Took The Words Right Out of My Mouth

I was planning on writing my thoughts about the OSU game today and to my good fortune, I discovered in my comments from Sunday's brief post that my law school buddy, Greg Pope, had done the work for me. I have cut and pasted his remarks below to give them front page, above-the-fold coverage. I agree with every word of Greg's post and I believe he drilled into all of my chief concerns. In a subsequent post, I will add a little to this. In the meantime, I yield to Mr. Pope...

Some observations re Saturday's disappointing loss:

Bobo went to sleep after the first drive - which was the most frustrating aspect of the game; we have to find some receivers who will catch - too many drops; Cox has to limit the mistakes and turnovers; the offensive line didn't blow them off the ball like I thought they would; Samuel has to get tough enough to fight through that first contact - he went down too many times after a 3 yard gain when he could have gotten 6 or 7 yards; we are inexplicably weak up front on defense; we don't blitz effectively if at all which we need to do because our ends cannot pressure the quarterback; Rennie Curran, our best defender, is 5'8" tall which means quarterbacks can see over him when he blitzes up the middle; our coaches don't seem to adjust well on the fly; we still don't have a kicker who can put it in the endzone; special teams coverage is still lacking. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

Positives: Butler's kid can punt it a mile which we may need this year. The defense - even without getting any pressure on the QB - only really had one lapse which was the long tochdown pass. They were tough against the run. Ehhh, I can't think of anything else positive to say.

What we can take away from the game: Okie State is a pretty good football team and was ranked higher than us so it wasn't a shocker. It is still disappointing to lose the first game. We won't see anyone with that much talent until LSU. We should know more about this team this Saturday night. The greatest amount of improvement in a football team comes between weeks 1 and 2. If we are flat Saturday night, it may be a long year. It's always ugly against the Gamecocks so they are going to have to dig down deep, play gritty on both sides of the ball, and win an ugly one on Saturday. If we come out swinging, we may salvage an 8 or 9 win season. If not, yikes.

Thanks Greg.