This thread is to talk about the nuts and bolts of our new team and what we noticed about individual players, statistics, and schemes.
First of all, that was a very exciting victory. I don't know if I have celebrated that hard since we beat Oregon State
. I was one of the doubters, and Eastern Washington sure put some sense in my brain and proved that we are a team that still reloads rather than rebuilds.
Biggest surprise for me tonight was the offensive line performance. Their pass protection was phenomenal against a WSU defensive line that was supposed to be pretty good. With how young this team is, just imagine how much development we have left. In a couple of years, we are going to have the best offensive line in the FCS. However, they are unproven in run blocking, which we will discuss that in a bit.
Next big surprise was the defensive back play. They were physical and fast. This isn't something I have seen since 2011. In a normal scenario, FBS players out athlete their opponents and tend to just overwhelm with subsitutes and physical play. This wasn't near the case in last night's game. Did anyone else notice all of the WSU wide receivers limping around? Slow to get up? Hunched over catching their breath? I didn't notice one player on our defense acting the same way. Our guys have been working very hard in the off season in the weight room and they looked and played TOUGH.
Our defensive line play was on par. Sure, there were moments when we didn't have any pressure. This mostly happened when we only had three down lineman rushing and the rest of the team in coverage. As soon as we brought more guys for pressure, the WSU line would fall apart and we swallowed them up. Do you remember in 2012-2014 when we would say "if only we had a decent defense, our overall team would dominate the playoffs". Well, our defense appears to have arrived. And our offense is almost at that level. This is going to be an exciting year.
Finally, GAGE GUBRUD. Mobile, agile, and hostile. Enough said.
There are a few things that I saw in last nights game that concerned me.
Special teams: We gave up a lot of return yards. It seems our kicker just doesn't have the leg to get the ball into the endzone, and it will create opportunities for our other teams. It just seems we haven't had that solid deep kick since Kevin Miller.
Penalties: It was the first season, so they get a write off. And we all saw that some of those calls were complete bogus. But there was a lot of penalties that should never have happened and put us in bad situations. If WSU hadn't been equally undisciplined, we would have lost the game. It is a concern, because we always seemed to rack up more penalties than the other team last year as well.
Rushing Game: Okay, so when you look at our rushing stats, it doesn't look so bad. But the more you delve into them, the more it looks a little dire. Our team accumulated 110 yards with a 4.4 average per rush. NOT BAD. Then we notice that 77 of those yards came from Gage Gubrud. Hmm, that seems risky to put your quarterback through that punishment. THEN you notice that 36 yards came from wide receivers taking the ball in a sweep motion play. So how many yards did our runningbacks put on the ground? 1 yard. Jabari Wilson put up 1 yard on 4 rushes and that is it. Is this due to our young offensive line? Or was it just a part of the game plan? We won't know for sure until we play some more competition, but it's really a concerning stat to say the least.
All and all, this looks like a great team with a lot of young talent.
First of all, that was a very exciting victory. I don't know if I have celebrated that hard since we beat Oregon State
. I was one of the doubters, and Eastern Washington sure put some sense in my brain and proved that we are a team that still reloads rather than rebuilds.Biggest surprise for me tonight was the offensive line performance. Their pass protection was phenomenal against a WSU defensive line that was supposed to be pretty good. With how young this team is, just imagine how much development we have left. In a couple of years, we are going to have the best offensive line in the FCS. However, they are unproven in run blocking, which we will discuss that in a bit.
Next big surprise was the defensive back play. They were physical and fast. This isn't something I have seen since 2011. In a normal scenario, FBS players out athlete their opponents and tend to just overwhelm with subsitutes and physical play. This wasn't near the case in last night's game. Did anyone else notice all of the WSU wide receivers limping around? Slow to get up? Hunched over catching their breath? I didn't notice one player on our defense acting the same way. Our guys have been working very hard in the off season in the weight room and they looked and played TOUGH.
Our defensive line play was on par. Sure, there were moments when we didn't have any pressure. This mostly happened when we only had three down lineman rushing and the rest of the team in coverage. As soon as we brought more guys for pressure, the WSU line would fall apart and we swallowed them up. Do you remember in 2012-2014 when we would say "if only we had a decent defense, our overall team would dominate the playoffs". Well, our defense appears to have arrived. And our offense is almost at that level. This is going to be an exciting year.
Finally, GAGE GUBRUD. Mobile, agile, and hostile. Enough said.
There are a few things that I saw in last nights game that concerned me.
Special teams: We gave up a lot of return yards. It seems our kicker just doesn't have the leg to get the ball into the endzone, and it will create opportunities for our other teams. It just seems we haven't had that solid deep kick since Kevin Miller.
Penalties: It was the first season, so they get a write off. And we all saw that some of those calls were complete bogus. But there was a lot of penalties that should never have happened and put us in bad situations. If WSU hadn't been equally undisciplined, we would have lost the game. It is a concern, because we always seemed to rack up more penalties than the other team last year as well.
Rushing Game: Okay, so when you look at our rushing stats, it doesn't look so bad. But the more you delve into them, the more it looks a little dire. Our team accumulated 110 yards with a 4.4 average per rush. NOT BAD. Then we notice that 77 of those yards came from Gage Gubrud. Hmm, that seems risky to put your quarterback through that punishment. THEN you notice that 36 yards came from wide receivers taking the ball in a sweep motion play. So how many yards did our runningbacks put on the ground? 1 yard. Jabari Wilson put up 1 yard on 4 rushes and that is it. Is this due to our young offensive line? Or was it just a part of the game plan? We won't know for sure until we play some more competition, but it's really a concerning stat to say the least.
All and all, this looks like a great team with a lot of young talent.
