[CTcard]

I guess my strong sense is that whomever we play, we play our game on offense.  Make Washington defend the entire field, wide and deep.  Keep their safeties honest, and fearful of strong bursts to the LOS a la Barnett against us Saturday, with play action.

Show we are willing to throw on first down and other apparent running downs.  Do it early. 

Aye, there's the rub.

KSU's safeties were crashing hard, and occasionally paid for it, but not enough.

By my count,* we passed on 4 of 20 first down plays (not counting run out the clock plays).
Those were mostly successful - the 40 yard bomb to Rector for a TD, Chryst's first play for 11 yards to McCaffrey, a play action pass to Rector for 13 right after the Lloyd INT, and an incomplete deep sideline pass to Irwin right after the Meeks INT. There was also one sack (-1 yd) and one Burns run on a first down (+4 yds, a scramble?).

For the most part, our brain trust either didn't feel the need or didn't have confidence to attack those charging safeties. I suspect we will have that opportunity/necessity a lot as the season plays out.



* Before they completely destroyed the official site this summer, they used to have a very cool feature in the official box scores where they broke down every play by down and distance based on run/pass and formation. That is one of many things that has now disappeared with the horrendous new "mobile friendly" format. Thus I did the count myself here - it might not be completely reliable.

Other things now completely gone from the official site are all previous seasons cumulative stats. As of today those seem to be completely gone, which doesn't seem much worse than two weeks ago when the links existed but were all broken.

It appears to be that they have used "mobile friendly" as a synonym for "mostly useless".

[CTcard]

I guess my strong sense is that whomever we play, we play our game on offense.  Make Washington defend the entire field, wide and deep.  Keep their safeties honest, and fearful of strong bursts to the LOS a la Barnett against us Saturday, with play action.

Show we are willing to throw on first down and other apparent running downs.  Do it early. 

Aye, there's the rub.

KSU's safeties were crashing hard, and occasionally paid for it, but not enough.

By my count,* we passed on 4 of 20 first down plays (not counting run out the clock plays).
Those were mostly successful - the 40 yard bomb to Rector for a TD, Chryst's first play for 11 yards to McCaffrey, a play action pass to Rector for 13 right after the Lloyd INT, and an incomplete deep sideline pass to Irwin right after the Meeks INT. There was also one sack (-1 yd) and one Burns run on a first down (+4 yds, a scramble?).

For the most part, our brain trust either didn't feel the need or didn't have confidence to attack those charging safeties. I suspect we will have that opportunity/necessity a lot as the season plays out.



* Before they completely destroyed the official site this summer, they used to have a very cool feature in the official box scores where they broke down every play by down and distance based on run/pass and formation. That is one of many things that has now disappeared with the horrendous new "mobile friendly" format. Thus I did the count myself here - it might not be completely reliable.

Other things now completely gone from the official site are all previous seasons cumulative stats. As of today those seem to be completely gone, which doesn't seem much worse than two weeks ago when the links existed but were all broken.

It appears to be that they have used "mobile friendly" as a synonym for "mostly useless".