The good, the BAD, & the UGGGGGGGGLY----

Football Insider Board
#1

good:

  1. We might have found a QB who might get us in the endzone IF we can get some help for our right tackle in pass blocking. I guess Starkel is a gamer who doesn’t practice as well as he plays in games.

  2. Our freshmen receivers got open against an SEC secondary and they made some plays once a QB was in there who could get the ball to them.

  3. If 2 & 3 stay true, that should open up our running game and let this offense do its thing finally.

  4. Once the rust gets sanded off, O’Grady may become the force at tight end we need. He kept turning the wrong way letting pretty good passing fly by. Lots of missed opportunities that might yield big plays in the future.

BAD:

a. The kicking game fell apart. Missed field goals and really short punts.

b. Coaching time management. We keep wasting timeouts because of confusion getting signals in and people in the right places on the field. How can a hurry-up, high tempo offense, keep losing timeouts to avoid delay of game penalties?

UGGGGGGLY:

x. I guess the SEC now knows the weak link in our pass defense. Ole Miss constantly matched their best receivers against Brooks, #9, our true freshman from Harvey, LA. It seemed like double digit completions to people he was covering. He was a 4* - #35 corner recruit who may not be ready for the SEC right now. I am sure he will be in the future but if we don’t scheme to get him some help we are in big trouble.

y. Once again, Ole Miss proved to be the deeper, tougher, better conditioned team in the fourth quarter. Their offense just wore down our defense (mostly because our offense was not sustaining drives) and they ran through our arm tackles like a hot knife thru butter in the fourth quarter again this year.

z. We are really young and no matter that these young receivers, defensive ends, linemen, and secondary players are more talented than the older players they are replacing at Arkansas, they are not going to walk into the SEC and win many battles against more talented players who are lots older, more experienced, and more developed than they are. We need these new talented players to get seasoned for 2-3 years, stock the squad with equal or better talented backups, and we may get to the middle of the SEC West in 2-3 years.

JMVVVVVHO

#2

I agree with the good and ugly’s. Especially your last point. Talented freshman are at a disadvantage against equally talented sophomores and juniors. We need Capps back. For the run game. Unless you are Bama and have future NFL all-pro’s running around, having to start freshmen on the o-line is BAD. Not that Ricky is not super talented. He’s clearly gonna be a stud. But he’s not had multiple off-seasons to get stronger. He’s not even had ONE.

BTW–we only missed on FG, right? It was a big one, but it wasn’t a chip shot either. I don’t think we can say the kicking game fell apart. A couple of mediocre punts? yes. But we are actually covering well…and returning very well!

#3

Good: OL is clearly better than last year. not great, but clearly better. Despite Capps out, Jacskson AGAIN battling injury, loss of Gatlin. pretty good game for OL, considering all that and starting a skinny true frosh.

found us a QB-FINALLY! and he looks like our best in a while, clearly able to win games in this league.

5 is a stud TB. when he is out, we are a different team.

the frosh WRs are studs. studs. still learning and growing, but studs.

DL did well through 3 quarters despite playing 2 true frosh a LOT. losing Gerald really hurts. And Youdaman is right, our DTs are just not able to stop SEC offenses running between the tackles.

Safeties are clearly the best we’ve had since…Houston coached us?

Bad: my goodness, what a tremendous number of self-inflicted mistakes! can’t even count them all. no way to win with that number of mistakes. luckily, it’s all the new guys learing the system (and a bad 2 play sequence by our RT).

Punting and PK were not up to par last night. I call this “bad” and not “ugly”, since we have reason to believe that was an aberration.

UGLY: the tackling. my goodness, the tackling. I swear they were closing their eyes and crossing their arms across their chests. Surprised Chief didn’t have a stroke. This should be correctable.

Play calling-the degree of difficulty, on our pass plays, is ridiculous. luckily Starkel can do it, but where are the quick-hitters, screens, bubble screens, quick slants, you know-those passes that every team uses against us. Where is the flow? why are we soooooooo predictable. “trick plays” were a disaster.

Coaching-and I don’t mean to be redundant about the play calling. I mean the crucial part of coaching where you lead young men into a hostile environment, and they don’t look scared and make dozens of mistakes. where they charge out confidently and seem to enjoy the big stage, rise to the moment, exceed prior performances, make us say “wow! we are getting after these guys! did you see that tackle? that incredible catch?!”. after 14 games, we’ve seen that zero times.

I’m not discouraged, I really think Clay’s article with some of his old coaching buds had a great moment-we are truly coming off of “death penalty”. far worse than what Ole Mrs got. now CCM has to clean it all up. it’s not as fast as we want, but if you can’t see improved ST, D, OL, QB play and if you can’t get excited about our freshmen, then you just want to not see it.

Can’t wait till Saturday “revenge” against CSU should start a couple nice games to iron out all the above issues and build confidence. I’m still hoping for a bowl game.

GHG

#4