It feels good to wake up and type this out and not be in a bad mood already thinking about what went wrong the day before. It was really a tale of two sides of the ball and for all the perusing that has been going on around here about “complementary football,” that was finally it.
Let’s start with the defense, who I thought were the real stars of the show yesterday. I was overall impressed with several phases of that side, and not just from the turnover standpoint. This was the first game from the defensive front that it looked like they had a real fire and put that on the field.
Isaac Smith was giving the offensive tackles hell all game and even on the play where he got flagged for a horsecollar, he made a nice move to the tackle’s inside shoulder to get the pressure. That looked more like what we had seen from him two years ago. Dooda Banks and DB Carroll had nice games and Jayden Cofield continues to be a nice piece in that unit as well.
The guy I do also want to highlight is Braylon Rigsby. Had you not been paying too close attention throughout the week, you would not have thought anything different about seeing Rigsby lined up on the edge considering he’s naturally an interior guy, but I thought he really flashed from the outside linebacker spot. If Rigsby is someone who can continue to give you consistent snaps that will be a major plus to what we originally thought was one of the deeper rooms on the team, to now one of the thinnest due to injuries.
When the front four is getting the kind of push like what they were, it really just makes everybody else’s jobs easier. Going back to one of my keys to the game that I put out on Thursday, this defense put Chandler Morris in tough situations and he crumbled under the pressure.
Could you attribute the tip drill interceptions to good luck? Sure, but just consider how many times in recent memory where the luck pendulum has not swung Tech’s way in the slightest. Sometimes the ball just has to bounce the right way and it certainly did yesterday. I’m not gonna chalk up the entire defensive performance to that, though, I think the guys deserve their credit for making plays and flying around all over the place. Overall, a much more inspired performance and the effort made it all possible.
For all the grief I spoke last Sunday about Zach Kittley and Behren Morton, really just the offense as a whole, I probably don’t have enough good things to say this week. 45 points from the offense in the first half tells a pretty good story about the way they handled business.
I went from nearly ripping my own eyes out having to watch an onslaught of screens to being pleasantly surprised by the variety and creativity that the offense rolled out yesterday. Morton looked much sharper, his reads were cleaner and he looked confident. The offense did a good job of seeing what the defense was doing and attacking their weaknesses, rather than letting the defense dictate their strategy.
The RPO and play action games were killer because UNT was so committed to stopping the run and taking away the underneath action. I saw a lot of man coverage from UNT and Tech attacked this perfectly with crossers, slants, the play action where the safety bit down hard and Johncarlos Miller ran free up the middle of the field, it was like clockwork. This is what everybody went into the week with pitchforks and torches about. And by golly it worked.
This was exactly the kind of game I think a lot of us were waiting to see from this team. Now, my next question is can these Red Raiders make performances like this a trend rather than an outlier? Should I have radical optimism or lingering skepticism about this team moving forward? Time will tell...
