I cant believe how bad Strong's defense is. It's nuts, man. I thought for sure he'd be balling out on that side of the ball by now, but man... Baylor sucks. And they're going to drop 60.
Agreed. I think both teams losing this weekend help our chances at getting Herman. He's facing what he's known from the beginning of his tenure at UH: to compete for a championship, they have to go undefeated. A gimmicky triple option team like Navy can sink those aspirations any week. And once the team loses one game, they lose the exposure necessary to compete in recruiting against the SEC, ACC and Big 12. For every Ed Oliver who goes to UH, how many say no? If Herman wants to compete for championships, UT is the place to come. A one-loss Oklahoma team (and it was a bad loss) made the playoff last year. They at least had a shot despite one hiccup; UH is done after one game.
I think you can legitimately question whether Strong actually knows how to defend the spread, something he didn't see much at Florida or Louisville (less at Florida). Even his signature Sugar Bowl win was over a Muschamp-led Florida team, while a very good team, was nowhere near the offensive juggernaut they were under Urban.
Can anyone defend against the spread? The big 12 has more spread offenses than anyone and OU finished 31st in the nation in defense last year and they were the top big 12 defense. They played Tenn in non conference and held them to about 260 yards of offense. There are a lot of talented players in the big 12 and coaches. Are they all just bad? College players are just not capable of stopping the spread. The NFL is different considering only the best of the best college football players make it as starters in the NFL. An NFL defense is full of players that were among the top defensive players in the country. TCU's Patterson said the issue was that offensive lineman in college get away with blocking downfield a lot. I don't know if that's the issue. I do think you should judge defenses on bull curves within conferences. There are just two few cross conference games to make meaningful comparisons of one conference to another ESPECIALLY now that the big 12 only has 3 non-conference games. I'm not trying to say that Texas has a good defense. They are the worst in the big 12. However, I don't necessarily think the big 12 has the worst defenses in the NFL given the type of offense that teams are running. Ugh. That's awful. I was only able to watch because I have my mom's comcast account info and they just launched an app on the Apple Tv. I usually use my antenna for broadcast channels. Putting that game on FSN is not going to make anyone sign up for the service. It's interesting how the viewership of the game correlates with how good a team UT has independent of OU.
As much as I want Strong to succeed, he too often looks in over his head. He doesn't seem to have the ability to successfully commandeer the minutiae involved in being a head coach. Things like clock management, gameplans, halftime adjustments, special teams, and defensive/coverage assignments are routinely mishandled or ignored. That's why some of us want Herman. He has that relentlessly detail-oriented mindset that a head coach needs to be successful. UH doesn't have the talent that we have, yet they almost always play at or above their potential. A lot of it is Herman and the rest of the coaching staff pulling it out of them and game-planning to their strengths.
Strong's blank stare versus ND last year summed it up for me. I understand we were starting a bunch of freshman against a very good ND team. But he had an entire off season to prep and didn't notice that Watson didn't change the offense one bit after promising to. And can't remember if it was after that game or another, but when asked what happened to the offense, he answered something like "I don't know, I was too busy looking at the defense." Youth and inexperience have had a lot to do with, no doubt about that. But well coached teams don't have the mistakes on the field and sidelines we've seen the past 2.5 years IMO.
Followed up by Kansas. Could you imagine the uproar if they lost 1 or both of those games? Right now, they're looking square in the eyes of being 4-8.
Kansas almost beat TCU and we got beat 24-0 last year to Iowa State. These aren't gimmes Yeah that would be signs of 'no progess'
Don't forget we needed last minute heroics to beat ISU the year before too. We actually should have lost that game to a goal line fumble that wasn't called.
Also, TCU isn't anywhere close to the team that beat Texas 50-7 last year. One of those rebuilding years.....
