How did OSU neutralize the D-Line; Lloyd?

[tarheelute]

My seat was not the greatest on Saturday, and I won’t get to watch the broadcast until ESPN repeats later this week.

So, what did OSU do than neutralized the Defensive Line and the line-backers, particularly Lloyd? If that is not a fair assessment, please advise.

What I saw was congestion in the middle of the lines, with most of the action pushed to the edges, otherwise over the top. Benard, Sewell, Bishop, Davis, Phillips and McKinney account for 39 of 61 tackles. Lloyd and Tafua account for 4 and 3 tackles respectively.

I just don’t know how they did it, outside of talent and size. Heck our defense was only on the field for 26 minutes, so they should not have been overly fatigued.

[Rick]

We rarely blitzed and when we did it was all up the middle which appeared to be jammed up all night.  I saw a couple of plays where Mika looked like something was wrong with him.  He was kind of standing around and not moving like he ususally does.  Not sure if he was hurt or just confused but it was strange to watch.  

What I saw all night was that we had no ability to cover their WRs and we did not make any adjustments to put any pressure on their QB.  The game reminded me of the Oregeon State game where our offense came to play and our defense came in with a game plan that didn’t work but then made no adjustments to try something different.  If you can’t cover their WRs then you have to put pressure on their QB.  Not sure why we didn’t try something to do that or maybe we did and it just didn’t work and I missed it.  

One thing I do know is that #79 for them is one hell of an offensive tackle.  He is massive and can move.  Very impressive player.

[Danilo]

Great points. Was surprised we didn’t change up our scheme too much when it clearly wasn’t working. Would’ve loved to see a few more blitz packages…don’t think the outcome could get much worse

[gothamute]

Like everyone, i was shocked at our lack of pressure on the QB but as was noted we rarely called for pressure… to the extent that I started to think it had to be a strategic decision not to blitz. I looked it up during the 3Q and this season Stroud was rated #1 against pressure of all D1 QBs… so a pick your poison situation to be sure, but the result was he had all day every play to pick his targets and dial up dimes… given the L it’s hard not to wonder whether this was the right strategy, but i guess it nearly got the job done. Plenty of Monday morning QBing to go around, but for me this was the biggest thing to second guess about the game plan.

[Rick]

I guess for me, after watching our DBs get torched all night long, I would have liked to have seen some different attempts to get to the QB rather than let him sit back and pick us apart all night.  It was very similar to the Oregon State game when their misdirection plays continued to kill us and we did nothing about it.  The definition of insanity IMO.  I don’t blame anyone really but would love to hear from Morgan about the strategy of not putting pressure on the QB all night.  I would also like to know if Mika was 100% healthy because he appeared to be a bit off all night.  I hope he is OK.

Regardless though I am so proud of this team.  They went beyond all of my expectations and triumphed over a ton of adversity.    

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