God bless the Pac 12 playing earlier games. I struggled staying awake for Utes last week.
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On an unrelated but similar note, WiscY and Minnesota had to cancel their rivalry game due to COVID yesterday. Paul Bunyan’s Ax will get its first hiatus in 117 years.
Why do we have two threads for this game? Can we merge them?
The other one was started first but I moved all of it to this thread.
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After rewatching the SC game, we’ll play better.
Nick Ford getting smoked, not even touching the DE? He’s got to be getting better physically. Just playing at sea level will help a little.
A whole bunch of Game 1 kind of mistakes and blown assignments.
The week before we had zero OL and 1 QB for UCLA? Yeah, we’ll play better.
Defense revealed some unexpected flexibility. Lloyd is a tackling machine, Sewell gives us a SS-LB hybrid, and Stone Fotu has a bright future. Ritchie and Davis will play faster, the CBs are solid, didn’t show any press coverage - UW’s receivers are really good but not the automatic NFL talents USC always has.
I expect a competitive game.
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Agreed. I think it’s a lot better because the defense wasn’t as bad as they looked. The TO’s really hurt them.
On offense, Bentley will be better. We all know he’s better than that. He knows it. This is his shot and his team. And our OL can’t be worse, right?
If we win the TO game, we are in this. We may lose, but I think it will be a really good game. A heart racer game with a side of bubble guts. So, yeah, a good one.
I love your optimism. My expectation is a 34-24 loss. My hope is that the Utes play much better than they did against USC; that the RB’s have actual creases to run through and that Bentley has more time.
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After watching UW-Arizona, and reading about Sumlin being on the hot seat and the pretty severe lack of talent they have on defense, I think our D will be able to keep them under 30, and if we take care of the ball, maybe 20 or possibly less.
Our corners showed zero press - it was weird, like watching a Bronco defense line up 8 yards off - and along with the reasonably decent zone we showed to make Slovis work for it, I think we can throw some different looks to make this freshman QB earn it, possibly get some turnovers, maybe some points. On the CB blitz by Phillips, Vonte Davis was late getting to Vaughn, then missed the tackle. That’s fixable. Van Fillinger is a solid DE as a FR behind Tafua & Tupai, Kaufusi looked promising.
Whit doesn’t accept excuses, but like you say, if the OL can be healthier, create some creases, and Thompson / Enis / S. Nacua / Kuithe / Vele get separation and Bentley returns to his SEC form, I think we can get to the mid 20s. We had some decent plays vs USC, just not enough of them, and not enough on the ground. Brumfield & Bernard showed good vertical acceleration, Ty Jordan should put LBs and DBs on their heels a little. If he gets to the 3rd level, he’ll make somebody look bad.
Just want to see a higher percentage of successful plays strung together, and we’ll see.
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I think we were snake bit from last season, where we played man, and they got extremely lucky with a number of hail mary style jump balls.
Did anyone here actually watch Bentley at South Carolina? It’s not like the gamecocks have been good at any point since Spurrier left.
The evolution of our coverage philosophy has been pretty dramatic. At the beginning of the decade we were just about all man - put the best athletes at CB and force the QB to throw to sticky coverage. It worked great… at that level… until we got the big promotion.
In a league of QBs & WRs where many end up in the league, that’s just too simple, and too easy to defeat with drag routes, rub routes, QBs that can drop dimes. It was very welcome to see us dropping 8 in Game 1, with some 1st year players on the back end. They’ve been putting a lot of time into developing zone.
A pitcher with just one type of pitch is going to get lit up in MLB, even if they can throw heat in the triple digits.
As for Bentley in the SEC, he put up some big numbers, which even with opposing defenses relaxing when they played SC is noteworthy. I don’t expect him to play on Sundays, but he knows how to run an offense and find who to get the ball to, against athletic defenses. Coach’s kid, 3 year starter in the SEC, voted Captain by his teammates.
If he only practiced one day in two weeks before facing a motivated USC defense, with crappy OL play - I think he’ll show quite a bit better than what we saw.
The Riley interview of Thompson saying he’s encouraged to see Jaylon Johnson having success in the league - it lets him know he can play at that level - suggests our WRs have reasonably decent talent, and they’ve been working hard.
There will be plays where nobody is open and you have to get rid of it, and some drive stoppers. That happens at the P5 level and in the league. Can we adjust & find where the opportunities are, and take advantage? I think we will.
It’s an abbreviated season, so everything we do is paying it forward.
I was also under the impression that Utah started three true freshman on the OL. Covid19 or quarantine protocol had limited OL players. Can anyone confirm that? But if that is true and some of the more experienced guys can now play, I expect better OL performance.
I’ve watched a lot of Bentley. He’s a better throwing JR Huntley. Or at least was.
Look at it this way: we protected Huntley a lot last year with Moss and a simple pass game. As bad as our OL was, our RB’s flashed and flashed well.
I fully expect our offense to look a lot better due to the OL having another week, one less RB (I’m not sure if it will be Wilmore or Brumfield won’t see the field) and the pass game suited to Bentley.
Now, it being UW “better” is 21-27 points. And we can hold them to that as well if we limit TO’s.
We might not win, but I think it will be a close game and we will all feel better about Utah…or be complaining that we didn’t win when we lose by less than 3…
Huntley as a junior had a 140 pass rating. Last year we ran the ball a lot because Moss is an NFL back and our WRs were not. Huntley had the highest completion percentage of throws over 20 yards in the entire country.
Huntley is on the level of Scott Mitchell and Alex Smith, he was in the discussion of best QB in the nation.
Bentley has a 50 pass rating and looked like Jonathan Crosswhite / TD Croshaw / Mike Fouts / Lance Rice / Tommy Grady
I expect Bentley to be more of a game manager QB than Huntley was.
Last year we had Huntley & Moss, with some Nacua, Dixon, Kuithe added.
The play I’ll remember best from last year for the offense was 3rd and long at UW when Huntley waited as long as he could, and threw it to where nobody was, and Nacua laid out for it for about a 27 yard gain. That play epitomized the sacrifice, the skill, the moxy, everything good about Utah’s offense in the PAC-12 era.
(There were innumerable plays that defined the Ute defense last year. I’ll just remember laughing out loud at the pre-snap games Blackmon & Burgess played with the opposing QB. Having 5 excellent cover DBs as part of your regular defense was a luxury I hope we can see again. Pre-snap reads were meaningless exercises in futility against our D last year.)
This year when everyone on the offense recovers, I expect to see Ludwig open up the playbook, get teams off balance. Brumfield, Thompson, Kuithe, Enis, Nacua, Jordan, Wilmore/Bernard. Ty Jordan by himself will have defenses leaning his way in fear of being on SportsCenter.
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Bentley’s rating as a JR was 146… so thanks for backing me up?
The rest of your post is not quite relevant to what I was talking about…so…good luck with that.
Covey? What’s up?
Hamstring is the word.
He warmed up last week but couldn’t go.
Cool, if he had brought South Carolina’s offensive line with him he’d probably have a 146 rating again this year. Huntley did it with no pass protection.
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Per Bill Riley the team is cleared to travel.
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