DLine Midseason Report Card
As the California Golden Blogs Week Of Hate starts to kick into high gear, don’t think we’ve forgotten another group of people absorbing a lot of hate right now. The DLine. It is the next topic of our Mid-season report cards.
TwistNHook: Let’s start with the positives: Hydro said that Rulon Davis was an incredibly nice guy when he met him at the FanFest. So, that’s about one right there.
Yellow Fever: And then we go right into the negatives: Rulon Davis had been injured most of the year after the FanFest.
HydroTech: Positive: our DL guys get sacks.
Negative: our DL guys don’t get sacks as often as we’d like.
TwistNHook: What??!?!? They get sacks?
Positive: Our Dlinemen look really cool with the hair coming out of their helmets.
Negative: Their unfortunate inability to get any consistent pressure on the QB puts the rest of the D in a bad position.
Yellow Fever: Negative: They don’t stop the run.
Negative: They don’t stop the pass either.
TwistNHook: Well, this is going downhill pretty quick. I feel like this must be what it’s like to be Seth.
Ragnarok: You know, we can’t even give them full credit for some of the sacks they do get. At least a couple of the sacks against ASU were ‘coverage sacks’, meaning that Carpenter had nowhere to throw and he took a sack only because the defense *eventually* got to him.
Being unable to force a young quarterback like OSU’s Canfield to make poor, hurried decisions is a big reason we lost that game.
TwistNHook: Can I blame the DLine for Riley’s deal at the end of that game? Please??? Clearly, this has been the weakest part of the D so far. No need to dwell upon that.
Do you think it is the talent or the scheme? Personally, I think it’s the talent. Injuries a go go to an already shaky front line have created this situation.
HydroTech: I think it’s a little of both talent and scheme. Mbakgou was our big time pass rusher but it seems as if his football career is over. As for the scheme, it seems as if our DL plays gap protection rather than being aggressive and shooting the gaps.
Yellow Fever: Whether it’s the talent or the scheme, the end result is that the defensive line hasn’t played like the team has needed them to. I’m calling this a C- at best.
TwistNHook: A C-? With that level of grade inflation, we might as well go to Stanford.
