How does being more, "psychologically prepared" help stop the scenario you describe?
It's pretty obvious I think. You need to know your assignments are going to be based on what the offense presents as a formation, fill your gaps if you're a run first defender, and get your zones/leverage/man assisgnments right if you're a pass first defender, and if you're a LBr, you need to be communicating with everybody to make sure you know what you're going to do at the snap. On the road, you need to be able to do that and ignore your surroundings and focus on nothing but getting your job done within the team.
That way, you can get on the balls of your feet and attack the offense at the snap rather than play slow on your heels and drop off the offensive players with 10-12 yard cushions.
We also need our best player on D - over the nose in a 3-3-5 to start actually playing like senior monster nose tackle, but that's another story.
I'm not here pontificating on how good or bad we are as physically talented team. We are not going to win any games based on talent. That's been painfully obvious for at least 5 years now. We barely beat Holy Cross.
All I've been saying is that UVA isn't a very good team either, and we made them look like a top 25 team - because we were woefully unprepared mentally to compete on the road on defense. On offense, we simply aren't good enough a team all around to be overcoming red zone turnovers. Need points on the board. It's a 3 phase game, and we need all 3 to work together to to have a chance to win. A better team than UVA would have put up 800 yards of offense and 60+ points on this D this past week. We were the freaking bad news bears. All that was missing was some defenders runnign into each other and knocking themselves out of the plays.
I'm not going to go to much farther with this. It's pretty simple. We haven't won a road game in a long, long time. That's not a scheme or talent thing because we've played some really bad teams. I think the last time we won, was the 7-3 win at Tulane where we didnt' score and offensive point. Could be wrong.
It's a team mentality, player leadership and mental preparedness thing - according to me. Disagree with that if you want, but I'm not changing my mind. We need player leadership on this team on the field and off, we need to start building a real team again in all 3 phases of the game, and we need to start being a hell of lot better practiced and prepared for what offenses can present on the field for the D, and we better start protecting the ball better on offense.
Coaches need to coach, and players need to play.
It's on to next week.
