Georgia has more talent than all of those teams, but they aren't smart enough to use it. Still blows my mind why they didn't involve 6'7 Darnell Washington more. He is more than capable of gaining attention downfield and getting Pickens and Burton open. That's about as deep as I get into it, because their lack of ability as coaches at Georgia only helps us in the end, so whatever they want to keep doing.
As far as the 3rd and Kirby comment, I understand that Alabama was used to killing folks on defense. It was the stalwart of being in the SEC, you had to have it. There was going to be some growing pains with offenses changing and us recruiting and changing strength and conditioning to adhere to these new RPO and spread type offenses. It was new to a lot of old school people, so I understand their frustration, but also understand the growing pains involved with anything new being introduced to these young ball players that have spent so much of their lives learning a different scheme. Texas A&M showed us what was possible coming into Bryant-Denny with a capable quarterback and stunned us. We have had time, especially with our evolving offense to practice against, to change or schemes and prepare. We talked about how we've changed the bodies of our guys (take a look at Reuben Foster's transition). We've discussed this as well that I just don't feel we put enough pressure on good quarterbacks and they have all day to pick us a part. It's not fair to the linebackers and defensive backs in this tit for tat current environment to have to stay with athletic receivers and running backs for eight to ten seconds. It's an impossible task.
As soon as we put in Rashaan Evans and Da'Shawn Hand in due to their speed, Watson was forced to make different decisions and it is what helped us win that game. Fast forward to the next meeting and we allowed Watson to pick us a part yet again. Moving forward to Kelly Bryant, we haunted him all night with pressure and he couldn't do anything. Finally, moving forward to our last meeting when we got very little pressure on Lawrence and he picked us a part along with his amazing receivers. The pressure we did bring, caused him to be very erratic and off. He was bailed out, but you could see a clear difference in pressuring him and not pressuring him. I only say all of this to express that this defensive staff does not make the decision to pressure near as much as I feel is necessary when your team is starting a young defensive backfield and linebackers that are having trouble keeping up with backs and tight ends. Hearing about Moses' knee only confuses me more as to why we wouldn't pressure to take even the possibility of a big play off his shoulders. 3rd and Long (3rd and 8 or longer in my eyes) should be converted on a very small percentage with the defenses we field. Sorry for the long post, but just expressing where my basis comes from and why I think we should be doing a few things different.
Below is a link for 3rd down defense. Not even in the Top 50. Mind you a lot of these teams aren't playing SEC competition or as many games as us, but some of these teams are playing decent competition, but we don't rank here.
Discover the current NCAA FBS Football leaders in every stats category, as well as historic leaders.
www.ncaa.com
If I'm reading this correctly, we gave up more 3rd down conversions per game this year than last year!
College Football opponent third down conversions per game, by team.
www.teamrankings.com
