I thought Slovis played well considering he was getting his brains beat in on every snap. Looked more sharp than Hooker did.
So Richardson is human. Florida looked athletic as usual but were exposed by Kentucky. Feeling better about this game. Levis looked pretty average.
South Carolina doesn't look like a swing game anymore. Of course that's assuming our play improves as I suspect it will. McCoy is just scratching the surface of his upside.
2-1 against Florida, LSU, and Kentucky and don’t slip up against a team we should dominate and 9-3 is right there. Easier said than done, but doable.
My stance on this is that we just needed to win it. No matter how ugly it was. You can make an argument that more went right for Pitt than it did UT, minus the QB injury. First one like this since 2003 against an established program like Pitt. This isn’t the goal post, but it’s good to seemingly be headed towards it.
I think I don’t feel quite as bad the offense in the second half as some of y’all do, because Pitt successfully slowed the game down (plus we lost a possession on the muffed punt) so that we didn’t get a lot of possessions, and the ones we had, the plays were there and we just didn’t connect. It’s not like we looked clueless or were outschemed, we just had a couple drops or overthrows. That said, the running game was no help at all, with our two main backs combining for 65 yards and a fumble. That can’t continue if we want to be successful.
Phil Steele has Pitt’s D Line ranked as the 2nd best in the country. We have the 25th best o line according to him. He also has Pitt as his #1 surprise team and has them ranked #9 in his power poll and #11 in his top 40. Pretty sure he had them favored in his Vegas spread as well.
Tillman uncharacteristically dropped a few and there were a few dumbass pre snap penalties, those don't happen and Tennessee wins without OT. Those aren't hard fixes. The run game wasn't good but they didn't run it enough in my opinion. The run game is two or three yards and then boom, hit a crease and go for 30. They just stopped and kept slinging it before the big run happened.
run game will look better when Hooker keeps a few of those. He had a lane outside often when handing to Small
It’s hard to stick with the run game when it’s killing drives the way it was. We had at least two off the top of my head (the fumble, getting dropped for a three-yard loss on 2nd and 3) that ended up getting Pitt that ball when we had been moving it through the air. Two and three yards here and there before you break the big one is fine, fumbles and three-yard losses will kill you.
Very true—I was surprised he didn’t start keeping more when it became clear the game was going down to the wire
My takeaway is that we won a road game against a reasonably decent opponent using a different tool in our bag than we expected going in and I don’t think that’s bad. That Slovis guy was going to throw us another ball or 2 if he didn’t get hurt imo. He was starting to feel the heat. Obviously the offense needs to improve but if there’s one thing I trust this coaching staff with it’s offense. Pitt has a pretty damn good defensive line. Pitt was a good matchup to just cut the pressure loose on, those QBs weren’t particularly mobile even before their legs got broken
And their qb doesn’t get injured (and the backup hobbled) without getting relentlessly pummeled by our pass rush
