Never felt better about this game than I have this week. OK, Bama and UGA are the teams that i worried about.
Couple things here. 3 weeks ago, everyone and their mother on this board was talking about our OL issues and injuries. People have clung to the recycled notion that our OL is a major weakness and that we seemed to not have improved much at that position. Thus the general feeling was bad OL's can not win in the SEC and vs the big boys. Also rewind to 2 weeks ago and our secondary and pass rush were major strengths by the consensus of the board.
Now, after 1 game. Our OL looked downright dominant, along with our rushing attack. The best rushing performance regardless of opponent in many years. We scored 6 TD's on the ground. We did anything we wanted in the run game. We have added an entire system of pulling, pins and some different trap plays to our outside runs instead of sweeps, tosses and it is working beautifully with our athletic lineman. It combined with the option read and the ability to fake the handoff and throw a quick screen is a very very tough element to defend. This offense puts pressure at all points on the defense. We can run the dive, we can run outside now and pull our OG's and C, we can play action fake, or Dobb's can keep it and pick a gap. The run game alone is going to put any defense on their heels with the things we can do now. Our OL looked so much improved it is not even funny.
I can't believe some of the people on this board don't see the difference in not only scheme but in attitude and toughness our OL has now. DeBord has been a HUGE upgrade. Our offense is going to be tough to stop. Teams are going to start loading up the box with 8 and 9 guys and then our passing game is going to start to emerge bc we haven't even begun to show the new vertical concepts that DeBord's playbook uses. Pig Howard back is another good weapon in the arsenal we didnt even have last week.
As for the defense, a week ago Big John Janitor was a great DC and our d-line and secondary are elite. The defense will carry this team. The offense and OL are going to be a big issue for this team vs the top SEC teams. After 1 game, people are questioning our defensive scheme, calling for 2 deep safeties and playing more cover 2 and cover 3......Emmanuel Mosley went from most underrated future star to an embarrassment. Our pass rush went from almost unstoppable to worrisome.
BGSU's offense is as good as they come.... Dino Babers was Art Briles right hand man. The offense we just played is basically Baylor's offense. Baylor has been putting up 40+ on everyone for many years now with a lot of non NFL talent. The QB BGSU is a good player. BGSU's offense last year finished #3 overall on offense in the entire FBS (without that QB he got hurt in game 1). That is a tough scheme to play against. They spread you out with 4 and 5 wide, they play HUGE splits on the OL and they get the ball out quick. We had several late injuries and TK Jr. was sick in the secondary. McNeil, Gaulden, Berry, Martin were all hurt and missed significant time this fall camp. Martinez was out for the game. There is some things that happened that made our secondary look worse than it was. The offense we played also made some really good plays. OU's offense is nothing like BGSU's IMO.
Upon watching OU's game vs Akron, i came away feeling much better about our match up. It's obvious OU is still breaking in a new scheme and playbook. They made so many mistakes and penalties while playing basic plays and vanilla shit. Factor in our crowd and i think we are going to see more mistakes of the same variety. The rushing game did not exist. OU's OL looked like ours did last year. A lot of new inexperienced guys, a lot of standing up and looking around for a guy to block, a lot of hesitance. The RB's Perine and Mixon looked like they didn't trust or understand where the holes and areas to exploit in the run game are. The passing offense consists of a lot of quick hitters. Slants, in's and outs, a lot of stuff over the middle. A lot of quick WR's with good YAC ability, particularly sterling sheperd. This offense and personnel is not suited to run anything like BGSU did. The OL particularly the OT's will not be able to stop our pass rush if they try to go deep often. OU is not going to go 4 wide and use such wide splits on it's OL. The QB is aggressive and will make some mistakes. He will force some balls and he is not afraid to throw down the middle. As long as we make our tackles and play whats in front of us, this offense does not scare me. Barnett is going to have a field day on Orlando Brown. He looked very slow
