re: House got put in the doghouse tonight.

quote:

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The advantage of a zone vs a running QB is that 11 guys are facing the QB and can read a QB run and react faster. But when you play read and react and your guys are all way off the ball to start every play and also diagnose slowly, not so good.

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I thought Sunbelt Billy actually summed up the dilemma of man vs. zone against a running QB pretty nicely, when he was talking about Daniels in postgame a couple of weeks ago.

He said something along the lines of “pick your poison. You can run zone and try to keep everything in front of you, and die by a thousand cuts. Or you can man up and try to bring pressure - but then if he escapes the pocket everyone has their back to the QB.”

The infuriating thing as an LSU fan is that we have been shitting the bed either way. If we man up and send pressure, we don’t get to the QB and we get burned (deep or on the scramble). If we sit back in zone, the QB either finds the weak spot or escapes the pocket and we still can’t stop him.

It hasn’t been one thing holding us back. It’s been pass rush, coverage, open field tackling, run fits - everything.

I will say this, though: I thought the defense seemed to be playing with a lot more confidence in the first half than I had seen previously this year. It also seemed like we were running a lot more man coverage. At the time I just chalked that up to not respecting A&M’s third string quarterback. But then we would go into quarters or something on 3rd & long and get burned over and over again.

It makes me wonder how much of the success after halftime was simply.. staying in man (trail coverage) on 3rd down.