Oth, I don't think Louisville is a better team than Tech. They won the game on sheer bum luck. Two tds go their way given lucky bounces. Without that Tech wins. I hate it when that happens, but Tech played well enough to win and won every stats battle in the game. Special teams performance? Well, maybe though we blocked one of their FGs too and the ball didn't bounce quite right. But Louisville is not - repeat not - a better team then Tech. Luckier no doubt, at least last Saturday.
And I would never underate Brohm. He's a great coach.
I don't think I said that Louisville was better than us and I think we played well enough to win and it just didn't happen. That said, Louisville players were in position to make those plays. The bounce on the field goal was without a doubt lucky, but the fumble on the backwards pass was just a heck of a play by Louisville's guy to jump and swat the ball. I think that if we played them 10 times, that we would win 5 or so of the match ups. Most metrics for the game on Saturday show that it was a pretty toss-up affair. People were acting like we lost to Georgia State this weekend, though. It was just out of proportion. I think the early win against Florida State skewed a lot of people's perception on where our team is at this year given how FSU has turned out. I think we are a 7 win, maybe 8 win, team this year. Next year would be the year to circle as far as us making some kind of run at a double-digit win season. We play some of the ACC teams that we are not playing this year (Stanford, Wake, BC, PITT, Clemson) along with several teams that we play this year (VT, NC State, Syracuse) with a much more manageable non-con (Colorado, Temple, Gardner-Webb, uGA). This team with another year under their belt, King hopefully coming back, and more experience/depth on defense can feast on that schedule. We can easily win every game on the schedule with the exception of Clemson and uGA.
What concerns me going forward this year are a lot of the same things that we saw last year amongst other things.
- We don't want Haynes King to get in a position like he did at times last year or like JT in 2015 where the QB feels like they have to play hero ball to win the game
- I think we are much more banged-up than we are leading people to believe. Jamal Haynes and Rutherford have both been clearly playing though stuff the last few weeks. Other players are surely hurt as well.
- Aidan Birr is a good kicker but I hope his confidence is not taking a hit. We have been sending him out to kick a good number of 40+ yarders and he has missed some. Lets hope he doesn't follow the same trajectory as all of our kickers since Butker left (good first year, bad second year, gone third year)
-We cannot get any pressure on the QB at all. Our run D has actually been pretty solid, but our pass D is atrocious. We made some great adjustments in the second half of the Louisville game. Hopefully that bears fruit later in the season. The good news is that our next three games (Duke, UNC, ND) are against teams that run more than they pass. Fixing this D was never going to be a one-year project. What really blows my mind about our pass rush is that you can almost change the channel to any other game and see qb's under more pressure than what we can do. Even if the team is out-matched.
-If we have 3 yards to a first down, we just need to send Pyron out every single time.
-I would love to see speed option on our short yardage plays
