Thursday, September 24, 2009

"The Book" on the Gators?

I saw this post on TomahawkNation.com by tdchrisdavis:

"The game vs UF will not be decided until the 4th quarter IMO
UF isn’t as good this year. Their passing offense looks weak without Harvin and that other guy. Crossing routes are basically their go-to play, while they try to mix in enough go routes with their sprinters to loosen up the coverage.
To beat this team you do what Oklahoma did – play zone to minimize their speed, use some weird looks to confuse their QB, and really commit to the run up front. I’d go with a cover 2 with 4 guys covering underneath, 4 man rush, and 1 guy playing as a QB spy, which will help vs both the run and scrambles."

I don't know about the spy, otherwise, it pretty well synopsizes what is becoming the prevailing theory on how to beat UF.

To be sure, our coaching staff has acknowledged, and our fan base understands, the current issues at WR resulting from the injuries to Moore, Debose and Thompson. At the moment, I'm selfishly missing Noah Boateng and Jared Fayson, but if they were here, we probably wouldn't have Thompson and definitely wouldn't have Moore, and who could have predicted this many incapacitating injuries so ignore my moaning.

Tebow's ability to read defenses has always concerned me. I watched the UT linebackers and safeties fidgeting about prior to many of the snaps and wondered if uncertainty about the location of defensive personnel didn't contribute to Tebow's decision to run so often. I also noticed that Tebow looked to the sidelines on the vast majority of offensive plays with 15 seconds left on the 40 second clock. This led me to wonder if the coaching staff trusts his ability to read defenses and whether or not he is even allowed to audible.

Hopefully, Thompson will be back to full speed and this post will be mooted. However, knowing the slow-healing nature of hamstring injuries and the risk of aggravation, I wonder if our coaching staff might limit his participation to get to the off week and achieve full recovery before LSU.

Of course, with the quality of our offensive line, Tebow, the RBs, the quality of all aspects of our defense, I'm not sure that many teams can play with us in a conservative game.

Even if the theory is accurate and our offense can be slowed, as demonstrated by UT (an excellent defense), we should still score in the area of 30 points, which should be more than adequate against most opponents if we minimize turnovers.

Looks like everybody's putting on their Big Boy Britches and going after the Bully.

Correction: Scalper of Tomahawknation.com correctly noted that the source was a comment posted on the website and not an original post by the bloggers.

7 comments:

jj gator said...

"At the moment, I'm selfishly missing Noah Boateng and Jared Fayson, but if they were here, we probably wouldn't have Thompson and definitely wouldn't have Moore, and who could have predicted this many incapacitating injuries so ignore my moaning."

And right now, Boateng is at Cal recovering from surgery whereas Faysom is wallowing in mediocrity kindness of the Zooker.

I still think Fayson was a little too quick on the trigger to bail on us, but as the saying goes, hindsight is 20-20.

And, patience is a virtue.

Kevin G. Bennett said...

Fayson was a Zooker loyalist. As you correctly note, he is now paying for it.

Unknown said...

I've seen it mentioned in a few Sun articles that Tebow is allowed to audible, to an extent.

jj gator said...

Jason, what's your point?

Scalper said...

KGB,

that was actually a comment, not a post. I'd prefer if you called it a comment, because it doesn't express the opinion of our website.

I personally don't think there is one specific way to beat UF. Against OU it took them a while until they ran more option against the zone blitz look.

The real key seems to be dominate the A gaps with your DT's and allow everyone else to space a bit wider, focusing on the veer, etc.

Also, not sure if UF's OLine is as good as in years past.

Unknown said...

I think Scalper has a point here; I'm not sure yet whether the UF O-Line is stupid-lights-out-dominant this year, or merely very, very good.

The fact is that FSU hasn't demonstrated they have the personnel to dominate our O-Line; no one has, not even the Vols, who "held" our offense to only 208 yards rushing this year.

Scalper said...

Also, Tebow lost a ton of money in that game. He just could not throw the ball outside the hash.