So do NOT post trolling comments or ad hominems or smarmy "holier-fan-than-thou" drivel in response.
http://www.macon.com/sports/college/acc/georgia-tech/article46959440.html
Yet again we see CPJ blaming the defense. We saw improvement this year, and much of that after we lost our best DT and the pre-season all-GTSwarm DT.
I'm not a Scientologist, but we should beat the mutts if we hold them to 13.
I don't see how you could possibly misread the article to a greater degree. He didn't blame the defense for the loss. He said the defense needs to improve, and that when we needed a stop we weren't able to get one.
You point to ONE game against an inept offense as somehow establishing that we were ok at defense this year. First of all, holding uga to 13 just isn't that great post-Chubb. Mizzou held them to 9. Florida held them to 3. Ga southern kept them at 17 in regulation. Georgia was 76th in the country in yards per game - about 3 yards per game better than us (we were 80). They were 86th in the country in ppg. Factor out the first four games (when they still had Chubb and played teams like La Monroe, Vandy, USCe, and Southern University) and they averaged only 17 points a game. That's right. The last 8 games of the year, uga averaged only 4 points more than what we "held" them to.
Second, the "pre-season all-GTSwarm DT" played most of the year as a backup and wasn't nearly as good as hyped (not his fault, that's ours). Gotsis played for a good chunk of the year too, and little good it did us.
We were 61st in rush defense, giving up 165.1 ypg and 4.7 ypc. That's mediocre at best. Pass defense we were 38 at 202.9 ypg. That's not bad - but not great either considering the yards we gave up on the ground AND that we pretty much just had seniors at DB.
Third, let's be real - what improvement did you actually see? That we held uga to 4 points under their post-Chubb average? That we held Miami to 38 the second to last game of the season? That we shut down virginia to the tune of 27 points? Kept Pitt to 31 points on our own field? Allowed an inept VT team to score 23?
We "improved" only in the sense that we were god awful last year. The "Defense" gave up 30 or more during each game of the 5 game losing streak. If we instead manage to keep those teams to between 21-24 points, we may beat ND, Duke, UNC, and/or Pitt - at the very least we would have won a couple more of those. That could have been the difference to being 5-3 or 6-2 after FSU, rather than 3-5.
Sure, the offense wasn't great either, but we were 57th in scoring defense and 63rd in scoring offense. Those are pretty even numbers. Yet some people are going on and on about how bad the offense was (don't get me wrong, it was bad) and giving the defense a pass. That's all CPJ is saying - grade them by the same system. Neither did particularly well - maybe we should beat uga if we hold them to 13, but we should also win games where we score in the high 20s, low 30s.