Friday, September 18, 2009

Game Breakdown

You'll have to excuse the delay, we are still catching our breath from last night and recovering (the constant screaming, pounding, and making noise does take a game or two to get into).

A little late but here is our Game Breakdown. Again, an overall impressive performance and the score was nowhere near as close as the actual game was.

Offense:

1) Oline - Another great outing for our Oline. No sacks, all day to throw. Open lanes for our runnigbacks. Derrick Morgan, Georgia Tech's all hyped DE, barely even made himself a presence in the game. Our lineman went downfield and a executed/initiated blocks down throughout the second level and very rarely did you see a lineman late on a pull, or miss a block.

Score: 9 and 1/2

2) Receivers - New week, new receivers step up. Benjamin, contrary to last week, was relatively quiet. Only saw some balls come his way during punt return. No matter. Hankerson got the party going on a deep completion down the middle of the field during our first drive. Byrd and Power Forward turned Tight End Jimmy Graham took over from there. Plenty of deep passes and crossing plays. Great blocking downfield as well by our wide receivers.

Score - 9 and 1/2

3) Quarterback - Jacory had a near flawless game as being 20-25. Perfect 7 for 7 in the second half. The only errors he had in this game was when he tried to force a deep pass to Byrd in the middle of the field early on in the game, while missing Jimmy Graham wide open on the side of the field on the same exact play.

Score - 9

4) Runningback - Cooper and James. James and Cooper. Name me a better 1-2 punch in CFB. Between the two they ran for over 165 yards. Wide open lanes for the, courtesy of the line, made their job easy. Throw in Pat Hill, who had a PHENOMENAL day blocking, and you really can't ask for much more from our backs.

Score - 9


5) Tight end - Jimmy Graham got his first TD catch. Major props to him. Epps also threw in 3 catches for 37 yards and his own touchdown, after faking a nice block and then rolling out into the end zone for the wide open catch. They also blocked very well, especially Richard Gordon.

Score - 9

6) Coaching - The playcalling was great, as great as the game before. If I recall correctly, there was a stretch where our offensive didn't even see a second down on a touchdown drive early in the game. That's awesome work. Receivers were wide open. Georgia Tech constantly seemed to blitz at the wrong time or the wrong side. All in all, beautiful work.

Score - 9 and 1/2



Defense:

1) Defensive line - They were our key to stopping the triple option, and they stepped up and showed why. Every other play it was either Bailey, Wesley, Moncur, Vernon, Forston, heck even Holme and Big Joe got in on it. Great game from them. They cut GT's rush attack to less than 100 yards in the entire game. That's as near a perfect game as you can ask from any defensive line in the country.

Score - 10

2) Linebackers - Still a few busts, misreads, but overall they were solid. Colin Mccarthy showed why we missed him so much last year and why he's so important to success this year. We need to see big stops and great coverage from them in the future, but last week they played very, very well.

Score - 8

3) Defensive backs - Our backs had to tackle well and get off their blocks, and they did. Gtech rarely got the corner on us, and their WR couldn't lay a hand on our backs like Shields, Harris (who had a great game) Vaughn or Randy. We still had some busts on deep plays, and that falls on Shields being so green, but we are seeing him improve little by little.

Score - 7 and 1/2

4) Coaching - We didn't just stop the option, we shut it down and sent it back to Navy. We'd like to see some of those deep pass plays picked off, and they did pick up a few runs here and there on the option, but overall we had a great gameplan and executed it extremely well.

Score - 8 and 1/2.

Special Teams:

1) Coverage - Bad specials teams coverage again, but this time after Uribe worked the kinks out he seemed to be doing a better job. This week it'll be huge because VT is solid on special teams all around, and they have some good return men.

Score - 5 and 1/2.

2) Return - We didn't have a lot of big returns, except for Mike James, but we are blocking well and hitting our holes nicely. Expect us to break one soon, although next week will be tough with Virginia Tech up to the task.

Score - 8


We'll have a breakdown this week on the keys to the Virginia Tech game as well as the location of where some Canes fans will be watching the game (right now it's at The Sports Exchange in Coral Gables).

Until next time, thanks for reading and Go Canes!

No comments:

Post a Comment