GT secondary ranked #103 by PFF

redmule

redmule

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Techster said:
Secondary has been the BIGGEST disappointment IMO. That's where we recruited the most talent, that's also where CPJ left CGC the most talent. On top of that, CGC prides himself on personally coaching DBs and putting DBs into the League. Our fundamentals for the secondary is pretty bad. CBs and safety play has been overall not to the level I expected.

I've said it for years, Thomas and Carpenter are a step slow and do not read the game as well as safeties on this level need to. Both would make outstanding LBs, but in the open field they get exposed. Should have been LBs years ago...even under CPJ.
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Jeremy Muyres might have personified what you are describing as reading the game. Nowhere near as physically imposing as Thomas and Carpenter, but he was a three time All-ACC as a defensive back.
 

JacketOff

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awbuzz said:
How much of that secondary rating is really due to lack of pressure from the defensive line on the quarterback?
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Well, the defensive line and front 7 was much better at creating pressure this year than it was last year. So that doesn’t really explain how/why Juanyeh and Tariq had such significant drop offs in their performances this year.
 

Gtswifty81

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I’m not surprised by the PFF. There were a lot of frustrating moments in the secondary. Did we have any good PFFs or at least improved PFFs
 

Dress2Jacket

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awbuzz said:
How much of that secondary rating is really due to lack of pressure from the defensive line on the quarterback?
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I would hope the ratings are more about how they perform in their own little DB bubble. Were they in position? Did they defend the pass? Did they make the tackle?

My sense is they have underperformed this year.
 
jacketup

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Our opponent passer rating ranking was 77. When you consider that we played three very good QB's in Lawrence, Book and Gabriel (UCF), that's not terrible. It's pretty certain that we played a tougher than average schedule against good passing teams.

I don't seen how you can rank DBs. That's a meaningless ranking in my opinion. You have to look at the whole pass D.
 
slugboy

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jacketup said:
Our opponent passer rating ranking was 77. When you consider that we played three very good QB's in Lawrence, Book and Gabriel (UCF), that's not terrible. It's pretty certain that we played a tougher than average schedule against good passing teams.

I don't seen how you can rank DBs. That's a meaningless ranking in my opinion. You have to look at the whole pass D.
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PFF basically does the equivalent on paying people who would be scouts or graduate assistants to break down film and grade players in the same way an assistant at Alabama would scout an opponent or a scout would rate a player for the draft. It’s qualitative, but the follow a scheme and try to be consistent.
You can look at a player and see “did they miss their assignment”, “were they turned the right way”, and a number of other places to evaluate their performance.
I can see questioning their ratings, or arguing that other people do it better, but I don’t think it’s meaningless.
To me, DB is one of the easier positions to evaluate, because you get a clearer view of their position
 
Northeast Stinger

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Something about our secondary doesn’t make sense to me. Our opponents’ receivers seemed to get open on every play or at least be in a position to make a play on the ball.

By contrast our receivers had trouble getting separation. Even when our quarterback had plenty of time he still ended up having to run most times because no one was open.

I honestly thought we would have a better secondary than most of the teams we played but we ended up having our secondary overshadowed by every other secondary we faced. I have read this thread but I’m still baffled.

Two possible answers come to mind. Does the grading system have a bug in it? Or did we just run the wrong defensive scheme for our personnel?
 
boger2337

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Getting pressure on the QB means NOTHING when our DBs are getting BURNED. Idk how many times we had to play soft coverage because our DBs were getting toasted by the WRs. Duke and Pitt both missed out on about 6-8 open passes due to bad QB throws or pressure from our DLine. Im talking 3-6 yards of separation on a fly route. No press up front to knock them off their timing or anything. Playing press coverage helps your DLine with more time to get to the QB. We had Slants/screens/ fly go routes thrown on us at will this year. Press at the line and play physical football. Too many times I felt like we were in Ted Roofs defense. When Collins came in I imagined NFL level blitz packages with the LBs and Safeties coming in full speed, CBs pressing all WRs, and a fast DLine that causes "mayhem". I have yet to see anything even remotely close to that. We started forcing our offense to pass more even though we are still built to run the ball. Why aren't we forcing the defense to start playing like we said we were going to. We look like a bend don't break pray for a turnover type defense. I fully expected our secondary/LBs to be sack/mayhem machines as it adds a level of speed to the defense. I haven't seen much of that other than Kaleb Oliver who was by far the best member in the secondary outside of Swilling when it came to getting to the QB and hitting hard. Juanyeah, Riq were underwhelming. Walton was average to above average. Tre Swilling rarely got thrown at other than screen passes and he knew to use the sideline like ANY player should know.

Just saying I'm curious if "better players" are going to fix some of these issues.
 
slugboy

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Northeast Stinger said:
Something about our secondary doesn’t make sense to me. Our opponents’ receivers seemed to get open on every play or at least be in a position to make a play on the ball.

By contrast our receivers had trouble getting separation. Even when our quarterback had plenty of time he still ended up having to run most times because no one was open.

I honestly thought we would have a better secondary than most of the teams we played but we ended up having our secondary overshadowed by every other secondary we faced. I have read this thread but I’m still baffled.

Two possible answers come to mind. Does the grading system have a bug in it? Or did we just run the wrong defensive scheme for our personnel?
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Here’s one of the two ESPN ACC beat writers giving position rankings from before the season:


Based on stats and a few other items, he put together this spreadsheet, but there was less of an “eye test” because there wasn’t a spring season to look at.

Our DB’s were forecast at #7. It’s one of the better position groupings on the team (RB was #5), but it’s middle of the ACC. QB, OL, and WR were ranked last.

To look how the forecast did vs actual, let’s look at one of the positions. QB was forecasting James Graham, but Sims was our QB this year. Graham was the bottom ranked QB in QBR for the ACC last season. Sims was 13th out of 15, including Notre Dame. Our QB performance was improved from last year, but not by a lot.

In Passing Defense, we were next to the bottom (UVA), at 270 yards per game. Our opponents QBR was 139.5–ahead of Duke, FSU, and UVA. Our Pass Defense wasn’t the worst, but it was bottom third of the league. I can look for some of the other ratings, but my view is that the DL improved a little from last year, but the defensive backfield regressed.

Let’s go back to the question of “the other team’s WRs are getting open, but ours aren’t, is it scheme?”. Back when we were still getting the couch coaching/film breakdown, we had some footage with analysis that some of our DBs were doing fundamentally unsound things and getting beat (hips turned the wrong way, not jamming the opposing receiver at the line, etc.). To me, that says “more of an execution problem that a scheme problem”.

Also, if our wide receivers aren’t getting open, and theirs are, that’s also something that happens when their DBs are playing better than our WRs, and their WRs are playing better than our DBs. Better pass blocking for our opponents helps too.

For scheme, with a 4-2-5 or a 3-2-5, you’ve still got the same basic man to man vs cover 2 vs cover 3/4 vs Tampa 2 coverages. We’re swapping a beefy safety for an OLB to get someone who’s faster in coverage, but it’s still the same coverage. The DB schemes are pretty similar regardless of the overall scheme.

Maybe you’d prefer a different kind of coverage—more zone or more man-to-man. From my recollection during the games, if we got burned in man to man, people asked why we weren’t in zone, and asked the opposite when we got burned in a “soft zone”.

We probably can pick smarter schemes and smarter tactics than we are. I don’t think that was the majority of our problem this year.

(Numbers people, including @ibeattetris-> there’s a Reddit with some good resources, including this listing: ).
 
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