I think you are selling the potential of the pass rush and the secondary short. We knew what we had with McD and Anderson played well from day one. The problem is both guys were smallish and a three man front allowed the opposition to double BOTH of our best players. Our secondary may have been young but we also knew, on paper, it was the most talented positional group on the roster and they backed that up early on.
So here we have a first round pass rusher getting doubled (sometimes tripled), a more than viable rusher in Anderson, yet we were fairly abysmal at getting sacks. Admittedly the stats don't always tell the entire story as sometimes we got pressure but with a 3 man front there is often a LOT of scrambling room. With that said we did absolutely nothing to create favorable matchups and try to help our anemic offense get field position, ergo help them score points. Instead we played a base defense that was excellent in preventing yards and touchdowns, but beyond paltry in flipping field position, scoring touchdowns (we didn't score ONE defensive TD all season), and creating TOs. Those three things mitigated some of the impact the defense had, especially for the team we put on the field.
At the end of the day the offense was trash, the coaching (outside Heacock) was suspect, and the special teams were the joke (yet again) of college football. This wasn't really a good football team but I would have liked to see Heacock and the coaches be more aggressive with THE BEST UNIT we had and see what they could have done. People act like some (like myself here) are saying the defense was faulty and that we need to completely abandon the system. That's not the case. I think we could have done a better job of moving guys around, mitigating the biggest defensive weakness we had (LB), and put the line AND the secondary in better positions to make game changing plays.
Would it have worked? None of us, including myself can say for certain. But I do think it was a huge mistake, given the offensive and special teams struggles, not to try. It's akin to an awesome offense being taken off the field on a 4th and 1, down 42-46 with 3 minutes to go with 3 timeouts. The staff is clearly playing to get the ball back but you are taking your BEST unit, the unit that's put you in a position to win the game in the first place, off the field. To a lesser degree we did the same thing with our defense. We stuck with the status quo despite greater team needs (in order to win) and positional talent that screamed for an alteration.
Will just have to agree to disagree on this one.
