New and Improved Utah VS WSU Game Thread

That comment pertain to what will happen if the Big Ten expands further. If by some chance southern California and Washington jump ship and head to the Big Ten it would cause a major shift in college athletics.

Is there any way to move the BYU posts to the Covid 19 thread? They are both about afflictions that just never seem to go away.

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Pac12 taking UNLV?!?!?!?

UNLV has had such weak football support over the years that when Wisconsin played a road game at their old stadium out in Henderson and brought 20,000 fans with them, it was essentially the first time that the stadium had been filled with red and they took overhead shots to put on the front cover of their media guides. And their basketball glory years are very far in the distant past.

And the PAC12 has use of the new Allegiant Stadium and the T-Mobile arena for events without needing UNLV to be our league.

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So I’ll make an effort to redirect the conversation to Utah football. What day, time and channel will the game be on this week?

Your attempts at subtle trolling are not so subtle.

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:joy: thank you for the link, but I wasn’t trolling. Washington state will be a good game for a BYU fan to watch.

No doubt. BYU gets an invitation to the only P5 conference that would ever take them (who themselves are in a desperate state with their anchors having left), win a game in the rivalry for the first time in 12 years, then we get trolls suggesting our league is going to disintegrate with USC & UW joining a conference of teams mostly east of the Mississippi.

USC has made some bad decisions. Joining a conference to fly east 2000+ miles east for multiple games won’t be one of them. (It turns out that both USC and UW have medical schools where things like jet lag and circadian rhythm are topics of interest.)

New research indicates jet lag is almost entirely an eastbound problem

Only BYU was desperate enough & short-sighted enough to join a conference (along with 2 schools in the eastern time zone) smiling, elated, certain they’re back to greatness, will become a upper tier program in the B12, having already forgotten their own dismal record playing in the Eastern time zone.

(Another study went into greater depth, testing saliva in athletes for cortisol levels & melatonin, testing grip strength. Summary - east bound travel of multiple time zones is a real ■■■■■. On the east coast, for BYU to perform optimally they’d have to leave a week early. That dang science thing again! Those uppity med schools! Call the Legislature!)

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So back to Utah football. What does Utah need to do this week to own the line of scrimmage?

Some LOS thoughts:

Defense: Vs Wazzu it’s hard to get pressure on the QB in the really short passing game because the ball comes out so quickly. It will be important for the DL to get their hands up to get a few bat downs. 6-7 Devin Kaufusi helps, as do the rest of our DL who have good size.

Vs the run game, don’t let their OL manipulate you into creating big holes, let the LBs clean up and keep Borghi and their RBs bottled up. They’re thin at QB, so the QB run game won’t be a big threat.

The 2s need to be ready if there are sustained drives - they’ll seek to wear down the defense, so a 60/40 split in snaps between 1s and 2s up front should keep the energy level high.

Tafua is an every down player like Anae was, so he probably won’t get platooned. If Tafua can demand a double team, that flips the numbers game our way, and it becomes possible to bring a LB or DB on a blitz without giving up much in coverage. A blitz will keep their short passing game short, and if the pressure is consistent allows our cover guys to jump routes, selectively. It’s a high risk move, gotta have safety help if you don’t get a hand on the ball or get a pick. Scalley’s defenses work best when everything else is accounted for & some risks can be taken.

On offense, we’ve had 2 weeks of fairly intense pressure, and some changes up front. There won’t be an issue with changing blocking schemes over the noise, we’ve had more time to practice doing just that, the symphony that is OL play should start sounding more like a symphony and less like a Jr. HS jazz band.

Any OL, in the NFL or in college, will lose the LOS battle if the defense knows what’s coming, so it’s imperative for the other parts of the offense to be effective, move the ball, keep the defense off balance. Everything gets easier up front for the OL when DL have their hands on their hips. I didn’t watch all of Wazzu vs USC, but I don’t get the sense they have great depth, so sustaining drives and wearing down their D will make our OL look much, much better.

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It’s understandable. They haven’t had much to crow about for over a decade, so they’re making up for lost time.

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The real sparks are going to fly in the Big 12 when T Boone Pickens gets a look at the size of Mr. Haddow’s television.

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Like you, I suspect the other teams know what’s coming. It seems to me the opponent often seems to be in the perfect defense, and/or have the perfect blitz called. There are a lot of possible reasons for this:

  1. Are the Utes tendencies so strong that they are tipping plays with personnel and formation?
  2. Are teams picking up the Utes play calls and/or OL calls?
  3. Are individual players tipping plays by the way they line up? We have all heard of situations where an OL tipped the play direction by which hand he put on the ground, or the QB tipped run/pass by foot placement at the snap, etc.

Ma-ake: Any thoughts?

Tipping plays is a problem, if your team is doing it.

That said, listening to Riley over the last week the fact the O-line wasn’t gelling was the overriding concern. Too many Olé blocks blowing up plays. When they yanked a couple of lineman and moved guys to other more natural positions on the line, they seemed to play better in the end of the SDSU game.

We will see if the improvement Carrie’s over to today.

Play calling most of the time is down & distance, at the college level.

I’m reminded of Brian Johnson as a JR here (I think), watching Florida in the NC game at a party, explaining / predicting what the play will be, and nailing it about 90% of the time. In that case, Florida just executed, Urban’s motivation & schemes just beat an opponent. (Also part of why the NFL is such a different game for Urban)

We all remember when Ludwig 1.0 would drive us nuts in throwing to the endzone on 3 & 2. He was trying to destroy defensives trying to get a bead on down & distance tendencies, and pissed off most of our fans in the process.

Ludwig 2.0 seems like it’s a deal between KW and Lud: establish the kind of offensive base Whitt would like to see, based on our recruiting & success to that point: chew up yards, eat the clock, punish & wear down the defense, get points on the board. Once that’s working, then move on to upper division stuff (which Whitt fully knows is imperative to reach the next step in the ladder). In our OOC games, that was the plan.

Because the OL has been still in development - revealed by Ford’s interview after BYU - I get the sense they’ve wanted the basics developed & solid, so it was fairly conservative play calling in Provo. BYU jumped all over that, and with the LOS an uphill fight, the playbook got really thin to avoid high risk turnover situations, and we looked flat, behind the curve. (But it was the FB 201 stuff that got us back into the game, lots of Bernard up the middle, etc.)

SDSU followed the same recipe, and we discovered we had a serious problem - and an apparent solution - at QB, all within 10 dramatic days.

No question all the stuff you mention is part of picking up tendencies, that’s upper division defense, after the down & distance basics. Harding & Lud work closely together, there’s chatter throughout the game, Lud gets a sense of what’s possible, how the defense is reacting, what we’re able to accomplish, and it goes from there.

I think a good example of the mixture they’d like to see is the play call in the first OT. 25 yard pass to Dixon in the corner of the EZ on first down. In any given situation that’s a low yield play, most often a burned down.

That play really stands out to me - in the execution, in the revived swagger, of Dixon breaking out (under Rising’s leadership), of the offense making a statement.

The last 3 TDs in that game gave not just the team, but the fans the sense that maybe there’s a lot more to this offense than what we’ve seen. There was a statement. I’ll bet the OL room had a lot more energy this week, things started clicking, the WRs & TEs & RBs all had more energy & focus.

If we can pick up a “W” today, that will go a loooong way toward getting things gelled, with a BYE week to heal & keep working on the schematics & then a trip to the Coliseum.

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The O-Line at Utah seems like it has been “under development” for years. Not sure if it is scheme, recruiting/developing talent or lack of effort.

Frustrating that year after year they can’t seem to figure it out especially in the throw game. Running by an large has been fine, pass block, not so much!

I have two really huge concerns about this game:

  1. The loss of Broughton. This is huge.

  2. We’ve all seen back-up QB’s come in under a simplified set of plays and succeed in a one-game situation. But that is not the same thing as succeeding when you have a full playbook in front of you, come in expecting to start and have the coaches calling plays for you and have defense prepared for you. Rising was in no-huddle… but will he have the same success trying to run a Utah offensive game-plan (which seems crippled lately). We’ll see. Hopefully the people calling the plays (KW and AL) are self-critical and adaptive enough to see what worked in that 4th Q vs. SDSU and adjust.

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Playing OL isn’t easy. If you’re number is called, it’s something bad. Your fantasy is running down the field to celebrate with whoever made the TD and will be on the sportscast later.

The complexity, the timing, the lack of notoriety, having to eat until you puke (Gunther didn’t even look like the same person a few years after playing). Big kids would rather be the next Travis Kelce than a grinder. How many times have we seen USC struggle with OL play? (More than they’d like to admit.)

It’s been mentioned that Huntley & Moss obscured some issues up front - there’s some truth to that, on those teams. Defenses had been jamming us since the days of Booker, part of why Ludwig came back.

25 years ago or so we got beat by Utah State at home. I was working with a guy who’d played some college ball. He had a succinct explanation for my disappointment: “Football is a game of heart”.

With this OL group, that will be the biggest element on how good they can get… along with Rising, Bernard, Solo, Kuithe, Howard, Dixon, Pledger, Kinkaid, et al, getting opposing defensives being concerned about the back end.

Look at it this way - One year we had double digits sacks of UCLA’s Hundley in the Rose Bowl, when Booker & Kendall Thompson led us to a win against a ranked UCLA team. After the game I was listening to the UCLA radio guys, who were trying to defend their OL. “Nate Orchard is a freak of nature that few OTs will be able to contain”.

(Hopefully we can get back to the OL being not the focus of attention.)

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