, 11 of 14 games started with our D allowing a score and this year it's 2 of 3. Not sure why that is, but I'd hope it's something the coaches recognize and actively change their game prep on D. The truth is that we have a lot of talent on defense, and these results are not indicative of our talent level. Toledo was only decent on offense, not all that good really, and they just moved the ball all over the field on us while we continued to play our LBs 6 yards off the ball and not really contest the line of scrimmage.

On Toledo's second TD, we played three down linemen and only one on the weakside of the field in the C/G gap. There was no one else with 6 yards of the line of scrimmage on the side of the field so when Toledo ran that way, we had no personnel to defend it. They were able to beat us before the play even started many times because we just didn't have enough bodies in tight.

The rough starts by our D really negated what was a beautiful start by our O. With those two great TD drives to open the game against a really solid defense, we should have been up at least a TD instead of tied. There was no way we could sustain big drives all game long because Toledo's D was just too stout. They managed to shake up VA a little bit by mixing coverages. One room for improvement for VA is knowing when to pull the ball down and take off... he had a few opportunities to get big first downs with his feet where he opted to throw and throw an incompletion.

All that said, this wasn't a bad loss. The team played pretty well... not great, but certainly not bad. Many of us knew this was a rotten game to have on the schedule from the time it was announced. Hopfully we can learn from it and improve in the bye week. :twocents:
 
I've really been trying to figure out what is going wrong with our defense. I can't pinpoint an area or position where we don't have a lot of talent. Is it poor game planning? Does our defense have trouble firing up? Are we lacking a good leader?

Whatever it is, we are really going to need to figure it out if we hope to go deep into the playoffs. Also SHSU has a very potent offense. We are going to need to make some stops early, rather than have another big gamble shootout.
 
All things considered, I thought our defense played pretty well. Yes, they had kind of a rough start the game, but I thought they settled in really well until they gave up that home run ball over the top which ultimately broke our backs. I though Toledo had a lot of speed on both defense and offense. That running back they had was really good.
 
Rjones61 said:
I've really been trying to figure out what is going wrong with our defense. I can't pinpoint an area or position where we don't have a lot of talent. Is it poor game planning? Does our defense have trouble firing up? Are we lacking a good leader?

Whatever it is, we are really going to need to figure it out if we hope to go deep into the playoffs. Also SHSU has a very potent offense. We are going to need to make some stops early, rather than have another big gamble shootout.
Click to expand...


Coach Graham's philosophy is just to play a really passive defense. We always seem to play our LBs and safeties really deep. It's no secret why we have so much trouble stopping the run; our defenders start the play so far away from the ball that by the time they can get to the ballcarrier, he's already at full speed. The advantage is that we keep most of the action in front of us, so it's hard to get a big play. The analyst doing the broadcast last night was spot on, he wondered why Eastern wouldn't gamble and start pulling guys in tighter... which we started to do in the second quarter.

EWURanger is exactly right, that deep ball they caught really did break our back because we immediately went back to playing way off the ball again and they just ran it down our throat for the rest of the game. We are going to have to bring our LBs and maybe even safeties into the box to get stops against Sam Houston State. If they beat us through the air, so be it. But let's make sure they pay for any pass completion with a busted nose and a fat lip.
 
EWURanger said:
All things considered, I thought our defense played pretty well. Yes, they had kind of a rough start the game, but I thought they settled in really well until they gave up that home run ball over the top which ultimately broke our backs. I though Toledo had a lot of speed on both defense and offense. That running back they had was really good.
Click to expand...

This.

Look at the drive charts and you'll see that once we settled down, our D stopped them time and again with several three in outs and a bunch of short drives through much of the 2nd and third quarters. Like I mentioned in the game thread, they had the ball something like 16 minutes more than we did. Our offense didn't help our defense out a bit.

And I totally agree with Dopa on pulling it down and running. He left several first downs on the field.
 
Overall I am happy that we are 2-1 at this point, as we have played two very good FBS schools.

As far as Toledo, we had several things go wrong. Adams didn't play his best game, he missed some throws and had other opportunities to run and didn't (as pointed out earlier in this thread). All in all I still think he played pretty good, 300+ yds passing, 3 tds. Our running game is just not there yet. Like in 2011, we have not been able to run the ball, except when Adams scrambles. Hopefully we can get all our RB's back and start running the ball better, this will help tremendously. Toledo also mixed up their Defense and had some great athletes which we have not seen in a while, it seemed to confuse our Offense a bit. Our O-line didn't play great either, it seemed as if Adams was running around, throwing on the run quite a bit.

Our defense looked good, but honestly its tough to tell. Toledo's QB went out in the 3rd series and we could not stop them in the first 2. We played well against the backup QB but he wasn't as much of a threat to run as the starter so I will give some credit to our D, but its tough to judge because their backup was in most of the game. We seem to struggle with the type of offense Toledo was running, so it was positive to see the D get stops after the 1st quarter.

I think its a good week to have a bye week. The Sam Houston game is going to be huge for playoff seeding. I think we make the playoffs at this point, but seeding is going to be a big deal, and beating Sam Houston would be huge. We don't stand a chance to be a 1 or a 2 seed if we don't beat Sam Houston, plus this team needs some revenge.
 
So what exactly did Toledo do that contained Adams? I just listened to the first half on the internet, but heard something later about Toledo using more man coverage than zone....but obviously they looked at tape from OSU and were successful in limiting Vernon's running.
 
nwray1 said:
So what exactly did Toledo do that contained Adams? I just listened to the first half on the internet, but heard something later about Toledo using more man coverage than zone....but obviously they looked at tape from OSU and were successful in limiting Vernon's running.
Click to expand...

Spies.
 
My biggest take away from the game was Toledo's overall team speed was very impressive. I think overall they just had a whole lot more than we did. . .speed kills!
 
So help me out on what to look for in the future...how does one counteract the use of spies against Vernon? Go Eags!
 
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