Well, it looks like you guys like your Fieldturf. After Saturday, we can all see why.

This week, it’s simple. Army-Navy is being moved to the second weekend of December. What say you?

Ricky Dobbs stepped up in relief of an injured Jarod Bryant and ran for 224 (!) yards on 42 (!) carries on Saturday as Navy topped SMU, 34-7. Jarod Bryant ran for 50 yards before leaving the game with a shoulder injury. SMU was held to 157 passing yards and -13 yards on the ground.

Conventional wisdom says that Navy doesn’t get the country’s most coveted recruits. But on Saturday, one 5-star recruit– THE HAND OF ALMIGHTY GOD– played his finest game of the season. The weather was Navy’s best weapon on defense, especially the wind. SMU’s biggest threat– the deep ball– was made virtually impossible to execute thanks to 30-35 mph gusts that kept the flags at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium taut and TV cameras shaking. To give you an idea of how big of an effect this had on SMU’s offense, think of Navy’s struggles earlier in the season. When Kaipo went out, Jarod Bryant struggled running the triple option. Without the ability to capitalize on all three options, Navy’s offense wasn’t effective. The same is true in the run & shoot. A receiver runs deep on almost every play, but if the quarterback’s key told him to throw deep, he wasn’t able to take advantage. That meant a lot of short-yardage, pre-determined routes; plays that aren’t the real run & shoot and take SMU’s offense out of its element.

Deep passes weren’t the only thing affected by the wind, either; Bo Levi Mitchell’s shorter throws were also getting knocked down. SMU’s punts were even worse. The Mustangs won the coin toss and decided to take the ball to start the game; they probably should have chosen to defer. Navy made them drive into the wind, and after the Mustangs couldn’t get those drives going, their punts went nowhere and gave Navy fantastic field position for its first three drives. Navy took a 20-0 lead in the first quarter on touchdown drives that had an average starting position of the SMU 39 yard line. The game was over by the second quarter.

While the wind was Navy’s MVP, it was still a team effort. It isn’t as if teams haven’t been able to nickel and dime themselves down the field against the Mids in the past. Buddy Green decided to rely on a 3-man rush for most of the game, dropping 8 into coverage. This hasn’t worked too well for Navy in the past, as opposing quarterbacks had all day to find an open receiver. That wasn’t the case on Saturday. Nate Frazier, Jabaree Tuani, and Matt Nechak controlled the line of scrimmage. They didn’t get immediate pressure on Mitchell, but they closed the pocket quickly enough that the freshman quarterback wasn’t able to camp out and wait for someone to get open. To me the most impressive part of the line’s performance was their ability to make plays all over the field. Nechak had the hit of the game, running outside to plant the wide receiver on a screen play. Nate Frazier got his sack by chasing down Mitchell from behind. Tuani might have had the most impressive play, coming in on a pass rush, then turning around and making a tackle on the wide receiver downfield and stopping him on third down. It was a good performance from a group that needed to rebound after the Pitt game.

But let’s be real here; the weather might have been the biggest factor in the game, but the biggest story is Navy’s ongoing quarterback soap opera. Poor Jarod Bryant just can’t catch a break. After struggling over the first half of the season, he seemingly put it together against Pitt, only to see the team around him get manhandled. This week he picked up right where he left off and moved the ball fairly easily against a bad SMU defense. But apparently Jarod had reached his good vibes quota for the week, and a couple of awkward falls onto his shoulder led to him being knocked out of the game. (WHY CAN’T I ENJOY A BLOWOUT FOR ONCE???) In stepped Ricky Dobbs, who runs like Brian Hampton and apparently prefers not to pitch the ball, like Brian Madden. Dobbs ran like a tank, bulldozing his way to 224 yards and 4 touchdowns. But it’s hard to really get a feel for how well he did because SMU’s defense was really, really bad.

To get an idea of how bad, let’s look at Ricky’s longest run of the day, a 38-yard stampede in the second quarter. SMU had brought a safety up to the line of scrimmage who would end up covering the playside slotback and getting run out of the play. Ricky’s pitch key was the linebacker lined up over the B-gap. He showed a pitch read, but the cornerback had blitzed to cover the pitch man:

This play should have been blown up by the defense. Against Pitt, it would have been. But Ricky just sidestepped the linebacker and ran upfield. You could say it was a good move on Ricky’s part, and it was. Ricky also deserves credit for seeing the blitz and not pitching the ball. But better linebackers aren’t going to miss those tackles the way SMU’s were.

One dimension that Ricky brought to the game was that he was essentially a second fullback. Ricky’s hard running inside made things easier on the offensive line. A lot of times you’ll hear about the importance of “establishing the fullback” from media and coaches alike. Being an astute fan, you might find that odd since in a triple option, you take what the defense gives you. But even when it looks like the option is working well outside, you still see the coaches call a couple of designed handoffs to the B-back. The reason is because it makes linebackers easier to block. Last week against Pitt, we saw how the middle linebacker ignored the dive and ran to the quarterback on the triple option. The Mids just couldn’t get enough of a push inside to force Pitt’s defense to respect the dive play. This week, Eric Kettani became a lead blocker for Ricky Dobbs, who attacked the middle of the field. The success they were having meant that the linebackers had to respect that play, and it kept them from running outside on the snap. That hesitation made it easier for the tackle to make the block:

There’s another play that might not have worked the way Pitt was playing, but was a nice little 5-yard gain against SMU. The linebacker went to meet the fullback, but wound up getting blocked by the tackle.

One thing you’ll notice is that both of those plays are triple option plays. That’s a good sign.

At this point we could have three healthy quarterbacks for Temple, or we could be starting our third string. If Ricky has to start, it’s good to have seen him run some of the offense. And we didn’t even use his biggest strength– his arm. Now we wait.

I’d like to enjoy
a win without worrying
about injuries.

Where to begin, where to begin.

I suppose the easiest place to start is with the obvious. A NMCMS-record crowd– something we’ve seen a lot of lately– watched Pitt pound Navy into the ground, 42-21. The Big East-leading Panthers rushed for 244 yards, including 156 yards and 3 TDs from LeSean McCoy. Jarod Bryant led Navy with 81 yards and a touchdown, while Shun White had a 40-yard TD run of his own. The loss ended Navy’s 3-game win streak and dropped the Mids’ record to 4-3. It’s hard to point out anything the Mids did well. The offense sputtered, the defense played like matadors to LeSean McCoy’s bull, and the kickoff coverage gave Pitt good field position to work with. It was a long afternoon.

The game was a tall, frosty mug of reality for the defense. Don’t get me wrong; they are better than last year. But after three straight wins, it seems that collective opinion may have exaggerated the extent of their improvement. The Wake Forest game was undoubtedly a dominating performance, but there were deficiencies in the Rutgers and Air Force games that maybe we glossed over a bit. Rutgers really had no trouble at all running the ball on the Mids. Their problem was that they still hadn’t found their identity as an offense and weren’t dedicated to running the ball. The Scarlet Knights averaged 6.2 yards per carry, but still turned to an inconsistent passing game in key situations. Pittsburgh had no such identity crisis. First down? They ran. Third down? They ran. Two minute drill? They ran. And Navy couldn’t stop it. LeSean McCoy was excellent, but it wasn’t just him. Fullback Conredge Collins ran for 50 yards on only 9 carries, while LaRod Stephens-Howling averaged 4.2 yards per carry and punched in two touchdowns. McCoy may be the lasting image of the result of Navy’s futility, and he certainly caused a spike in this week’s missed tackle count; but it didn’t really matter who Pitt gave the ball to. This game was won for them at the line of scrimmage.

And that’s true on both sides of the ball. The biggest shame in all of this– other than losing the game– is that Jarod Bryant actually had a decent game relative to his past performances, but I doubt too many people will recognize it. Coach Niumat said that he couldn’t afford to shrink the playbook against Pitt, and he didn’t. Jarod responded, running the triple option capably and getting the ball to the right people. Unfortunately, when the blocking breaks down it doesn’t really matter who you give the ball to.

Some of you may remember back to the week after the Duke game when Bill Wagner posted on his blog about an observation I made about the Blue Devils’ defense. When you run the triple against the defensive alignment that Duke used, the playside tackle’s responsibility is to pass inside the defensive end and block the middle linebacker. But instead of using the defensive end to pursue the ball, Duke’s coaches used him to actually “block” the playside tackle and keep him from getting to the second level of the defense. This did two things; one, it freed up the middle linebacker to flow to the ball. Two, by turning inside, the DE gave the quarterback a “keep” read. Jarod would keep the ball, then get swallowed by the unblocked LB.

Pitt’s defense took the same approach:

You can see how Scott McKillop is lined up a little deeper than usual. That, combined with interference from the DE, kept Navy’s tackles from getting to him. He was able to move to the ball all afternoon and led the team in tackles.

Now, it isn’t as if there is no answer to this. There are a few things the offense can do to take advantage. One is the counter option, which we know can be set up nicely by defensive ends that cheat inside on the snap. The counter option was Navy’s most successful play for the most part, and was the play that they used to score their second touchdown. But unlike some others in this offense, it isn’t one of those “run it ’til the defense stops it” kind of plays. Since the quarterback starts the play with his back to his read, there’s a chance that he’ll get crushed if the pitch key blitzes. That’s what happened to Kaipo in last year’s Wake Forest game. If the defense is expecting the counter option, they’re more likely to blitz. That’s particularly bad when you’re already on quarterback number two. The midline option can also be effective when the middle linebacker is quick to move outside, but when Coach Jasper tried to run it, the line just couldn’t create enough space in which to run.

Coach Jasper didn’t give up, though. He tried yet another adjustment in the second half, using the unbalanced line. This time, he tried running the triple option to the heavy side of the formation, using the extra tackle to try to block McKillop. But more often than not, Pitt’s best defensive player was just too agile:

The coaches had answers. Unfortunately, the Mids just couldn’t execute them.

One other thing that Pitt did a little better than most other teams was anticipate the snap count. There was more than one play where you would see the slotback go into tail motion, with a defensive lineman using that to time his jump:

When you’re watching these plays in real time, you might get the impression that Jarod missed reads. Only after going back and watching the game a couple times do you get a feel for what really happened. Kaipo wouldn’t have fixed this, and neither would putting in Ricky Dobbs. I’m sure that the team will block better in weeks to come, and depending on who plays in the Eaglebank Bowl, we probably won’t see a defense as good as Pitt’s for the rest of the year. Strangely, after seeing this game I actually feel a little better about the offense if Jarod has to play. Hopefully this game doesn’t shoot his confidence.

There’s no doubt that this game was a stinker, and the coaches should lose their voices yelling in practice today. But it’s important to keep a little perspective. Navy is 4-3 after playing 4 BCS teams, a top-25 MAC team, and Air Force. The team has come out of that stretch in position to win the CIC Trophy and become bowl eligible. They’re still on track to meet the standards set over the last five years.

Some other bits:

— I have now heard more than once about “grumbling” from TV analysts calling the game. As in, “after Navy’s 1-2 start, there was some grumbling about whether Ken Niumatalolo was the right man for the job.” Can these guys shut up about this already? Who, exactly, was “grumbling?” A few select message board jackasses? Because I don’t think anyone else was. I certainly hope that there is a slightly higher standard for what’s worthy of on-air discussion than the ramblings of message board idiots who are ready to jump off a cliff after three games. I can only imagine what other nuggets of wisdom might come to light if they talk about what they read on message boards.

— Here’s Navy’s first touchdown of the game. I show this for two reasons: one, to demonstrate Jarod Bryant running a splendidly executed triple option play; and two, to point out a really, really annoying habit of Shun White’s:

On his long touchdown runs– which we’ve been fortunate enough to see quite a few this season– Shun seems to like to drop the ball on the ground as soon as he can. Shun cut it pretty close on a couple plays earlier in the year, but against Pitt, he got very, very lucky:

The ball is out of his hand. Whether it broke the plane of the goal line before he dropped it is extremely questionable. I don’t know if that’s what the cool kids are doing nowadays, but he needs to cut it out. God help him if the team loses to Notre Dame because of something like this. Get on him, Coach DuPaix!

— I noticed a few players wearing a new helmet style this week. I’m not sure if it’s related to all the concussions we’ve seen this year or if it’s just some new equipment that came in.

You aren’t going to
win many games with such a
horrible defense.

They say that good things come to those who wait. “They,” however, usually doesn’t include college athletic directors, at least when it comes to football. The tattered and discarded remains of college coaching careers cut short by trigger-happy ADs are like prairie dog roadkill on a back road in Utah. They’re everywhere. To say that coaching football is a “what have you done for me lately” business would be an understatement. Nowadays, the football team’s success is 90% of what determines a successful AD. Every other program could be on probation, but if the football team is winning, then all is well. On the other hand, your school could have dynasties in soccer, swimming, and women’s basketball, but if they aren’t going to bowl games, then that AD is on the hot seat. Football is king, and athletic directors want to hitch their wagons to stars. Time to produce results is a premium for the newly hired.

Naturally, there are exceptions to this phenomenon. Rutgers was coming off of its sixth straight losing season when it hired Greg Schiano as head coach in 2000. Things didn’t exactly improve right away. Schiano led the Scarlet Knights to to four more losing seasons, including 2-9 and 1-11 campaigns in his first two years, before breaking through for a 7-5 record and a bowl game in 2005. Then there’s the curious case of Dave Wannstedt.

Unlike Schiano, who inherited a team that was absolutely terrible, Wannstedt was put in charge of a Pitt team that had seen some modest success. His predecessor at Pitt, Walt Harris, had led the Panthers to a 52-44 record over seven seasons. In the year before Wannstedt was hired, Pitt went 8-4 and won a share of the Big East title, earning a berth in the Fiesta Bowl– the team’s fifth straight bowl game. But even though the team had clearly improved under Harris’ watch, he had come under fire. Harris left Pittsburgh for Stanford at the end of that Fiesta Bowl season, but it was rumored that he did so because Pitt probably would’ve fired him anyway. The Panthers had gotten good, but not good enough. They were stricken with nextlevelitis. If the rumors were true, and Harris was going to be shown the door, it makes Wannstedt’s tenure at Pitt all the more curious. Pitt has yet to finish with a winning record since he’s been hired. They looked well on their way in 2006, starting the season 6-1. They ended the season with five straight losses. Last year, Wannstedt limped into the last game of the season with a 4-7 record, but was still awarded a contract extension. It boggled the mind.

On the other hand, maybe there’s a reason why the peanut gallery is the peanut gallery, while other people get paid to make these decisions. In the first game after signing his new contract, Wannstedt took his Pitt team into Morgantown and upset a motivated West Virginia squad that was playing for a berth in the BCS championship game. And this year, after a season-opening upset loss to Bowling Green, Pitt has rolled off four straight wins to make a return appearance in the top 25. One thing that Dave Wannstedt has always been given credit for is his recruiting, particularly in western Pennsylvania. As those younger players have matured, Pitt has started winning games that they would have lost last year. The Panthers have found themselves trailing in the fourth quarter of their last three games, but kept their composure and found ways to pull out victories. The last of those wins was an upset of #10 USF in Tampa that some in the media suggest will finally be the springboard to the Big East success that fans expected when the former NFL head man was hired.

The Pitt formula is simple and familiar; play defense and run the football. Their defense is ranked 27th nationally and anchored by linebacker Scott McKillop, who led the nation in tackles last year with 12.6 per game. Running back LeSean McCoy should need no introduction after running for 165 yards and three TDs against the Mids last year. McCoy set the Big East record for rushing yards by a freshman with 1,328; averaging 106 yards per game so far in his sophomore season, he’s picked up right where he left off. Those two should be familiar to you, but quarterback Bill Stull might not be. Stull missed most of the 2007 season with an injured thumb and did not play against Navy. His numbers won’t blow anyone away, but his 205 passing yards per game are second in the Big East. Ideally, the way to defend Pitt would be the same way that Navy defended Wake Forest: stop the run, disrupt the short passing game, and force Stull to throw downfield (which isn’t his strength). That is a whole lot easier said than done, though. Wake Forest did not have a running back like LeSean McCoy, and Pitt’s offensive line, to put it delicately, doesn’t miss very many meals. McCoy has 28 carries in each of Pitt’s last two games, and you can probably count on that trend to continue. Wannstadt will run him until the Navy defense proves it can stop him. Last year, they never did.

Stull isn’t the only quarterback in this matchup that’s different from 2007. Coach Niumatalolo confirmed at his press briefing after Wednesday’s practice that Jarod Bryant would be starting ahead of Kaipo. Kaipo is healthy enough to play in an emergency, but apparently not enough to play a full game. That’s bad news for Navy fans. I mentioned last week about how the offense flows from the triple option. Last year’s Pitt game gives us a great example, which we can take a look at here (at the risk of stealing my own thunder for future posts).

The basic idea for a quarterback in reading the give key is doing the opposite of what the defender commits to. If he takes the fullback, you keep; if he takes you, you give to the fullback. But what if the key doesn’t commit to either one? That’s called a “squat;” basically, the key is reading the quarterback the same way the quarterback is reading him. He doesn’t make a clear move to take either the dive or the keep. Take a look at the highlighted player here. He doesn’t commit on the snap; he only moves on the fullback after he sees that the fullback has the ball:

Once the coaches see the tendencies of the defense, they can exploit them. Paul Johnson did just that. Navy’s offense gained two first downs on the first three plays of its next drive. They did it by taking advantage of the squatting read, then anticipating his adjustments. The first play called on this drive was the fullback trap. When the DE sees the fullback get the ball, he commits. But when he does, he’s trapped by a pulling guard, leaving the fullback free to run wild. Because the DE squats, the guard has enough time to get to him and block him. Now that the DE has learned his lesson, he won’t squat anymore. He’ll cheat towards that fullback right away to make sure that the guard can’t block him in time. Knowing how the DE would probably react to being trapped, PJ could anticipate it and call the right play to take advantage of it; as we learned in an earlier post, DEs that cheat towards the middle set up the counter option play. That’s play number two. And once PJ was done picking on that DE, he simply repeated the process on the other side.

You know how sometimes you hear about thinking two or three plays ahead? This is the sort of thing they’re talking about.

But the important thing as it relates to tomorrow’s game is that it all flowed from how the defense was playing the triple option. Without that to start from, the real adjustments to take advantage of the defense can’t occur. And that’s where Jarod comes in. We know that for whatever reason, he just can’t seem to run the triple option play. Every week I allow myself to think that maybe this is the week when the light finally turns on for Jarod, and every week I realize that I’m just setting myself up. Before the Air Force game I said that as long as Navy didn’t turn the ball over, they would win by virtue of simply having more playmakers. This isn’t the case against Pitt. With players like McKillop and McCoy, Navy isn’t going to win on talent alone. They are going to need the full arsenal of the offense, but under Jarod Bryant it just hasn’t happened. The coaches try not to focus on him too much, talking about how the line could block better. But don’t you think it’s a little odd that the offensive line happens to play poorly when Kaipo is out, but plays fine once Kaipo’s back in? It isn’t the line, it isn’t the perimeter blocking, it isn’t the fullback, and it isn’t whatever other reason you can come up with. The problem is the quarterback, no matter how much we don’t want to single anyone out. Navy could get away with running a scaled-down offense against Air Force, but that won’t cut it against Pitt.

Dave Wannstedt has talked a bit about being more aggressive in defending against Navy’s offense. He has also talked about how the Mids’ passing game really threw him off last year. Christian Swezey wrote a really good piece before last year’s game, talking about Wannstedt’s history of defending the wishbone:

In terms of a game plan, the Panthers’ coaches have a history of two schemes against the option.

In victories over Oklahoma in 1986 and 1987, Wannstedt relied on a speedy nose guard to disrupt the fullback up the middle.

The middle linebackers flowed to the side opposite the nose guard. And the outside defenders used their speed to focus only on the run.

The Sooners were held to 186 and 179 yards rushing in those two games; the passing game was open, but the Sooners completed only 10 of 25 passes.

You know that scene in Patton? “Rommel… You magnificent bastard, I read your BOOK!” That’s gotta be what it’s like when this coaching staff does game planning. Pitt came out doing exactly what Swezey described. On Navy’s first play of the game, Kaipo faked a toss sweep. The secondary committed to the fake and ignored the wide reciever, O.J. Washington, who made his way to the abandoned side of the field and was wiiiiiiiide open.

Hitting this play right off the bat scrambled Pitt’s entire game plan. Navy’s offense is not the wishbone, and coaches who defend it like they’d defend the wishbone get burnt. Wannstedt was unprepared for Navy’s passing ability because none of those old wishbone teams could throw consistently. Pitt’s secondary barely played run support after that pass. Wannstedt does have a new defensive coordinator, so it’s hard to guess how they’ll line up this time around. Paul Rhoads was picked up by Tommy Tuberville at Auburn, and in his place stepped former SMU head coach Phil Bennett. Bennett’s SMU team is the only win Navy had in Paul Johnson’s first year as head coach in Annapolis among schools whose names don’t rhyme with “Vest Joint.” I don’t know how the Mustangs lined up then, but at least we already know it didn’t work.

Of course, none of this matters if the quarterback can’t direct the offense. It sucks that there’s this much pressure on one guy, but it pretty much comes with the territory. Navy’s defense is improved to the point where McCoy won’t have quite as ridiculous a game as he had against the Mids last year, but he will still get his yards, and he’ll still score points. Navy’s offense will have to keep pace. Without Kaipo, I don’t know that they will. Here’s hoping for a breakthrough.

Congratulations to Matt Harmon. It’s going to be hard for him to fight through the swarm of adoring fans in downtown Annapolis now that he’s been tabbed as The Birddog’s People’s Choice MVP of the Air Force game. That’s the price of being a stone cold killah. This week, I pretty much have nothing. So I will ask you how you spent your last week. You had no Navy football to sustain you. How did you cope?

How did your spend your weekend of freedom? Some possibilities:

• Went to a high school game.
• Mowed grass that hasn’t been touched since August.
• Feigned interest in other games.
• Fought withdrawl symptoms.
• Spent some “quality time” with the family. Hopefully it’s enough to tide over the ol’ ball & chain until the next bye week.

I left off “all of the above” because that’d be the obvious answer.

If you have a slightly more fulfilling life than mine, feel free to chime in here with your bye week exploits.