No one is saying that we should be positive after our loss to Cal Poly. But seriously, let's think this through... All I hear is that we can't win when we only have Brett trying. Really! I looked at the injury list A lot of our top guys were out for this game. So far our top Wide out in Herron, Offensive leader in Smith, One of our starting guards and one that also got hurt during the game. We had practically nothing but backups playing in this game. The same for our defensive side of the ball. Huff was out and I think one of our LB's.
We lost A LOT of firepower for Cal Poly. I'm not making excuses. You would hope our back ups would be good enough to still be able to take it to an FCS school, but then again, I've been watching the score this year and it seems that the FCS is taking it to ALL FBS schools. There have been several FCS wins this year, sadly Wyoming is one of those, but even SDSU and Nevada had a run for their money last saturday. And SDSU and Nevada hadn't lost starters for the game either.
Going back to the game. We ran alot of what we run when Smith is out there, but the difference in the intangibles between Smith and Kirkegaard really showed. Smith has the ability to see the entire field, Kirk, not very well, Smith can make the play from a broken down play, Kirk Throws it away and usually refuses to run and even when he does run, it's not a threat. We run the same screens and out routes with Smith. Kirk couldn't find the guy in time. Herron is the go to guy for screen passes and his not being in this game showed. Several times Rufran an McNeill and even Claiborne were open on their cross routes and Kirk refused to split the D and get them the ball, something Smith could have handled.
If you want to talk about running the ball, I honestly thought that our guys did a relatively nice job considering...We had NO passing game and it is already tough to run the ball from our type of spread. Cal Poly never had to respect the pass and kept everyone in the box. I'm surprised we even gained over 100 yards rushing just because of this. Wick, May and Miller all did well. Cal Poly could easily see when it was a run and yet we were still able to get yards on the ground. Not as many as we wanted/needed. But it showed a lot of promise.
When we get our firepower back, watch for a better running game. When we are healthy, we have an offense that can easily put up 30 points a game.
Defensively, this team reminds me a lot like the early 90's defenses we had under Tiller. We always had to shoot out other teams offensively to win games. Occasionally we would put together one or two good games a year, but we typically gave up an average of 25 or more points. I think this team will come in to its own. We have a young D. And it's in transition. This D has gone from one extreme to the other. We used to run a coverage based D, now we run a blitz based D. These guys have to get used to it. I agree that Tormey has struggled in the past, but he will need more than one year to get this D where it needs to be. Remember, he inherited a D that was already notoriously bad. And now on top of that it's young. If we have Smith and Herron back on saturday I think we will be fine, if it's Kirk then we will have a game similar to Cal Poly. If we can defeat the injury bug, we'll be fine.
I hate losing. I had actually reconsidered some of my thoughts and predictions that I had early before the season and easily saw us at 0-2. The injuries devastated us to this 0-3. I don't blame coaches for injuries. And I know what it's like to try to win with your top players out... Stop calling for heads and get ready for game 4!
