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Josh Pate Speaking Facts on Miami's loss to GT (11/10)

hurricaneman said:
Man...I'm not trying to be a mope but I think there is a serious conversation that needs to happen around Mario and the success this year. You have an entire side of the ball that has regressed this year beyond the point that he inherited it. The defense is worse than when he got here. And it's absolutely full of recruiting deficiencies and lack of player development. How do you explain that for a program that's supposed to be on an upward trajectory?

I get Mario got Cam Ward and he gets credit for that. But you can't ignore the reality that if he had missed on Cam Miami could be a .500 team right now, or worse.
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Fair but you also can't play the hypothetical game. Diego Pavia committed to Vanderbilt on January 17th. What if we'd have gotten him? Also, I don't think this is *likely*, but if you want to play the could game, maybe Emory Williams isn't a bad player. Do I think being Cam Ward is anywhere in his range of outcomes? No. But we won a game against Clemson with him last year. Maybe he can win 9-10 games with the offensive talent around him? Maybe the mindset of the entire team is different if we're forced to play a little more conservatively with a young quarterback? Again, just saying there are so many factors that go into a football team, you can't just blindly say if you remove one kid we're multiple games worse. Who knows what happens over the past 11 months if Cam decides to stick with the NFL? Thankfully, we never will know, and he's here, and we're gonna win the ACC.

I just think we need to be careful saying "If Cam Ward wasn't here, we're a .500 team". That's wildly hypothetical. But the first paragraph is fair and valid RE: the defense. It's nowhere near as good as it should be in Year 3. There's no way to sugarcoat that. The DB recruiting especially has killed us. We can't cover and we can't tackle back there. Otherwise, we're great. And I'm not going to draw any concrete conclusions after 1 game, but the GT game is absolutely concerning when you consider anyone with a brain knew what their gameplan would be, and we weren't ready for it and/or couldn't stop it even if we were. That can't happen. In a vacuum, I can live with one game. But the defense has been well below average since we started ACC play. In year 3, that's certainly not acceptable.
 
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OrangeBowlMagic said:
Fair and logical, as usual from Josh.

He said one thing that I’ve really been shaking my head at the last 2 days too. It only took 28 to get us. I genuinely did not think that was in our range of outcomes. We’re killing the defense, and rightfully so. But we lost a game giving up 28 points. I thought if/when we lost, it’d take AT LEAST 35, if not 40. I just can’t believe we only scored 23.

More on this in the stat roll thread, but regression to the mean finally got us on 3rd and 4th down. We’d be comically great up until now. We finally had a down game, and it results in 23 points.

But that game really didn’t change a whole lot to me, once I got over the initial disappointment of hoping for a true miracle season and going undefeated into the playoff. It’s a good team, with flaws. Just like a lot of teams. We didn’t lose by 30. With Cam Ward, we’ll be in the game against anyone we play, imo. This one, we came up one possession short.
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In conference play we’ve been averaging 75 plays a game. Every D we played in that stretch was completely gassed in the 4th, and is the reason we dominated.

We ran 63 vs GT.
Less plays/possessions for us, and more in the tank for GT’s defense for them to hold on.
Btw, I would have bet anything on us scoring a TD on our last drive.

This may sound crazy, but I’d rather play the pass oriented teams the rest of the way.
 
NJshoreCane said:
This may sound crazy, but I’d rather play the pass oriented teams the rest of the way.
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I don't disagree in principle, but the team has been sleep walking since the VT game and while I think we can easily run the table for the rest of the regular season, postseason doesn't look as easy if we don't start playing a full game.
 
There’s only three teams that I don’t think we’d beat, and could see us losing by 10+.

Everyone else, we’d have a shot against (or possibly favored, provided the offense plays the way they have pre-GT).
 
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RamblinGamblinCane said:
I don't disagree in principle, but the team has been sleep walking since the VT game and while I think we can easily run the table for the rest of the regular season, postseason doesn't look as easy if we don't start playing a full game.
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Agree.
What I'm saying is, our best shot to win the ACC and maybe a playoff game is is to get into a shootout, and not a slogfest.
We know where we are with our defense, so a Louisville -type game is our path (don't know why that game is overlooked, btw).
 
hoops156 said:
this. the internet wonders if he noticed that GT only scored 28 bc they limited possessions and had 10 more min of TOP. they raped our D. if they could throw the ball, theyd likely put up 40+ (they were going to put up 35 but intentionally took a slide before the goal line to end the game). this was every bit as bad as the UNC manny game
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Definitely agree except for the last sentence.

I think they’re still trying to tallying the rushing yards to this day. I think the UNC rushed from Miami to Atlanta and back that game.
 
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