I had to put my 2 cents in about our poor returns.
First of all, I'd be interested to compare our kick-off returns vs. our punt returns. I think we would see that we are much worse on punt returns. Our scheme is TERRIBLE. I've been preaching it for at least a year now. Most of the time, Danny never even had a chance because there was never any blocking. We always use two guys on each of the flyers of the kicking team, which never seems to work, and we NEVER go after the punt. This is what kills us the most - we are always backing off trying to set up for blocks. As a result, we don't get any push at the line of scrimmage and the kicking team gains momentum and runs up the field at will. I'm getting angry just typing about it! Watch some film if you don't remember what I'm talking about, but I'm sure you will see it. If we don't change it this year I'm literally going to stab my eyes out while watching our punt returns. I'm almost positive that we changed the scheme after Danny's highly sucessful freshman year (remember he showed flashes of Wes). And Danny (or whoever else was back there) has had almost 0 sucess all last season. This was my #1 pet peeve about TTU last season.
As far as kick off returns go, I don't think our blocking was very good, and I don't think we had the right guys back there. I almost think we'd be better off taking the ball at the 20 every single time. It seems as if our offense functions better when we start at the 20. Although, touch backs are probably going to become much more rare with the rule change this year, so I hope we can find somebody other than Shannon O'Toolihan to return our kicks for us.
Well it was bothering me so much I dug up the stats.
Turns out I was actually wrong about the kick-off returns vs. punts.
Our national rank based on yds/return for kick-off's in 04, 05, and 06, respectively, has been 91st ,99th , 118th (yes we were 2nd to last last year, pathetic). As for punt returns, in the same 3 years in the same order we were 27th, 49th, and 56th, respectively. HOWEVER, I noticed that the huge outlier on the game logs was our big return day against the big bad extremely tough SE Louisanna. So, if I take those 5 returns for 133 yards out of the data, our rank last year moves from 56th to 96th.
So basically we suck all around in our return game. Fire the special teams coach. And while I'm on special teams, why on earth are we the only team in the nation that uses our star position players (see: Filani, Taurean Henderson) for kick-off and punt coverage? That's just plain stupid. I remember hearing Leach say something about it, but I don't really care what justification he had or what point he was trying to make - it's flat out dumb.
2 comments:
I had to put my 2 cents in about our poor returns.
First of all, I'd be interested to compare our kick-off returns vs. our punt returns. I think we would see that we are much worse on punt returns. Our scheme is TERRIBLE. I've been preaching it for at least a year now. Most of the time, Danny never even had a chance because there was never any blocking. We always use two guys on each of the flyers of the kicking team, which never seems to work, and we NEVER go after the punt. This is what kills us the most - we are always backing off trying to set up for blocks. As a result, we don't get any push at the line of scrimmage and the kicking team gains momentum and runs up the field at will. I'm getting angry just typing about it! Watch some film if you don't remember what I'm talking about, but I'm sure you will see it. If we don't change it this year I'm literally going to stab my eyes out while watching our punt returns. I'm almost positive that we changed the scheme after Danny's highly sucessful freshman year (remember he showed flashes of Wes). And Danny (or whoever else was back there) has had almost 0 sucess all last season. This was my #1 pet peeve about TTU last season.
As far as kick off returns go, I don't think our blocking was very good, and I don't think we had the right guys back there. I almost think we'd be better off taking the ball at the 20 every single time. It seems as if our offense functions better when we start at the 20. Although, touch backs are probably going to become much more rare with the rule change this year, so I hope we can find somebody other than Shannon O'Toolihan to return our kicks for us.
Well it was bothering me so much I dug up the stats.
Turns out I was actually wrong about the kick-off returns vs. punts.
Our national rank based on yds/return for kick-off's in 04, 05, and 06, respectively, has been 91st ,99th , 118th (yes we were 2nd to last last year, pathetic). As for punt returns, in the same 3 years in the same order we were 27th, 49th, and 56th, respectively. HOWEVER, I noticed that the huge outlier on the game logs was our big return day against the big bad extremely tough SE Louisanna. So, if I take those 5 returns for 133 yards out of the data, our rank last year moves from 56th to 96th.
So basically we suck all around in our return game. Fire the special teams coach. And while I'm on special teams, why on earth are we the only team in the nation that uses our star position players (see: Filani, Taurean Henderson) for kick-off and punt coverage? That's just plain stupid. I remember hearing Leach say something about it, but I don't really care what justification he had or what point he was trying to make - it's flat out dumb.
Post a Comment