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Breakdown of assignment weakness

Memnon said:
Is that under the assumption the players have remained at the same level of play or gotten worse?

From a personnel standpoint, our Secondary wasn't any good last year, so blaming the Coaches would have to be under the premise they replenished the Secondary with better players.
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No one can deny the biggest issue with the defense is talent. Our LB’s and Secondary have taken a major step back this season. Not many, if any, of our starters (DL excluded) start in most elite programs.

The poor years of recruiting in the secondary has finally caught up to us. The weak portal evaluations of Hill and Richard’s (Powell is suspect, as well) isn’t helping. It’s a shame. This defense should have been a legit top 10 D and helping us compete for a title.

I am not looking forward to seeing what Louisville does to us.
 

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We have recruited really poorly in the back 7 for years and have thus played quite poorly for years. I think Guidry sometimes puts guys into poor positions relative to their skill but we have overall very low level of skill so what can really be done other than hope QBs and OCs suck or sit back and let teams get easier short plays consistently
 
Brains said:
Kiko Mauigoa was terrible against the pass last year, and still is.

Wesley Bissainthe was terrible against the pass last year, and still is.

Jaden Harris consistently makes the wrong diagnosis and gets out of position.

Jadais Richard can't cover or tackle.

Powell can't tackle for his life.

Our DBs and LBs are not highly talented. We desperately need Brown back.

Lance Guidry is a **** good defensive coordinator, and he makes very good in-game adjustments.
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An explosive pass rush would be a big help…
 
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Guidry would earn his wage by finding some way to patch up these shortcomings at least for the regular season. We’re not asking for this to be some cracked defense that only allows 2 TDs per game. We just need to hold opponents to 30 points and we’re comfortably undefeated. DL should be healthy again so trust them to get penetration and drop everyone else back in zone 80% of the time.
 
Hurracanes said:
No one can deny the biggest issue with the defense is talent. Our LB’s and Secondary have taken a major step back this season. Not many, if any, of our starters (DL excluded) start in most elite programs.

The poor years of recruiting in the secondary has finally caught up to us. The weak portal evaluations of Hill and Richard’s (Powell is suspect, as well) isn’t helping. It’s a shame. This defense should have been a legit top 10 D and helping us compete for a title.

I am not looking forward to seeing what Louisville does to us.
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I don't think its an evaluation issue, and I also believe "evaluation" is overrated as a causal factor in both recruiting and roster management. All staffs now have access to information regarding all players, including film, contact with prior coaches, and countless scouting sites. The vast majority of coaches see the vast majority of players in very similar light.

The issue is that there are limited spots, limited number of players available in each recruiting and portal window, and limited resources. Every staff has to prioritize both the players they most covet, and how to distribute NIL funds. That's a **** of a lot more than mere evaluation.

We allocated a ****load for Cam Ward, and rightly so. I'm sure some of the DLs were also allocated a lot, and rightly so.

Most of our prior recruiting failures weren't evaluation issues, they were salesmanship and resource issues. We evaluated plenty of high level talents; we simply couldn't land them.

We lost two starting safeties last year. Anyone with eyes knew the CB situation wasn't a good one, especially with respect to depth.

In the portal, I seriously doubt our staff looked at Jadais Richard as some sort of stud player. But we needed a body. Guidry was familiar with Hill. He could at least play, so we took him. Meesh Powell is highly experienced and played on one really good team. We took him.

Anyone with eyes knew that we couldn't afford to lose Damari Brown. He's hurt.

I don't recall what was available in the portal as far as Safeties go. Maybe there was an opportunity we should have been more aggressive on. But, maybe there wasn't one available.

Our fans vastly overrated our LBs last year, something I had trouble understanding, as they had already shown their weaknesses.

We can't fix everything in one cycle. Only recruiting solves the defense for next year.
 
Memnon said:
Are you guys sure you read that article in its entirety?

Because if you did, idk how you can come away with the conclusion its Coaching.

Pretty much every example he highlighted was guys missing plays due to poor eye discipline & not knowing their assignments.

The majority of our big gash yardage plays have been either LB's or Safeties literally not knowing where they're supposed to be in relations to the call of the Defense. That's not Coaching, that's a lack of understanding your assignment because you're either not doing film study or you simply can't retain the information being taught to you.

The LB unit & DB group are abandoning their fundamentals & playing the way they want to, as opposed to what they're being told. Now that you can blame on Coaching, but the majority of the big plays are not of a result of bad Defensive calls, but rather a result of players not trusting what they practiced.
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I like Guidry and this is where I land. Also brings my mind to Harvey last year, who consistently did what he was tasked with, whether it matched his physical skill set or not.

There is value in that; and a seemingly tremendous value in such to execute Guidry’s defense (at least as my limited comprehension understands it).
 
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DTP said:
Pretty good article. We are very undisciplined in the back seven. Guys overcommitting and either ignoring or not knowing their responsibilities has gotten us gouged for huge plays the last two games. For all the worry about our line not being stout enough against the run, it’s actually the bag seven that are killing us. Chasing the big play and leaving your assignment wide open. Crashing on inside runs and leaving nobody to defend the cut back. This should be fundamental stuff but we’ve been over aggressive and undisciplined going back to Manny.

I don’t think it’s quite as bleak as the article paints it. Our guys should know their assignments and play within the system. If they don’t at least have that part down, they’re screwed.
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I agree. I don't think the state of the defense is as dire as the article implies. I'm sure you could take the opposite approach and breakdown a bunch of good plays from our defense and make it seem like we are killing it. Truth is in the middle. The defensive numbers aren't atrocious save the number of explosives we are allowing. Keep working to clean that stuff up and we might get the D where it needs to be to make a playoff run.
 
It’s not that complicated, we’re just not that good in the secondary, we line up, we get beat, keep it simple.
 
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BS85 said:
A jag-off?
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Run Comedia GIF by DeAPlaneta
 
Memnon said:
Are you guys sure you read that article in its entirety?

Because if you did, idk how you can come away with the conclusion its Coaching.

Pretty much every example he highlighted was guys missing plays due to poor eye discipline & not knowing their assignments.

The majority of our big gash yardage plays have been either LB's or Safeties literally not knowing where they're supposed to be in relations to the call of the Defense. That's not Coaching, that's a lack of understanding your assignment because you're either not doing film study or you simply can't retain the information being taught to you.

The LB unit & DB group are abandoning their fundamentals & playing the way they want to, as opposed to what they're being told. Now that you can blame on Coaching, but the majority of the big plays are not of a result of bad Defensive calls, but rather a result of players not trusting what they practiced.
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If multiple groups are abandoning their fundamentals, not understanding their assignments, cant retain information, playing the way they want, not trusting what they practice thats 100% a sign of a coaching problem

Players should always be held accountable too but i would lean more players if it was a few leaks, when all year multiple guys at different positions are doing the things u named i dont know how its not coaching.

You either coaching it or allowing it and now this is the 2nd consecutive year we have the same problems with different players.

I read the article as him saying if the players aren’t retaining information well and its not translating on the field then you need to find more effective ways to teach them with more realistic drills
 
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Memnon said:
21 missed tackles can't be the Coaches fault, that would insinuate that the Coaches are literally not teaching them how to tackle. 21 missed tackles is a matter of Effort & physical will.

The systemic problem is that they're not actually that good.

But, here's an interesting dichotomy. On one hand, many of you will say to trust the Coaches on all their evals & that they essentially have a 100% hit rate, but then on the other hand, yall are saying it's the Coaches fault when those same players aren't playing well. So which is it?
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I trust these coaches and think they're a quality staff. But they're fallible. Just like Cam can throw a boneheaded pick six and still be the best college QB in the nation, I don't see a dichotomy in concluding that Guidry/Jackson are the root cause of our systemic failures in poor DB play over the past couple games and are also the root cause of improved DB recruiting this class.

Past recruiting at DB has been decidedly worse than the recruiting at other positions. I vocally agreed with you in the DB portal thread we needed to bring in more talent there. But it is still more than adequate to prevent Mendoza and Drones from shredding them like they did. Other programs didn't allow that, and I don't believe our guys are more unathletic, stupid or lazy vs. those team. More likely, they were being asked to do too much. If the kids weren't able to execute their assignments, we needed to simplify the coverages.

I feel differently about current recruiting at DB. We give head coaches a mulligan class. Guidry had his mulligan last class when he didn't even have his own guy at the coaching spot. Now that Addae is gone and he's brought in Jackson, we look like we're doing much better there. I'm very optimistic for the future. I just don't want to waste Cam Ward. I want to win big now, too.
 
atlcane72 said:
We have decent enough players. Send 4 and drop 8. No more islands. Make teams have to execute long drives. I like Guidry but a lot of it is on him. He’s running a lot of man and it’s not working. Sit back and let the d line work.
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Agreed. There is a time and place to get aggressive on defense (like 3rd or 4th down and 1 instead of dropping back on deep zones)

We have some all ACC Dline players let them eat
 
Hurracanes said:
No one can deny the biggest issue with the defense is talent. Our LB’s and Secondary have taken a major step back this season. Not many, if any, of our starters (DL excluded) start in most elite programs.

The poor years of recruiting in the secondary has finally caught up to us. The weak portal evaluations of Hill and Richard’s (Powell is suspect, as well) isn’t helping. It’s a shame. This defense should have been a legit top 10 D and helping us compete for a title.

I am not looking forward to seeing what Louisville does to us.
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Every year and every offseason anyone that knew anything (including you) said Addae was an issue

Whelp we are dealing with that fallout. We also just missed a lot of high quality names in the portal. I don’t want to just assume but had we gotten rid of Addae sooner I would guess we could have done a better job

But I digress, not much we can do at this point but ride it out and hit it hard this year. It’s a shame really. Had we fired Addae when we should have we might be saying something else. He did get us OJ I’m assuming but that’s about it
 
Hurracanes said:
No one can deny the biggest issue with the defense is talent. Our LB’s and Secondary have taken a major step back this season. Not many, if any, of our starters (DL excluded) start in most elite programs.

The poor years of recruiting in the secondary has finally caught up to us. The weak portal evaluations of Hill and Richard’s (Powell is suspect, as well) isn’t helping. It’s a shame. This defense should have been a legit top 10 D and helping us compete for a title.

I am not looking forward to seeing what Louisville does to us.
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it’s more mental than anything. We don’t have elite Dbs but these guys aren’t just pure trash. Vs cal they gave up 205 yards passing in the 1st half. All of that basically came on 3 plays. They held them to only 78 yards passing in the 2nd half. Wasn’t like they was just throwing the ball all over the field. The qb was 11/22 which is 50%.

So it’s not talent. They have proven they can get the job done. The issue is the mental lapses they have and it leads to the big plays,
 
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