Georgia Tech Film Review: First Quarter

Louisville got off to a horrid start in this football game while Georgia Tech did whatever it wanted to do on offense. This game goes a lot differently if the offensive line plays a good game. Louisville could have at least been a shootout.

UOFL BALL, 1ST AND 10

Louisville started the game with a very nice play call to get Jawon Pass out of the pocket. They run a nice bootleg and Crum uses his speed to separate much more quickly than the outside linebacker expects him to. You can see the linebacker at the bottom of the screen check on him twice and he’s well behind him at that point. Crum also makes a very nice catch on the sideline.

UOFL BALL, 3RD AND 1

A few things go wrong here on the first third down of the game. Lukayus McNeil drops his head when he fires off to block and the end gets by him with a nice swim move. Also, Linwood Foy gets beat to the spot and ends up riding his guy directly into the path of the play. Both of the defenders being in the hole forces Trey Smith left where he is chased down by McNeil’s guy. Throw in Nate Scheler not getting to his block and Smith has to fend off two guys to get this first down. That doesn’t happen and it’s a blown play.

UOFL BALL, 4TH AND 1

This is another play where things go poorly up front and it leads to Pass having his arm hit as he throws and a missed opportunity for a huge play early in the game. The right side of the line gets pushed back into the fullback. I believe that the fullback is responsible for the end on this play. That’s what I’m seeing as the play plays out, at least.

This is a staple of Petrino’s offense. He’s run it for years and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it executed this poorly.

GT BALL, 2ND AND 5

On Georgia Tech’s first touchdown, no one took the quarterback. That’s obvious but I’m not sure based on what everyone does, who is responsible for him.

• If G.G. Robinson is responsible for the dive man on this play that means Mike Boykin has the quarterback. Boykin takes the dive man.
• If Boykin has the dive, Dorian Etheridge should have the quarterback. He gets outside immediately as if he’s supposed to help on contain or be a second man on the pitch.
• That leaves Robert Hicks possibly and he gets blown out of the play by the guard.

It’s definitely possible that this play was just blocked extremely well and no one missed their assignment, also.

GT BALL, 1ST AND 10

This is a two-fer. UofL used this defensive alignment and I can’t really understand why. I think the idea is to have two sure tacklers to take the dive while also forcing the quarterback and pitch man very wide. The three guys playing at 5+ yards are able to play down hill against the qb/pitch man. But as it kept getting gashed, Geoff Schwartz tweeted this:

Schwartz is a former NFL offensive lineman and he makes a living now breaking down plays and games. I’d have to agree with Geoff here.

The second part of this play is that no one takes the pitch man. Everything shows that Dee Smith has that responsibility here and he turns inside to take the quarterback. That puts two guys on him and no one to contain the back. This was a theme through the night.

UOFL BALL, 3RD AND 5

This is a pet peeve of mine and I’ll have to admit that I don’t know if it’s just because I happen to notice it every time but Petrino runs this play way too much on third and medium. The play is called “Mesh”. It’s just simple crossing routes at about three yards. I knew it was coming when they lined up and I would be shocked if Nate Woody didn’t have his defense ready for it.

GT BALL, 1ST AND 10

The more I watch the defense, the more it seems like some of the weird things they did were on purpose. On this play you can see Khane Pass split the difference on the outside. I don’t know that I really understand why that would be the plan, but Pass did it each time I watched him up until this point in the game. The reason why this is odd to me is that it takes away your contain guy. You put a guy on the pitch man because if the quarterback keeps it, he’s at least in an alley that has guys running towards it. If you allow the pitch outside, you end up with just what happens on this play.