Natty Preview

So in thinking about this, I went back in and watched two games I thought were key: The semifinal against Ohio State and last years National Championship game against Alabama.

On offense... everything rides on the performance of Stetson as the mailman delivereth.. but also takes away; a lot.

SBIV is a Dawg HOFer, but we may get lost in the praise of the result and forget that in both of these games he made a LOT of mistakes that put UGA in very bad situations. Against OSU he made a bad interception and almost caused another turnover throwing a backwards pass to Ladd that isn't even one of the reads on the play. He also made a couple of bad decisions, one on a RPO and another when he decided to keep the ball on a read option. Overall his performance was a half sub-par, a quarter of okay, and a quarter of Heisman trophy caliber play. 
   Much of the same thing can be said of the Natty last year. 2 fumbles.. one of which just involved him dropping the ball as he was running in the open field which luckily bounced right back into his hand, and then the fumble that gave 'Bama the ball on our 20 leading to their last TD as he tried to heave the ball downfield as he scrambled. He also had a bad intentional grounding penalty in that game and almost fumbled the snap on the short Zeus TD.

We can block and run... we can catch. We have all the weapons. The game on the offensive will come down to great Stetson overcoming bad Stetson, or hopefully having bad Stetson not even show up.

Next up... WTH pass defense?? 

A brief mention special teams: I would say special teams leans in Georgia's favor just a tiny bit, but TCU does have an explosive returner.

As long as we can contain that, we have a bit of an edge. I think our ability to block kicks gives us that edge and we keep it as long as we don't fall victim to fakes. We can't reply on a Kirby timeout to save us next time.

Oh defense, where for art thou?

Ringo hasn't covered anyone in a month and half while Starks and Smith have been strangely silent as well. The main issue for me is that Ringo has never been a glue cover guy and Georgia's success with passing defense was always communication and pressure. The communication part seems to have broken down a bit in zone coverage and it has really hit us hard.

I have little confidence in our man to man coverage holding up for more than 3.5 seconds unless something drastic changes, and it's also been killing us with QB's who can run. In my mind we really need to have success in zone so we can collapse down on the lateral running game and keep the opposing QB from making big plays with his legs. OSU was able to neutralize Jalen Carter and despite the sacks, we really didn't enough consistent pressure and when we did we lost contain. This was very similar to what happened in the SEC championship game last year when Alabama negated Jordan Davis.

For me... success against TCU comes down to pressure from the front 7, and not pressure that allows them to get outside contain; allowing Duggan to make plays with his legs and buy time for his receivers. We need to play a lot of zone keeping our eyes on him and we need pressure UP THE MIDDLE. If we can do that and then maintain contain on the edges, the secondary can do it's job well enough.

God Bless and Go Dawgs