BucsandBulls

It was our first challenging game and we rose to the challenge and should have won. We didn't turn the ball over our defense was stifling except for 5 plays of the game (big play continues to be our Achilles heel) and our offense was able to pass the ball. It is hard to simulate playing in a tight football game with the game on line, that experience should be invaluable when it comes to our next challenging game (UCF).

What do you think makes those first down passes able to go for those yards? It is the defense respecting the run. Its called an intangible which doesn't show up in the stats. It is all about risk/reward. Running is low risk low reward. No gain is not the end of the world. Passing is higher risk/higher reward. Again the goal is to score not pickup yards on 1st down. Getting yards on 1st down helps with that absolutely. Many of those runs help you see how they are gameplanning against you on defense or setup other plays. Its all a game of what ifs. How do you know if we pass it 5 more times they aren't all picked off? You don't and I can't prove it. The fact is we did enough to win and we didn't. So lets make some small adjustments not whole sale changes.

I can agree with that.

Should find out Monday, November 6th, around noon. Might get 6 day ruled though. Then we would know on the 18th I think.

Let me preface this by saying, there are a million scenarios out there in college football and these events are not mutually exclusive, but for sake of argument which of these two options looks better to a recruit? 1) USF goes 10-0. Reaches top 10 and loses to UCF on Black Friday. Doesn't get a CCG and plays in god knows what stupid bowl and finishes season 11-1. 2) USF goes 9-1 with loss to Houston. Stays unranked until beating UCF on Black Friday. Beats Memphis in CCG and goes to Peach bowl.

Because the HC never actually touches the ball...

I would have liked more production on 1st down. 100%. But to hammer on Charlie's quote we would have to go back and rewatch every first down play and see what defense they were in. I'm sure we ran it a couple times when they loaded the box, we also passed a few times when they dropped 8 into coverage. As far as your stat...the two biggest of those losing plays were runs to the outside. Something people on here had been clamoring for. And your stat is skewed because sacks are counted as running plays in college football as well. The best thing about a run up the middle is the limited downside which can kill a drive. We tried getting creative (outside run, pass) on 1st down and 6 times it failed us. That will make an OC stop getting fancy on 1st down real fast.

Who said anything about enjoying the view? The whole point is you don't enjoy it and it motivates you that much more to fix it. I couldn't give two cents about people "paying attention" to USF. Guess what it was all just lip service anyways, no one really cared and they were just waiting for us to lose anyways. The goal has been and continues to be winning the conference championship. If staring at UCF's ass for three weeks helps us do that then I am all for it. Yea of course I would have preferred us not to lose and be close to a top 10 ranking right now, but if that happened and we still lost to UCF then it still wouldn't matter.

No we wouldn't I would guess we are 6-2. Would have lost Houston still and one other in a shootout. Offense would be better than this year's but still no where near as good as last year. Team's would have a whole offseason to gameplan better against the Gulf Coast Offense and don't have the same playmakers. Plus honestly feel like we overachieved last year with some lucky well timed gutsy deep balls etc. Defense would have to be better than Woodie but who knows who Willie brings in. Could be anybody and doubtful that they would be better than BJM has been so far.

Yea my bad JTrue. I see the sarcasm now, its hard to tell with all the actual hate on here and don't know posters well enough to know who is known for it.

Okay armchair quarterback. We punted 6 times in the first half and 3 times in the second half. Want to guess how many of those had a run up the middle on 1st down? 3. That's right. I'll wait while you check the game log. Of the other 6? 2 were outside sweeps which failed miserably for a loss of 5 each time. And the other 4 were either incomplete or sacks. Selective memory is a wonderful thing when trying to prove yourself right.....

I don't know you all can see us pass 38 times for 300+ yds in this game and claim Gilbert didn't change anything at all. The run game will always be a part of the offense even if it isn't be effective because that is what keeps the defense honest. And truthfully in the second half the run game was actually working pretty well. If it was up to the majority we would have passed it 70+ times and had 4 ints and about 10 sacks. Now here is what I would like to see. Change about 5 playcalls a game. Give me 1-2 rb screens and 2-3 qb sprint out run/pass options on key 3rd/4th and shorts. That's it. Keep it simple.

Some of you are the biggest bunch of cry babies I have ever seen. Doom and Gloom the season is over, why even bother playing another game we are just gonna lose. There are legitimate complains on some aspects of this team, but it is still a very good team that was in position to beat a top 4 team of our conference and should have won. I feel better about this team after Saturday than I did before. We should roll our next two games. And UCF is a great team who it will be a challenge to beat, but the team I watched on Saturday could very easily do it with a few MINOR corrections not wholesale changes. Especially now that we are done patting ourselves on the back and know what it feels like to get punched in the mouth. We have flipped the script for Black Friday with us now being the hungry underdog coming in to ruin UCF's perfect season which I love.

Exactly this. Call me crazy, but I actually like our chances at winning the conference championship better after Saturday's game. Obviously we have taken away any margin for error in the next two games by losing and I would have preferred to win but I think this helps our chances against UCF which was always the biggest obstacle. Now we have that taste of blood in our mouth and the target off our backs. Pressure is all on UCF now.

Never thought we would lose until their QB crossed the goal line with 11 seconds left. Anyone who "knew it was over" earlier than that just got lucky with their pessimism.

I have really liked BJM as well. Didn't have any huge problems with the defense. Although I'm sure we prepped somewhat for King at QB I doubt we expected them to use him all game like they did. Really added a totally different wrinkle to their offense. I don't mind rewatching the bad plays and seeing what went wrong. Once I've experienced the pain live it never seems to hurt as much(side note as a bucs fan as well the one exception to this rule is the 2003 bucs colts game). Their offense essentially had 5 plays the entire game. 1) Deep td over Hoggins. Not much to say on this one. Hoggins can't let his man run by him, probably got caught sleeping since they barely passed all game. Should have taken the PI and made them earn the td. 2) 46 yd run by backup RB up the middle. They left our DT unblocked who missed the rb in the hole. No idea what Sanchez was doing on this play as he has his back turned to the inside run watching for a wr screen. By the time he turns around the RB is 10 yards past him. Bad tackling by the rest of the team. Nichols chases down play to save td. 3) Designed QB keeper, looked like power sweep, around the right side for 44 yds down the sideline. Haven't had a chance to rewatch this one yet, but seemed like our lbs just got outrun to the edge. Nichols chases down play to save td again I think. 4) 4th and 24....enough said. 5) 20 yd td run by QB. Looks like it was meant to be a sprint left quick pass but our DE blows up the RB and we cover the pass options to the left. Nico overpursues and leaves the cutback wide open and then doesn't have the speed to recover. Otherwise its a different story with the QB getting tackled on a stupid decision to run and we mostly likely win as Houston can't run the fg team on in time on 4th down. 1st half: 8 drives. One Fumble, one 4th down stop. Six punts (4 of which were 3 and outs). 2nd half: 7 drives. 4 drives on big plays detailed above, plus 2 punts and another 4th down stop. If Wilkins manages to snag that early pick 6 then I think we win this one easily. As it is we still should have won despite any complaints about offense and clock management, etc. Senat, Reaves, and Love all played great on the line. No major complaints by secondary except for Hoggins. Our LBs really got exposed as not athletic enough. Really wish we had someone we could trust more than Sawtelle.

We actually did pretty much exactly what you said. We rushed 3 and then had Reaves delay/spy. They chipped the end with the rb which is what allowed the QB to get outside the pocket.

Yes I am sure he said "Guys, Don't worry about the win Go try to get the stats". Players were in the right position and didn't make the play to knock it down. The hate on the coaching staff is ridiculous.

I am going to try and build on the economics lesson from another thread to get through to you about how "opening up an offense" works. Right now we have a huge overabundance of points & yards at a very low price (playcalling) because the demand (opponent toughness) is not there. If we see a shift in the demand curve (we play a tougher team) then we will raise the price to get the same quantity of wins. Until then it makes no economic or football sense to play harder or call more advanced plays.

Do you have anything to base this opinion on or is completely unfounded conjecture? Do we have a completely hidden playbook that we have been practicing in secret? No, but I guarantee you we have 5-10 plays we just haven't had to use yet and may never use all season. Its all dictated by the game situation and defensive looks. And even if we didn't pretty much every offense in the country installs at least 1 new play a week as part of game planning for that week's opponent.

I'm guessing the helmets will still be the gold. Helmets are more of a safety concern when changing, because the helmet needs to fitted properly.

Many of the plays are RPO, but we are purposefully choosing not to read it as well. Again why use something that you don't have to. That bag of tricks is much more effective when Q pulls it out for the first time and runs. Think ECU when he walked into the endzone untouched. Then once the defense sees that and adjusts to stay home, now he pulls it out and flips it to the outside wr. Finally now the defense thinks its seen everything, you've got him, you've got him, you go back to that original play and let the RB keep it because without all that extra help defense its an easy 5 yards and if someone misses a tackle then its a 45 yd TD. Rinse and repeat. Its really not that hard to see how 1 play can be all you need to beat a defense and that's without changing the blocking scheme.

I'm with ya we definitely ran the ball a lot, I disagree with the little success though since we drove the ball nearly everytime we had it. I just feel like we are looking at the results rather than the method of the offense late in the 3rd quarter and 4th quarter. It seems like people (not necessarily you, you seem reasonable) see that we didn't score and remember us punting after running up the middle one time and selectively remember that's how the whole quarter looked when it didn't. Conservative offense to me is 3 runs up the middle and punt. We didn't do that. This is alot of IFs, but on those last 5 drives if we make either fg, or Q hits open deep balls, or we don't get kneecapped by the refs than we win an easy two score game and everyone relaxes. Kneeling the ball was absolutely the right decision to end the game safely, but maybe CS should have had the guys score just so our fanbase would calm down.

Did any of you actually watch the 4th quarter to come to your conclusions about taking the foot off the gas, turtling, just holding on..etc? I would have liked to see us win by 30 instead of a single score, but never did I get worried about the offense. Here are our drives after going up 34-7, please tell me where we went conservative and played to not lose the game. As a bucs fan under dungy I know what a conservative offense looks like. Drive 1 -Started at our own 20. Drove to the Tulane 30 before an atrocious call by the refs (15 yrd clipping) took us from 1st and 10 to 3rd and 13. We tried a intermediate pass to TE Wilcox for the first down, Fluke INT bounced off a guys foot. Drive 2- Start at midfield drive to Tulane 30 again. Take 2 deep shots to endzone incomplete. Missed FG by Nadelman. Drive 3- Start at own 20. Convert 3rd down with Flowers run, but holding on Wilcox makes it 3rd and 16 from our own 15. We run a safe draw for 1 yard. This is the one time I'll admit it was conservative but at this point we were up 20pts still with 11 minutes left in the game. I'd say 90% of offensive coordinators make the same call. Please tell me you all are not basing your conclusions for the entire quarter off of this one play. This was our only punt in the 2nd half btw. Drive 4- Start at midfield. Drive to 1st and goal from the 8. Another blown call by refs back us up to the 23. Not many play calls for goal to go from the 23. Blocked fg. Drive 5- Start at midfield. Drive to 1st and goal from the 9. Kneel out the game.

Ummm you do know we have another bye coming up in three weeks right?