Limey Frog
Full Member
How are we feeling? More important, what are y'all thinking? Hopefully we're doing that.
Here are my main thoughts:
Offense
--Hoover is what we thought. His ceiling is somewhat high; he's not a bad QB, can be a good one but is unlikely to bloom into a great one.
--It was nice to see Hejny get a series in a role similar to how K-State used Avery Johnson last year. In the transfer portal era you've got to get your talented true frosh QB involved from the get-go. That was smart.
--I like Cam Cook a lot. He makes too many cuts and wants to get to the outside every time. Better defenses will eat his lunch if he doesn't cut that out and hit the hole after one cut/step, but he can fix that.
--Trey Sanders appears to be one of those tragic cases of a 5* recruit who was at the absolute peak of his development potential at age 18. We may as well put his face on milk cartons at this point, which is sad. Given the short yardage situations we found ourselves in all night I would have thought to have seen him feature more. He came out, carried it, dropped it (thankfully in Bech's direction) then went AWOL again. That doesn't bode well.
--Pope John Paul's fumble and Savion's 3rd quarter dropsies aside, our receivers look terrific. If the rest of the offense allows it, Savion can have a huge year. Bech and JP are both the kind of inside receiver everyone wants, and we've got two of them. Tight ends were great, too. We will win the national championship of racking up passing yards between the 20-yard lines comfortably.
--Offensive line... I don't know. It is what we thought. They looked shaky at points, did enough overall, and I have no idea how much worse it might have been against a better team. But no one got hurt, we're 1-0 and they've got two more weeks to gel/learn before we face a better team. On and up.
Defense
--We had how many tackles for loss? Almost ten, I think (I haven't looked at the box score yet). I suspect Stanford isn't very good (though they have some good players), but we didn't get pressure last year against anyone, good, bad of otherwise.
--Hodges looked like a vintage TCU linebacker. He's healthy, he was everywhere, I bloody love him.
--The Deal brothers are fantastic.
--JaTravis Broughton looks like a guy who came out of a program led by Kyle Whittingham, the best coach in college football. He was my "man of the match" (as we say in another kind of football). He was the star.
--Overall, this defense should be good enough, if we stay comparatively healthy, to keep us in the game against everyone on our schedule. They were a big improvement in terms of talent, positioning, scheme, etc.
Special teams
--Even highly rated true freshmen kickers will miss kicks if you put them in unnecessarily close games in their first college-level start, so maybe don't get in a close game.
--Major Everhart's injury looked bad. Yes, he walked off the field, but you don't just lie down in the middle of a punt return when there's open grass in front of you unless you pulled something you don't want pulled.
Coaching
--The red zone troubles are in Johnny Finger-tape's DNA. As I said when we hired him, I don't care for the Briles scheme. It's not my style, though it can work. When it doesn't work, it tends not to work in frustrating and self-destructive ways. Briles is a bad red zone coach, which is bad because he's in charge of us scoring. If you love yards but hate points, he's your guy.
--Lord Almighty, how stupid were we last night? We had butter-fingers, poorly-times sportsmanship problems and personal fouls... We looked so undisciplined. We hired Sonny for all the ways he isn't GP, and I still think that was necessary and the right decision. A lot of those ways are good, but we also have to live with the bad ones. The image of him having a little chat with Abe Camara (I'm pretty sure it was Abe--again, from memory and it was very far past my bedtime) after the unsportsmanlike conduct penalty on the tackle for loss was telling. GP would have been drowning him in spit and the "conversation" would have lasted five minutes. Can a Dykes team have fundamental discipline as its core DNA? It's not looking good right now. How/if he turns that around will, for me, tell us everything we need to know about the head coach we have. Talent-wise, we should have beaten Stanford by thirty last night. That bodes ill for winning bigger games against better teams. They scored touchdowns on at least two drives that were sustained by at least one automatic first down penalty in situations where we either had or surely would have gotten them off the field otherwise. Then we fumbled it away on the goalline. That's a 21-point swing. We should have won handily.
Bottom line
We won on the road in game one against a non-gimme opponent on the far side of the country at a disadvantageous kickoff time. I like a lot of players on this team, and we're talented enough to do very well against our schedule. Briles's offensive scheme and play calling are a hard ceiling on what this program will achieve. If we don't cut out the penalties and mistakes by the time we play UCF, I'm afraid the DNA of this program is insufficient on discipline. That comes from the top. This question is Sonny's Waterloo: he must stamp that $%^! out or he isn't an elite head coach.
Here are my main thoughts:
Offense
--Hoover is what we thought. His ceiling is somewhat high; he's not a bad QB, can be a good one but is unlikely to bloom into a great one.
--It was nice to see Hejny get a series in a role similar to how K-State used Avery Johnson last year. In the transfer portal era you've got to get your talented true frosh QB involved from the get-go. That was smart.
--I like Cam Cook a lot. He makes too many cuts and wants to get to the outside every time. Better defenses will eat his lunch if he doesn't cut that out and hit the hole after one cut/step, but he can fix that.
--Trey Sanders appears to be one of those tragic cases of a 5* recruit who was at the absolute peak of his development potential at age 18. We may as well put his face on milk cartons at this point, which is sad. Given the short yardage situations we found ourselves in all night I would have thought to have seen him feature more. He came out, carried it, dropped it (thankfully in Bech's direction) then went AWOL again. That doesn't bode well.
--Pope John Paul's fumble and Savion's 3rd quarter dropsies aside, our receivers look terrific. If the rest of the offense allows it, Savion can have a huge year. Bech and JP are both the kind of inside receiver everyone wants, and we've got two of them. Tight ends were great, too. We will win the national championship of racking up passing yards between the 20-yard lines comfortably.
--Offensive line... I don't know. It is what we thought. They looked shaky at points, did enough overall, and I have no idea how much worse it might have been against a better team. But no one got hurt, we're 1-0 and they've got two more weeks to gel/learn before we face a better team. On and up.
Defense
--We had how many tackles for loss? Almost ten, I think (I haven't looked at the box score yet). I suspect Stanford isn't very good (though they have some good players), but we didn't get pressure last year against anyone, good, bad of otherwise.
--Hodges looked like a vintage TCU linebacker. He's healthy, he was everywhere, I bloody love him.
--The Deal brothers are fantastic.
--JaTravis Broughton looks like a guy who came out of a program led by Kyle Whittingham, the best coach in college football. He was my "man of the match" (as we say in another kind of football). He was the star.
--Overall, this defense should be good enough, if we stay comparatively healthy, to keep us in the game against everyone on our schedule. They were a big improvement in terms of talent, positioning, scheme, etc.
Special teams
--Even highly rated true freshmen kickers will miss kicks if you put them in unnecessarily close games in their first college-level start, so maybe don't get in a close game.
--Major Everhart's injury looked bad. Yes, he walked off the field, but you don't just lie down in the middle of a punt return when there's open grass in front of you unless you pulled something you don't want pulled.
Coaching
--The red zone troubles are in Johnny Finger-tape's DNA. As I said when we hired him, I don't care for the Briles scheme. It's not my style, though it can work. When it doesn't work, it tends not to work in frustrating and self-destructive ways. Briles is a bad red zone coach, which is bad because he's in charge of us scoring. If you love yards but hate points, he's your guy.
--Lord Almighty, how stupid were we last night? We had butter-fingers, poorly-times sportsmanship problems and personal fouls... We looked so undisciplined. We hired Sonny for all the ways he isn't GP, and I still think that was necessary and the right decision. A lot of those ways are good, but we also have to live with the bad ones. The image of him having a little chat with Abe Camara (I'm pretty sure it was Abe--again, from memory and it was very far past my bedtime) after the unsportsmanlike conduct penalty on the tackle for loss was telling. GP would have been drowning him in spit and the "conversation" would have lasted five minutes. Can a Dykes team have fundamental discipline as its core DNA? It's not looking good right now. How/if he turns that around will, for me, tell us everything we need to know about the head coach we have. Talent-wise, we should have beaten Stanford by thirty last night. That bodes ill for winning bigger games against better teams. They scored touchdowns on at least two drives that were sustained by at least one automatic first down penalty in situations where we either had or surely would have gotten them off the field otherwise. Then we fumbled it away on the goalline. That's a 21-point swing. We should have won handily.
Bottom line
We won on the road in game one against a non-gimme opponent on the far side of the country at a disadvantageous kickoff time. I like a lot of players on this team, and we're talented enough to do very well against our schedule. Briles's offensive scheme and play calling are a hard ceiling on what this program will achieve. If we don't cut out the penalties and mistakes by the time we play UCF, I'm afraid the DNA of this program is insufficient on discipline. That comes from the top. This question is Sonny's Waterloo: he must stamp that $%^! out or he isn't an elite head coach.
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