re: Anyone surprised LSU offense played better than LSU’s defense and special teams?

quote:

---

No it does not, you’re obviously insane

---

That’s what I thought. You’re clearly devoid of logical thinking ability. The defense didn’t HOLD FSU to few possessions. They had no control over FSU taking over on offense. What they did control was how long FSU maintained possession and how many points they scored on average on those possessions. FSU having fewer possessions than average points to the fact the defense did a poor job getting FSU off the field (thus providing the offense fewer opportunities to score). It also means that they gave up more points per possession than is typical for a team giving up 24 points. Allowing the other team to score 24 points when they only had 9 possessions is a worse defensive performance than if they had scored 24 points in 12 possessions.

quote:

---

Wrong, you’re inverting reality and now ignoring your original argument. Like I said before this is totally agenda driven which is why you ignore the facts.

---

You clearly didn’t understand my argument if you think I’m contradicting myself in any way. My argument is and always has been that the defense not being able to get FSU off the field reduced the opportunities for the offense to score and that “only” giving up 24 points really isn’t a great performance when FSU had only 9 possessions. Taking away opportunities from the offense and giving up too many points per possession were the primary reasons LSU lost. The offense wasn’t perfect but they scored at a high rate given limited opportunities.

quote:

---

We moved the ball when FSU went to a 3 man front and played very soft. Until then, nothing.

---

Christ lol

They didn’t allow FSU into the red zone for an entire half and held FSU to zero points on 2 possessions that started in the red zone because of turnovers. That’s not bending that’s stopping the other team. You omit the fact that until the 3-4 minute mark of the 3rd quarter our offense had put up 3 total yards in the second half which is when we got down by 2 scores. Your entire motive is obvious which is why you’re ignoring huge areas of the game. 24 points allowed is average for an SEC defense, 23 points scored is usually bottom 2 or 3 and was the worst output for the SEC in week 1. You can try to spin that and subvert reality but the 0-1 record correlating those facts won’t budge.

Well first off you keep saying LSU had 7 possessions because you read that here but we had 8. You never bothered to look at FSUs possession total but they had 9. We lost and they gained 2 possessions because muffed punts, if that doesn’t happen we have 10 possessions and they end up with 7. That’s on the special teams but you’ve blamed the defense for it when the defense earned those for us. You’ve inverted reality in service to a narrative.

quote:

---

Well first off you keep saying LSU had 7 possessions because you read that here but we had 8.

---

I keep saying 7 because I’m the one who posted that. The possession ended by the half was not a realistic opportunity to score under the circumstances.

As to the muffs, your logic is flawed. It didn’t give FSU an extra turn AND take one from LSU. LSU still got the ball back on the exchange so they didn’t lose anything. It was just delayed. The first time, there were 3 minutes left in the first half. LSU was getting one more possession in the first half either way. The only question is whether FSU would have gotten another possession. Granted that would have been 8 legitimate scoring opportunities instead of 7 for LSU, which I have already said. The second half was almost the identical circumstance. LSU was getting one more possession either way. Without the muffs, it might have been 8 possessions for LSU to 7 for FSU instead of 9 for FSU and 8 for LSU. Under no circumstances was LSU getting 10 possessions.

quote:

---

So you’re discounting possessions is also flawed because if the muff doesn’t happen that possession is a valid chance for a drive giving us 3:15 seconds instead of just over 1 minute. And again saying we had a disadvantage of possessions because we had fewer than 12 is a double standard since FSU didn’t either. It was a 1 possession difference the entire game.

---

From the very beginning I have granted that the muff cost LSU a scoring opportunity. That doesn’t change that they still would have had far fewer opportunities than normal because the defense couldn’t get FSU off the field. The other part of your statement is a flawed understanding of my argument. I never once said the defense allowed FSU more opportunities to score than LSU. I have consistently said two things. One they took opportunities to score away from the offense, which is true. The other is that they gave up too many points per possession, which is also true. Had they gotten FSU off the field more often and more quickly while still only surrendering 24 points (in 12 tries instead of 9, for example), it would have been a good performance because then LSU would have had several more opportunities to score and almost certainly would have scored more than 24. Alternatively, had they bent but not broken and only surrendered, say, 16 points on FSU’s 9 possessions instead of 24, then the fewer opportunities for the offense would not have mattered so much since they would have had enough to score more than 16. The problem was the combination of surrendering time consuming drives and giving up a high point total per drive. They bent AND broke. That was the problem.

quote:

---

You’re nit picking at the D and refusing to apply the same standards to the offense.

---

I’m applying EXACTLY the same standard to offense and defense, which is points per possession compared to average. An average team scores around 28 points in 12 or so possessions, excluding end of half. That’s about 2.3 points per possession. The offense scored 23 in 7 non-end of half possessions, which is 3.3 points per possession, almost a full point better than average. The defense gave up 24 points in 9 possessions, which is 2.7 points per possession or about 1/3 point per possession WORSE than average. The offense outperformed the defense.

quote:

---

You’re selecting one stat while ignoring others and making a blanket assumption, that’s nit picking or selective critique.

---

I’m not ignoring anything. The fact that you don’t understand the argument doesn’t make it invalid. You are trying to take a low scoring game as proof the defense played well and the offense did not without at all considering why the game was low scoring. It was low scoring due to low possessions. That makes the points surrendered by the defense worse than they look and the points scored by the offense better than they look. If you want to argue that the defense played better than the offense in the first half, I won’t disagree with that. They weren’t as good as the 7 points allowed suggests and the offense wasn’t as bad as the 3 points scored suggests, but the defense still outplayed the offense in the first half. For the game as a whole, that is not the case.