Defensive Improvement This Year

[gioff2323]

When you can not make plays on their side of the ball, the D will fail. I like the young kids up front, but they need more time. Since we won’t bring the house, we force mediocre DBs to play better than they are capable of doing.

How this turned into a SK thread is interesting. I’m in the camp of “ I’ve seen enough; season’s lost, so can we try someone else. Leon? I miss little P - he added some excitement to what has otherwise been an embarrassing perf across the board

 

[ktuck911]

Any defensive improvements we've had gets hindered by the offense.. Way too many 3 and outs in less than 2 minutes it seems.. That will wear any defense down....

 

[Sprague03]

Still think this is a young D too but glad it’s not historically bad again. Hoping the upperclassmen next year don’t transfer and we are still in this perpetual cycle of playing young DBs

 

[noeynox]

They had some good moments on the field yesterday. 2 Ints, turnover on downs, tackled the best i recall seeing. The offense however, oy.

 

[Dream Jobbed 2.0]

They weren’t bad yesterday! No help from the O at all and really made Clemson grind out for their points. And don’t come at me with no 3rd or 4th string BS. The 3rd string at Clemson are still 4stars

 

[Palatine]

tackled the best i recall seeing.

This. Odd it happened against some of the most talented players they have faced. Very interested to see if they maintain it against UCF.

 

[huskymedic]

 

[noeynox]

This. Odd it happened against some of the most talented players they have faced. Very interested to see if they maintain it against UCF.

Here is the Jim Mora the dad,

“I watched the first half,” Jim E. Mora. “Here’s my impression. One, I think the defense was respectable. Respectable. I thought the offense was bad. Real bad. To play at the major college level and the teams they’ve got to play, they’ve got to get better. A lot better.”

 

[noeynox]

Young players, who didn't play last year, having played almost a whole year and coming off a 2 week bye. Could be behind the improved tackling effort.

 

[SubbaBub]

Best defense UConn has had in years.

I was one of those fans who said at the beginning of the year, I wanted a UConn defense which was good enough for the opponents to have to use their first string players all game and actually be running their offense all 4 qtrs. Fresno, Purdue and Army most definitely did not fall in to that category. The rest of the games have been competitive.

Back in 2018 UConn had empirically one of the three worst defenses in the history of college football. PPG were a shade over 50, yards per play was over 8.5 and teams averaged over 610 yards per game. And this was with most teams starting the second half with second or third string players and just running out the clock.

2019 saw some improvements. PPG was down to 40 ppg, yards per play down to 7.0 and yards per game was about 445 yards. Again, almost every game saw teams playing second string by early second half and using the fourth quarter to run out the clock.

2020. Bye year.

2021. PPG down to 35. Yards per play at 5.8 and yards per game at 433.

Is there's year's team defense good? No. It's between below average and bad. Compared to the previous two seasons, it's been fantastic.

Offense has gotten progressively worse as defense has improved, but the regression on offense has been less than the improvement on defense. 2018's team scored about 22 ppg and was a -28 in points differential. 2019 scored about 20 ppg and was a -21 in point differential. This year's team is down to 16.6 ppg and is a -19 points differential.

Not sure what any of this means. Just noticed on the UConn football page you could select stats for the 2018-2021 seasons rather easily.

We've moved to occasionally giving up huge plays from giving up huge plays at will and from getting beat badly on generic plays to mostly holding up. Still need to get off the field on 3rd down more often but at least we are making it to 3rd down more often. We used to rarely get there before giving up a long TD.

Job #1 for the D is to learn how to disguise pre-snap reads. The comment from the Wyoming QB was eye-opening and shouldn't have been allowed to happen.