Well, well, well-there certainly has been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth lately by Coug fans. Yes, I have done that also. Seems like there is a lot of blame to go around, individually and collectively. We blame recruiting, coaching, play calling, mental awareness, officials, fans, weather, and maybe even CougEd. LOL I think I can boil it all down to one word-OFFENSE. Our offense has been anemic, impotent, offensive, awful.
How many of you are aware that WSU is leading the conference is points allowed per game? In spite of giving up too many Pass Interference penalties and third and long (over ten yards) conversions, we still are leading the conference at just over 20 points per game allowed. And that is in spite of being LAST in the conference in Time of Possession at 26:22 per game. The defense has outperformed the offense by miles.
I sometimes like to dig deeper into some of the stats to try to figure out where some of the root causes are for either success or failure. It can be enlightening at times. I listened to the post game and call in shows while doing the two hour drive home after the game. Something Coach Dickert said stuck with me. He said that "We are not good enough right now to overcome negative plays". While that is true, I think the real issue is that we are not good enough right now to PREVENT the negative plays. I went back through the play by play to investigate that a bit and here is what I found:
How many of you are aware that WSU is leading the conference is points allowed per game? In spite of giving up too many Pass Interference penalties and third and long (over ten yards) conversions, we still are leading the conference at just over 20 points per game allowed. And that is in spite of being LAST in the conference in Time of Possession at 26:22 per game. The defense has outperformed the offense by miles.
I sometimes like to dig deeper into some of the stats to try to figure out where some of the root causes are for either success or failure. It can be enlightening at times. I listened to the post game and call in shows while doing the two hour drive home after the game. Something Coach Dickert said stuck with me. He said that "We are not good enough right now to overcome negative plays". While that is true, I think the real issue is that we are not good enough right now to PREVENT the negative plays. I went back through the play by play to investigate that a bit and here is what I found:
- WSU had 10 drives, one of which was only 2 plays before halftime.
- 4 of those drives started with a negative play or one that went for no gain, so 40% of the time we were in trouble after our first play.
- First drive had -3 and -8 yard plays
- Second drive had -3 and -6 yard plays
- Third drive had a 0 yard play but did end in a TD
- Fourth drive had -1, -6, -10, plus the stupid Stribling illegal touching penalty that wiped out a huge gain
- Fifth drive had 0, then halftime
- Sixth drive had 0 and ended up with turnover on downs
- Seventh drive had -7, 0, -5 penalty
- Eighth drive had no negatives, ended with a TD
- Ninth drive had -5 penalty, -4, -2, -10 penalty, -1
- Tenth drive had -2, -5, 0, ended with field goal after 7 plays netted 12 yards, wasting great field position after the turnover
- Soooo, out of 50 plays plus three false starts, the Cougars had 22 negative and non-positive plays.
- For those of you that were not math majors, that means that over 40% of our attempted plays were not positive plays.
- And all that lead to only converting 3 times on third and fourth down plays. Not a recipe for success unless your tough defense is scoring a couple times a game to help out the scoreboard totals.