Go Beavs!

12:30 kickoff in our final tuneup for the USC upset. ;)

The interesting topics this week, to me at least, is whether Nolan remains the starter once Gebbia is healthy, and if Gould has replaced Lindsey on the depth chart. Gould has to at least replace Champ. So much better a player it makes you once again question what Smith is thinking.

56-7, Beavs.

Goooo Beavs.

38-20

Given the QB situation, the game plan this week should be regrouping and getting back to basics. Simplify things and run the ball vs Hawaii. Pass only when necessary. Just get the win and give Gebbia another week to get healthy.

Would like to see a lot more Fenwick and Lowe this week.

This should be a relatively easy win with that formula.

Beavs 38, 20

I asked this eloquent and deeply philosophical question on Twitter:

If you make progress (recruiting, size, athleticism, etc), but then take a giant dump on your progress (degenerate gambling on every 4th down, etc), did you really make progress? #GoBeavs @Coach_Smith

But seriously, despite some positives from last night, this is what stands out the most. Smith hasn’t made any progress with in-game management, risk profile, intuition or a feel for odds and probabilities, etc. He also had two incorrect players on the field: Noyer at QB was obvious for all to see, but Champ to me was another problem. I saw the defenders lift his leg and laugh at him at one point. He is just too small. Yeah, one nice catch, but where is Harrison or any of the other dynamic, large, 4-star WRs?

For me Smith’s in-game decisions were once again the glaring problem. It has been an obvious problem since early in his tenure, but there were always excuses. E.g. “no depth at D so he had to go”, but now we have depth, and the D played pretty great all night. It’s pretty obvious to me Smith just likes to gamble on the risky outcome, even if the odds of winning are better with the less risky play. The other problem is he couldn’t ID that Nolan was a much better option to win this game than was Noyer. There is no way this just showed up on game day. The coaches even commented in some Sedge videos they needed Noyer to clean some things up, and when Lingren was pressed he said something like, “just the basic plays have confidence throwing them” or something like this. So what we saw last night was happening in camp. This is some weird recency bias playing out. Because Noyer had a few good games at CU, there was bias toward him. That’s a bad sign if your coach is succumbing to bias rather than results in the present. Also they only seemed to factor in the positive bias and not negative bias (i.e. his brutal TD:INT ratio).

Positives were the players looked appropriate size, we did have some depth, we pressured the QB, played decent vs the run, and found our short-term QB (a day late, a dollar short, as if the Beav way). Bradford looked better than ever. Lindsey was a big positive. Ma boy! Lowe looked decent, though he lacked vision on a few runs and ran right into the defender.

Some negatives were mentioned above but also Fenwick not getting carries – we have an SEC RB who averaged over 5YPC in that conference. Give him touches. Baylor ran for 2.7, so there wasn’t really an excuse.

There were more both positive and negative, but you guys can fill those in. These are the obvious ones that stood out to me and remain with me this morning.