We were absolutely awful against Ole Miss, against Texas in the 2nd half, and in parts of the game against Vanderbilt.

There are injuries every year. Dorsey was never the same after the Auburn chop block. He was way more important to that team than Delpit but they still managed to finish the season strong statistically if you account for the two triple overtime games.

Shame on us for not having Queen ready at the beginning of the season.

We had a record number of juniors return for their senior season (at least one at all levels of the defense), added a historically great freshman cornerback, and had a first round linebacker that we didn’t use properly until the end of the year. We finished outside of the top 30 in both scoring defense and total defense. That’s simply unacceptable.

I’ll give you that we were playing our best at the end of the year. That just doesn’t make up for what we saw most of the season.

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Posted by GetmorewithLes

UK Basketball Fan

Member since Jan 2011

19121 posts

Posted on 5/6/20 at 7:23 pm to southdowns84

quote:
There are injuries every year. Dorsey was never the same after the Auburn chop block. He was way more important to that team than Delpit but they still managed to finish the season strong statistically if you account for the two triple overtime games.

I can line up a whole lot of contributing factors for "under performing" the expectation but they will just sound like excuses to those with this mindset. In reality all of these "statistically dominant" defenses were nothing but moral victories for us because in the end none of those dominant defenses were undefeated as this one was. So somewhere they had a flaw too.

But then the arguement moves to "but we had no offense back then." Well we had offense this year and our defense had to endure 68 scoring drives by our offense in 3 min or less. Speaking of Les he would have turned over in his grave for that stat. He would have strived to be the TOP leader... Jimbo got that title this year. I do not want to be aTm.

So back to the 2019 defense, with all those returning Jrs we had one returning starting LB and he missed 9 games for suspension. We had 0 (that is zero) CB's behind the two starters with any experience. We never figured out whether Jacoby Stevens is a LB or Safety but he should be on the field somewhere, and Safety as a whole was a patchwork quilt behind Delpit.

So my point in all this was that this yrs defense had to find a chemistry and gel. At the end it was nothing like what it was envisioned coming out of fall camp.