The same holds true for other teams as well. That is true. The problem though is people don't want to look at the actual games. We scored 7 against UGA, and 10 against clemosn, 3 when the game was on the line. The rest of the year aint going to change the fact that in those games the offense sucked. Same with the o only scoring 17 against Miami and only managing 3 offensive points in the second half. Or getting shut out against Duke in the second half. Or all the stuff that went wrong in the UVA game. The overall season numbers can be nice, but in the individual games that's not really what's important. Last year our defense played well enough for us to win 9 of the 11 games (or at the very least 8).
Yes in theory you can win 14-7. We beat Pitt while giving up only 10 points from the defense ( 7 came directly from the ST). We beat UNC only giving up 7 (and that score was in garbage time). We beat VT only giving up 16 points from our defense (6 came off an INT return) and of those 16, 6 came off the back of a long KO return. Against JSU we gave up only 10. So in 4 of our 5 wins our defense basically gave up 10 or fewer. 2016 was a similar story with 6 similar games where we won with the D playing at around that level. The problem though is that it's not really realistic to expect us to have a defense like that when we have a HC who is his own OC, calls his own plays, and only advantage recruiting is finding guys who can fit in his offense. People always talk about the scout team, but all the players on the scout team are still recruited to play in our offense, and are being coached by guys who are trained to coach our offense. Is it really a wonder why our DL looks lost trying to get through better lines when they are used to going up against option OL being coached by the guys who coach our own 1st stringers who struggle with pass pro themselves? Ditto with QBs in the passing game, or TEs and short passing in general.
Another thing, the opposite also holds true. You can win games when the other team scores 28 or more, and with the way we have set up our program, I expect us to. But we have lost that ability. In the last three years we are 1-13 in games where the other team scores at least 28. The one game we won, 2016 against Duke, the reason they scored 28 was because we gift wrapped them 14 points with turnovers deep in our territory. If we even won half of those types of games we'd have won 2 more games on average the last 3 years, and that shouldn't be a big deal. In that same time we lost 6 games in which the opposing team didn't score 28 or more. We shouldn't be losing two games a year in which the opposing team doesn't get to 28 with the way our program is set up.
I do think it's a problem when we invest so heavily in the offense, and it still requires us to have a defense that can hold teams under 28 to have a chance to win.
