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Completely mauled a solid CMU OL tonight. Defense has lagged behind the offense since PJ arrived, but tonight felt like a coming out party. Now have the athletes, experience and depth on both sides of the ball to compete with any team in the country in my opinion. 1-0 in the CMU season and on to the next.

(10-01-2016 10:12 PM)tayles mullet Wrote:  Completely mauled a solid CMU OL tonight. Defense has lagged behind the offense since PJ arrived, but tonight felt like a coming out party. Now have the athletes, experience and depth on both sides of the ball to compete with any team in the country in my opinion. 1-0 in the CMU season and on to the next.

WMU was defiantly the superior defensive unit tonight

I don't disagree, but at the same time I wouldn't call it a coming out party, either. In terms of the constant pressure on the QB and the sacks, yes, but this D has (until yesterday, anyway) quietly been very solid and consistent throughout the year. Basically, our D has had one bad half (the first half against NC Central) causing understandable angst to many of us here.

NW ran the ball on us fairly well and had a couple big plays, but we held them to 22 points (and, by comparison, they just put up 38 and a W at Iowa). Illinois put up close to 300 yards passing, but only 10 points and we held them to less than ten yards rushing. Minus a couple of big plays, we did what I thought was a very solid job defensively against a very challenging Georgia Southern offense to defend.

With our offense, our D doesn't have to be dominant or great; it just needs to be solid. The scary thing for our upcoming opponents is that the D is getting better and better every week and appears to have the potential to become dominant in MAC play.

After last night, we're giving up an average of just over 18 points a game so far this year. If that keeps up, and our offense continues to roll, have fun with that, MAC.

The Offensive side of the ball is so experienced. I love how Fleck uses timeouts when we're on defense, and doesn't let them expire at the half or end of game.

I agree with the Kolonel, it's not a coming out party. Our D is not rock-solid, but I will say it seems to be shoring up. As I said pre-season, I did *NOT* expect this to happen of course, being 5-0 after playing 2 P5s, GA-Southern, and @CMU. The reason was, it was at the beginning of the season and wouldn't give us time for our D to get itself broken in.

Our D has been lit up and will be vulnerable to whatever extent. CMU's QB gets sacked a lot (they don't have much of a run game which sort of foreshadows that), and we jumped on that. No doubt our D is improving and shoring things up. But our D is not a rock-solid wall -- but it's "gettin' good". As said above, with our O, we don't Need a rock-solid wall to win the remainder of our games...

... although against Toledo, it will need to get better. Toledo is going to want to knock US out of the rankings at that time, for revenge. Thankfully, it's the last game of the season. And at home. So we do have a Good chance of going 12-0.