2014 Good and Bad

[ckhokie]

Three games into a year which was widely agreed upon to be 'unknown.' What are you pleasantly surprised with? Where do you still have concerns?

Surprises

Linebackers - Linebacker play was thought to be a weakness going into the new season. While the depth is still TBD, I don't think anyone can question the play of the starters so far.

Freshman WRs - While LT was far from the best QB last year, when Willie Byrn is your best WR option, you're just not going to be very successful. Ford, Philips, and Hodges (to a degree Stroman) contributing immediately in a position of need has been very important.

Two TE sets - Malleck and Hodges on the field at the same time, with our WRs creates serious matchup issues with LBs on our TEs. The importance of this was magnified yesterday when losing one TE basically took both out of the game. Having Malleck and/or Clein back healthy is super important.

Playing the best player available - seems obvious, but hasn't always happened. Nice to see coaches seem to be on board

The bad stuff

OL - OL play is still rough. Run blocking has been terrible, regardless of our level of competition. You never want to see your OL coach teaching fundamentals on the sideline during the game. Watching BC's OL run blocking last night against USC was like a thing of beauty that I've never seen out of a VT team. It made me sad.

QB - The next three aren't as much bad, as just areas of concern. I do like Brewer so far, although he will make some silly throws, that have resulted in INTs. Turning the ball over this much in conference play will not lead to Ws

Big Plays - Going hand in hand with the first two, our offense doesn't really seem to threaten on big plays. We had one play over 20 yards against tOSU. I haven't rewatched the ECU game, but I don't recall many more, if any. Not sure if this is a product of the OL, run game, QB's arm, Loeffler's calling, or what.

2nd CB - Fuller is going to shut down everyone, so the boundary guy is going to get a lot of action, regardless of who lines up. Facyson still doesn't look 100%, but Chuck Clark is young, and Donavan Riley, though probably a better option than Chuck at this point, still probably isn't as good as a 100% Brandon. Hopefully he can get himself together after what was a pretty terrible showing against ECU. Neither Bonner or Jarrett have ever been that great when they've had to be in man coverage.

 

[Sleepy T]

Good post. I agree with pretty much everything you said.

I do think the secondary is and will be fine. As you said, some of our guys aren't 100%, but Facyson, Clark, and Riley have been plenty good, albeit they have gotten burnt a few times in man to man. It will happen when Bud and TG puts them on an island. They all have NFL potential and will be very very good when all is said and done.

The OL has been troubling, particularly in the run game. Once again, I am not ready to call this group another complete failure just yet, but we have a good mix of athleticism, youth, and experience. I am not sure why they cannot get any push at the line of scrimmage?? I don't think it is that they are too small, I think technique/coaching has something to do with. Another couple games and we will see what the verdict is on this group.

I have been pretty happy with Brewers play. He straight up put the team on his shoulders at tOSU. He has made some mistakes, but overall, if he has time, is quite accurate on the short and intermediate routes. He doesn't throw a great deep ball, which may be part of the reason we haven't had a ton of long gainers. Still, the play of Malleck, Bucky, Ford, and Phillips has been very good. Need to go deep more with them. The young guys run great routes (did you see that one double move on the TD!!). Byrn and Stanford have for the most part played well too.

If the O could consistently run the ball, it would open up the pass game even more making Brewers throws very easy. This offense would be very fun to watch.

 

[sparko]

Not as important as the other pieces and I don't know the entire stat line but AJ Hughes has been prett underwhelming. I know it's just punting but for a team who likes to play the field position game and had a former all-ACC punter, he hadn't exactly been killing it

 

[sparko]

Overall the team's depth and offensive line are the biggest areas of concern.

Gibson got manhandled yesterday and Glock didn't look much better.

I'm no offensive coordinator either but the play calling seemed off. I mentioned in another thread that we get 5-20 yards on jet sweeps. We should be running at least five of those per game. And after watching the Georgia-USCe game, I'm even less of a fan of this zone running shit. Gurley is so good because he runs from the I where he gets the ball and half the time doesn't even need to make a read. By the time he gets to the LOS, his 230lb ass is at full speed. Simple laws of physics says he's gettin 3 yds minimum. And all the lineman have to do is make a hole for a few seconds. I'm not saying our line is Georgia's and we have no Todd Gurley but I think we'd be more successful with the between the tackles running game if we employed a strategy that better suited out skill set

 

[wildturkey]

I really like our freshman. They've been a big surprise to me with just how good they are this quick. And Brewer has looked pretty good too.

I don't think there's anything that I would say that's bad that I didn't expect. The O-line hasn't been as good running the ball as I would have hoped. But prior to ECU, they had been very good in pass protection. Maybe ECU was just a bad day for some guys. Gibson was a turnstile out there and Farris was completely overwhelmed by ECU's nose tackle. He definitely needed help out there and didn't get it until late (or maybe ECU's linemen just got gassed??). The unit just looked different from the first two games. They had protected well in the past 2 games, but against ECU were consistently getting blown up by just 4 defensive players up until sometime in the 3rd quarter. Right now I'm going to pencil that in as just a very bad day and see what happens next week.

 

[HoHumHokie]

Overall the team's depth and offensive line are the biggest areas of concern.

Gibson got manhandled yesterday and Glock didn't look much better.

I'm no offensive coordinator either but the play calling seemed off. I mentioned in another thread that we get 5-20 yards on jet sweeps. We should be running at least five of those per game. And after watching the Georgia-USCe game, I'm even less of a fan of this zone running shit. Gurley is so good because he runs from the I where he gets the ball and half the time doesn't even need to make a read. By the time he gets to the LOS, his 230lb ass is at full speed. Simple laws of physics says he's gettin 3 yds minimum. And all the lineman have to do is make a hole for a few seconds. I'm not saying our line is Georgia's and we have no Todd Gurley but I think we'd be more successful with the between the tackles running game if we employed a strategy that better suited out skill set

I agree. Marshawn and Shai don't seem to be able to make sharp cuts up field on when they are running to the outside. They need to be running down hill as soon as the receive the hand-off.

 

[Hokie200proof]

I agree. Marshawn and Shai don't seem to be able to make sharp cuts up field on when they are running to the outside. They need to be running down hill as soon as the receive the hand-off.

I think part of the problem there is play calling. We were trying to run to the edge or do sweeps a lot more than we're calling North/South runs. In the tOSU game we tried to run around them when the Center/Guard gap looked open. Shai was the one who was finding those holes later in the game and his vision is much better than Marshawn's at this point. Vision is almost as important as foot speed IMHO when you're talking about an RB in a 1-cut system. Running full speed to the hole/area before you've let the defense over-pursue or commit will always result in a short gainer. Ryan Williams and Kevin Jones were particularly good at this, often times running with the OL to one sideline, drawing the LBs too far to one side, then reversing the field and hitting a big gainer. Williams wasn't exceptionally fast, but his vision and anticipation was amazing. I think it might take some time working with our OL for our current stable of RBs to get to where they need to be with their reads. Shai has already shown (to me at least) that he's seeing it more than the others.

Also, the read option with Brewer <<< the read option with LT. Brewer hasn't shown he's willing to keep it, so our RBs get blown up on those plays. If Brewer isn't a threat to keep it (and I don't really think he is, he's more of a scrambler than a dual-threat QB), we need to rip those pages out of the playbook.

 

[ckhokie]

The bad stuff

QB - The next three aren't as much bad, as just areas of concern. I do like Brewer so far, although he will make some silly throws, that have resulted in INTs. Turning the ball over this much in conference play will not lead to Ws

Starting to look like more of a concern. We HAVE to stop turning the ball over. The QB literally lost us the game today

 

[amszete]

Add RB Coaching - why in the hell are we playing 4 RBs? It's a sure way of helping us to NOT having a running game. Starting to feel like SB needs to be coaching some other area like maybe ST now.

Add ST Coaching - We just need to have FB stop coaching this side of the ball. Every game we have a huge ST misfire that costs us big. Beamerball is dead.