Tulane: The Replay

I ended up watching a replay of the Tulane game, intent on trying to figure out what went wrong. To that end, I made a few observations.

With right at 5:00 to go in the first quarter, on LSU's third possession (we had a touchdown and a missed field goal on the first two), the Tiger offense faced second and long on our side of the field. Demetrius Byrd broke open deep on the Tulane secondary. He had a step on his man, and Flynn heaved it out to him. A completion would have gone for a touchdown or put us inside the 10 yard line. The ball was overthrown and fell harmlessly to the ground. On the next play, Carnell Stewart's man stunted inside and beat him, getting a sack on Flynn.

We punted away, and Tulane got some yards on its ensuing possession, ultimately punting the ball back to us, but pinning us deep in our own territory. We wouldn't get out of that bad field position until Tulane took the lead.

Think about that. It's two plays. One play, really. If Flynn gives Byrd a catchable ball, it's probably 14-0 with time remaining in the first quarter. Instead, Flynn missed the receiver, and then the blocking collapsed. If we hit those plays, we have great confidence, Tulane is demoralized, and we probably pour on the points. Instead, we missed those plays, gave Tulane the ball and a surge of confidence, and we struggled for most of the rest of the half.

It's also a microcosm of what went wrong in that game. The whole game, the passing game was simply out of sync. There was no one reason for it.

Sometimes the blocking broke down. Sometimes Flynn held onto the ball too long and/or the receivers failed to get open. Sometimes Flynn missed receivers. Sometimes the receivers failed to catch a well-thrown ball.

I've seen a lot of blame thrown around on this game, and a lot of has fallen on the designated offensive lineman whipping boy, Carnell Stewart. I think it's undeserved to focus criticism on him. Given, he did not play very well, but he played at least as well as Lyle Hitt played, and probably better than Herman Johnson played. Stewart beat his man most of the time. He gave up a couple sacks, but at least one of those was on a play where he gave Flynn plenty of time and he never got rid of the ball. The safety occurred when a man beat a Stewart/Hitt double-team. He went inside on Stewart, and Hitt whiffed on his attempt to block him. Hitt then grabbed him and pulled him down in the end zone.

Most of the pressure on Flynn seemed to come from the interior line rather than from the outside. Stewart gave up a couple sacks, but most of the hits and hurries came other spots on the line. Most of it seemed to come from Herman Johnson's spot. Johnson also picked up a couple penalties. I'm not saying Stewart was great, or even that he was particularly good, but people seem to be putting an awful lot of the blame for the offensive woes on him.

The offensive line failed as a group (except for Ciron Black, who was definitely the best of the group), with no one person taking the blame for most of it.

On defense, let me just say that Kirston Pittman was GREAT. What a tremendous surprise he has been this season. His career was DEAD before the fall, and now he's one of our most dangerous defensive players. He was getting pressure on the QB, running down ball carriers from behind, and basically doing everything. I hope he comes back for a 6th season, but I have a feeling he'll get love from the NFL and move on.

Tulane: Post Game

I don't think I really have to recap what happened in this game. We all saw it, unless you were too drunk to get up. I was up at 2:30am because of the baby, so I didn't have that problem.

I would like to start by saying that the defense played very very well for the entire game. We gave up one long touchdown drive and that was about all. Tulane got one or two other nice drives that stalled with a turnover or a punt, but the defense was mostly dominant.

The offense? Well, the coaches need to figure out what's going wrong with the offense. Do you realize that Matt Flynn hasn't played well in a game since Virginia Tech?

After scoring an easy touchdown on our first possession, the offense went backwards for most of the first half. Part of the problem was the offensive line either getting penalties or giving up pressure on the quarterback. The right side, so good against South Carolina, seemed to struggle in particular. The left side and the middle didn't exactly shine, however.

The other part of the problem was Flynn holding the ball too long. I don't know if the receivers were not open or if he didn't see them, but we have a serious problem in our passing game. Flynn's numbers were deceptively good. He was 16 of 29 for 257 yards, with one interception. however, he lost over 40 yards and 6 downs on sacks. He was harassed all night, and often could not find a receiver. I don't know if the problem is that Early isn't there or what, but the coaches need to figure out very quickly if this team is better with Matt Flynn or with Ryan Perrilloux behind center.

The running game, when we finally decided to rely on it, did very well. Taking out Flynn's sacks, we averaged almost 6 yards per carry and scored 4 touchdowns on the ground.

I would like to point out, however, that there really was no chance that Tulane would beat us. We played a very very poor first, about as poor a first half as you could imagine us playing, and we still went into the locker room ahead. Tulane played with passion and energy to our unfocused lack of effort, but we lined up and beat them with talent in the second half after killing their momentum. Yes, we played a very poor game, but we still won by 25.

I saw Chad Jones, Kelvin Sheppard, Drake Nevis, and Ricky Dixon all get significant playing time. Nevis had never played before, and is playing because of the injury to Charles Alexander. Jones, Sheppard, and Dixon had all played before but got more playing time today than ever before.

I don't know if I'm going to watch a replay of that. It would be too painful.

Tomorrow: What happened to Florida and the rest of the top 10? It sure was an exciting day of football after our game.

Game Day: Tulane

Once again, I blog with a wiggly baby in my arms, along with her stuffed toy lion. Once again, Mr. Peabody and Sherman accompany me.

Today is a pretty big day in the SEC. Several interesting games will be going on, some of which will even be televised.

Here is my schedule for the day:

Now - 11:00am: Errands and other non-football related activity.

11:00am - 2:00pm: LSU at Tulane, ESPN2. Tulane is probably the weakest team we play all season. We can really name our score. There probably isn't one player on Tulane's team who could have earned a scholarship to play football at LSU. I just want to get the starters out early, get the backups and young players some game experience, avoid injuries, and reward some walk ons. I may even take the unprecedented step of changing the channel to another game if it gets to the point of playing walk ons.

2:00pm - 2:30pm: Watch the end of South Carolina against Mississippi State. I don't know how good of a team SC is without Brinkley. If they're really going to challenge for the East, they need to win this one, obviously. MSU is not that bad of a team though, and is certainly capable of winning if South Carolina isn't at their best.

2:30pm - 4:00pm: I don't think we're getting Cal vs. Oregon locally, which is a shame because it's clearly the best game on at this time. It's probably the most interesting game of the game nationwide if you don't have a massive SEC bias like I do. No SEC games will be going on at this time, at least not on television. I may do more non-football related activity.

4:00pm - 7:00pm: Bama vs. Florida State, CBS. It's an interesting game, but honestly I think Bama is a superior team. At least, they're superior to the team I saw play Clemson in the first half of the opening week of the season. their offense looked absolutely awful early in that game. If the offensive line has solidified itself, Florida State is a dangerous team. I have to claim a certain amount of ignorance about Florida State, but we can analyze a little. They lost to Clemson, and beat UAB and Colorado in fairly close games. They aren't running the ball effectively, and Drew Weatherford is not a world-beater at QB. They're averaging less than 23 points per game, but their defense has been very solid. They'll have to take big strides to beat Bama unless Bama goes out and plays a bad game.

7:00pm - 10:00pm: Auburn at Florida, ESPN. Word is that ESPN will return to Baton Rouge next week if LSU and Florida both win. LSU doesn't have a serious game, but Florida does. Auburn sure has not looked very good on offense, but their defense returns a lot of previously injured players this week. It was solid to begin with, and should be even better now. Auburn will be getting better again next week when Brad Lester returns. They'll finally have a playmaker on offense. To win this game, they're going to have to find offense somewhere and hope their defense dominates. I'm not rooting for either team (I don't really care that much if GameDay goes to LSU and I don't care if Florida is that highly ranked), but it sure would be nice if Florida suffered some hard body-blows to soften them up.

Tulane Preview

There are two items of big news for the Tulane game. First, we're wearing special uniforms with a pelican emblam, white pants, and a white helmet. Tulane will also be wearing special uniforms. Proceeds from sales of the uniform will go to Katrina relief. Unfortunately for them, I haven't heard of anyone being that excited about this game or about the uniforms. Which brings me to the second item of big news.

This game will be played at 11:00am on ESPN2 Saturday morning. It is my hope that the powers that be didn't see this coming when they scheduled the game. I think they expected an afternoon or evening game schedule by ESPN. Instead, symptomatic of a general lack of interest in this game, it's been picked up for the 11:00am game usually reserved for Illinois vs. Indiana or UVA vs. Maryland.

And it's not just television. At my last check, LSU still hadn't sold 9,000 out of its 40,000 ticket allotment.

News Flash to LSU Athletics Department: Most LSU fans don't really care about Tulane anymore. For people my age and younger, and probably for people significantly older than I am, we don't remember a time when Tulane was a serious threat to LSU. We don't remember a time when Louisiana had a large number of Tulane fans. We don't remember a time when Tulane fans really cared a lot about football or thought they had a superior team.

So, we play Tulane this week, likely in a partially full Superdome, before the tailgaters eat lunch.

But what about the game? Well, Tulane is 1-2 so far this year, having lost to Mississippi State and Houston. They beat Southeast Louisiana. They're giving up 33 points per game and scoring about 18 points per game. Their backup quarterback, Anthony Scelfo, has won the job over their previous starter Scott Elliott, who only completed an average of 11 passes per game. As a team, they're averaging about 180 yards passing per game and about 140 yards rushing per game.

I have a feeling we'll see a little of Scott Elliott before the game's over.

The guy they try to get the ball to is Matt Forte #25. He rushed an ungodly 40 times against Southeast Louisiana University for a very impressive 303 yards. Matt Forte in that game accounted for more than 2/3 of Tulane's rushing totals on the season. I have a feeling he'll find the sledding a little tougher against LSU. He also has about 1/4 of Tulane's pass receptions.

This is a team that has had trouble offensively except in one game, and that was against SE Louisiana. Defensively, they haven't given up gaudy numbers, but they allowed Michael Henig to have a pretty good game against them, and allowed 300 yards passing to Houston.

Alright. We know the goal here is to get an easy win and get out. We want to use this game to

• tune up for Florida
• shorten the season for our best players by getting them out early
• get our younger players some game experience
  

We want to spring out to a quick lead and get it to halftime before rotating in the backups and the next generation of players. Protect the starters from injury and wear and tear. In particular, we need Matt Flynn to come out of this game healthy enough to go against Florida. I really hope we don't see a repeat of last week's debacle where Flynn stayed in a game in which he was so ineffective.