re: Re: Mettenberger and team enthusiasm

Last year was a stellar defense and stellar special teams creating a short field and a ton of turnovers that meant that the offense needed to only be average to compete. Last year LSU had a turnover margin of +20 (second only to OkState). That is a massive number and not sustainable. The previous year our margin was 8, and before that is was 4, and before that it was -1. Turnover margin is highly volatile.

Likewise the Offense was number 17 in points per game last year, but number 86 in yards per game. How did we score so many points with so few yards? Because we had short fields all year long. Alabama was number 20 in points per game with a very similar offense, but they had almost 100 more yards per game than us.

It's not a question of how much you run versus how much you pass, it's about changing things up when what you are doing isn't working. We try very few screens and when we do it's usually a back coming out of the backfield. What bout WR screens from a 3 or 4 wide set to get the receivers a little comfort and confidence catching the ball? Quick passes across the middle? Misdirection in the run, instead of trying to jam it up the middle 9 times out of 10? There are a ton of different things you can do to try to correct for a lack of ability at certain positions and this team doesn't do any of them.

Every game where our o-line struggles to create lanes we fail to score. If you're going to put every egg you've got into the "o-line better be able to run over the d-line" basket then of course things are going to go pear shaped as soon sa that doesn't happen.