- Outside contain still a major issue. It’s clear some guys either don’t know who has contain on certain plays or they are intentionally giving it up in hopes of making a big play.
- DLine mostly dominated tonight. Only issue there is outside contain and that’s not solely on DEs. But our DEs have to know that if they crash in on a mobile QB, they are likely going to put everyone else in a bad position.
- Outside of Ellis and Pickens, Webb has really come on strong the past few games at DT. He made some nice plays tonight.
- Several times our CBs cheated and bit on the play fake, giving up long passes. Rush and Dial were the main culprits. This has become commonplace for Rush at this point. Opposing teams will continue to attack him until that’s corrected.
- On the other hand, Cam Smith was really good tonight.
- Vandy had a few formations were they overloaded a side and we chose to line up our 2 LBs on top of the inside WRs/TEs. That made our S or Nickel have to come down and in essence fill like a LB in the gap where one of our LBs typically are. Often, our S didn’t do a good job of filling and Vandy hit several nice gainers on us with those formations.
- I’m looking forward to the day Debo and Kaba are ready for MLB reps. Too many stretches during this game where we got little to no production from that position.
- Offensively, the tight formations, which in general have been very good to us this year, we struggled with tonight. Vandy often came with blitzes on those formations, which we struggled to pick up.
- The first few drives, Vandy really didn’t do much blitzing, but once they changed things up, we sometimes struggled to correctly recognize who was coming on the blitzes.
- At this point, I don’t believe any plays should be called for our WRs that don’t involve their routes being past the marker we need. Outside of Vann - who didn’t seem quite himself tonight - our WRs don’t have the ability to get YAC.
- Bell is special and I hope we continue to find different ways to get him the ball.
- I liked what Satt did with White tonight. White may not be very effective running the ball between the tackles, but he’s got a nice burst and some shiftiness on the perimeter.
- Rushing was a mixed bag tonight. We should be able to run the ball effectively against a team like Vandy when they have 6 in the box. But same issues tonight when we struggled. Either an OL would miss a block (or hold) or the RB couldn’t make a guy miss. Pull plays are still far more effective for us than zone.
- Good job by the staff to make the call to sub in Zeb once Doty started sailing his throws.
- Surprised Vandy didn’t bring any pressure on our last drive. Allowed Zeb to settle in and take his time scanning his options.
At this level, you have to take a win any way you can get it. With the amount of penalties and turnovers we had, we were fortunate to win. Let’s hope some of these issues get cleaned up soon. We have a tough one next week, but anything can happen any given week - Purdue reminded Iowa of that tonight.
