The majority of the time your WR/QB will not be making plays that consistently on deep balls. The DB for the most part were in very good position on all the deep ball and it just so happened that the WR came away with almost all of those passes. Ole Miss had ZERO running game and were not going to be able to dink and dunk their way down the field with the press coverage man tight we were playing. Their only real option was to throw it deep and let their kid go up after it. I'll take those odds on those types of passes every time. This game it worked out for them, but if they played again it might not. I have no issues in how our secondary played sans the one or two broken coverage plays. Kelly made some spot on throws and his WR made some spot on catches.
What killed us in this game is penalties and poor calls/non calls by the refs. It cost us at least 14 and more likely 21 points given to Ole Miss. It was one of the worst officiated games I've seen in a long time. Even the instant replay ref turned over a ton of calls, which isn't that common either.
I appreciate your optimism, but the reality is we've been trying to fix this major leak on the backside of our defense for a few years now. Recruiting better athletes has helped, but we are still getting sliced and diced with these talented spread passing teams. Texas A&M, Auburn, Clemson, Ole Miss, every time we see them, that's not a once in a lifetime oddity, that's a trend. And so Tuscaloosa, we still have a problem with the backside of our D. How does a team, as you said, with NO running game and with our pressure at the LOS, get to throw pass after pass to any open receivers? Could it at this point be, we need a better scheme? This latest oddity from Oxford just finished off the best passing day of his life and we knew it was coming and had prepared our team for a year to make sure it didn't happen again. We were not studying ole miss's running game. The only thing we feared about this team was the pitch and catch. 421 yards later, we still have reason to fear. You think the Aggies were taking notes?
