[Goose]

I hope that ShawVita are designing an actual gameplan to counter this likely approach. Something that should've happened at halftime against UCLA...

If you listen to what the players have said, they HAD a gameplan designed against what UCLA actually did. I think you would agree that it didn't take a genius to know they were going to pressure the rookie QB. UCLA also normally jumps around a lot on defense, so that wasn't a surprise at all. What probably was a bit of a surprise was that UCLA played so aggressively in the secondary, although nobody has said that AFAIK. The gameplan was to run  into the less than effective UCLA run defense and throw short combination patterns. The press man disrupted the patterns pretty badly, and UCLA also messed up the throwing lanes. The killer was that we couldn't run the ball at all. If we could have run, it may have forced UCLA out of press man, although they played with only one high safety basically all night as it was.

There is no "adjustment" one can make to overcome an OL that is getting it's head handed to it. Football isn't chess where each piece has deterministic properties and you can scheme your way to success. If your line is getting beat like a drum, you can't pass block and you can't run block, you will lose, no matter what plays you call. Changing to a different page in the playbook isn't going to help that. There are no "magic plays". You have to block someone. Our problem was that we had nothing to build on. We weren't being successful anywhere, so "doing more of that" wasn't an option.

If you want to fault the coaches for something, I would suggest you do so for not having the OL and the receivers ready to play. You could also say they didn't regroup and play better after halftime. That is what really surprised me. I though we would see some real fire in the second half, and we didn't.

[Goose]

I hope that ShawVita are designing an actual gameplan to counter this likely approach. Something that should've happened at halftime against UCLA...

If you listen to what the players have said, they HAD a gameplan designed against what UCLA actually did. I think you would agree that it didn't take a genius to know they were going to pressure the rookie QB. UCLA also normally jumps around a lot on defense, so that wasn't a surprise at all. What probably was a bit of a surprise was that UCLA played so aggressively in the secondary, although nobody has said that AFAIK. The gameplan was to run  into the less than effective UCLA run defense and throw short combination patterns. The press man disrupted the patterns pretty badly, and UCLA also messed up the throwing lanes. The killer was that we couldn't run the ball at all. If we could have run, it may have forced UCLA out of press man, although they played with only one high safety basically all night as it was.

There is no "adjustment" one can make to overcome an OL that is getting it's head handed to it. Football isn't chess where each piece has deterministic properties and you can scheme your way to success. If your line is getting beat like a drum, you can't pass block and you can't run block, you will lose, no matter what plays you call. Changing to a different page in the playbook isn't going to help that. There are no "magic plays". You have to block someone. Our problem was that we had nothing to build on. We weren't being successful anywhere, so "doing more of that" wasn't an option.

If you want to fault the coaches for something, I would suggest you do so for not having the OL and the receivers ready to play. You could also say they didn't regroup and play better after halftime. That is what really surprised me. I though we would see some real fire in the second half, and we didn't.