Preston Guy charts LSU's defense vs Ole Miss

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After charting #LSU’s defense against Ole Miss, it actually is worse than I thought it would be watching live.

I charted all plays of ten or more yards and touchdowns

Here’s my break down of all the issues:

Missed tackles: 14
Bad pursuit angles: 4
Loafing: 13
DL stance/alignment: stopped counting at 8. It was essentially every play.
Soft zone coverages giving up easy catches: 5
DL blown up by OL: 4
LBs stuck on blocks: 6
Scheme issues: 3
LB bad coverage: 4
DB bad/blown coverage: 3
Too much time to pass: 1
Outside Run contain: 3

I’ll elaborate a few examples at the end.

As far as the biggest culprits… well there were a lot.

Greg Penn had the most with ten negative plays, but that has a lot to do with his position being around the ball the most.

Greg Penn: 10
Andre Sam: 9
Saivion Jones: 7
Sage Ryan: 6
Major Burns: 6
Omar Speights: 3
Latterance Welch: 3
Maason Smith: 2
Denver Harris: 2
Mehki Wingo: 2
Paris Shand: 2
Jacobian Guillory: 2
Whit Weeks: 2
Ovie Oghoufo: 2
Zy Alexander: 1
Harold Perkins: 1
Ashton Stamps: 1

As you can see that’s a lot of players committing a lot of different mistake.

The two issues that should bother you the most are missed tackles and loafing. Brian Kelly said in all LSU had 34 missed tackles which gave up an extra 284 yards.

And as for loading around? To see that many players not hustling to get to the ball on plays where your team just got gashed? That speaks volumes. Football is a weird sport. Things happen you don’t expect. Even if you can’t make the play, you should always run to the ball in case chaos occurs. Any coach will tell you this.

As far as the overall coaching play call selection I noticed many of Kiffin’s plays were perfectly designed to take advantage of what LSU had called. A lot of crossing routes and zones flooded. I think the play calling needed to mix in a good bit more man coverage.

There were also plays where no matter what the defenders did there was no way to make the play because of the defense that was called. On one play the defense was over stacked to the wide side. So Ole Miss put four blockers on the short side of the field to block LSU’s two defenders on that side of the box. I’ll let you guess what happens next.

So is it coaching or talent? Well, I think there’s definitely enough talent to be average. However average is a loooong way away from this defense that ranks 117th in the country. So I’d say it’s both - coaching and talent.

Scheme is an issue, but I think technique and fundamentals are the bigger issue. If this team just tackled well, that by itself wins the game for LSU, and it’s probably not a close game.

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