Spring football thoughts

 

I just watched the replay of the game on BTN, so curious if anyone who was there saw things differently. A few modest thoughts:

Plusses:

 

• Secondary looks like a top Big 10 secondary. Still a bit young in years but, after last season, they can't be less experienced than anyone else in the league and Allen, Johnson and co look like they could develop into NFL guys. Big change from what we've traditionally had.
• DL played better than I thought and managed to penetrate. Hard to tell with vanilla gameplans but guys kept moving and fighting. We won't make up for Kerrigan with one guy.
• OL looked fine; we didn't show much but with experience and (hopefully) depth the hope is that this will be a strength of the team.
• RB actually looked better than I expected. Going into this spring I basically worried that we would have no one back there, with all the injuries, attrition (McBurse) etc. We don't have any first or second round picks on the roster but it looked like we had a couple of guys (Shavers, Pegram, some of the fullbacks) who can get you 4-6 yards a pop, which is all we can really ask for. If Bolden comes back and is early 2009 Bolden (see vs Oregon), then we're in great shape; if not, then I don't feel so terrible about the position. I was especially surprised by some of the backup guys you don't hear much about (Johnson ran well), though you never know when running against the second and third units.
• We didn't show much schematically, but I expect a lot of our zone run game to look like what Auburn did with Cam Newton: Nothing real fancy, but you combine the zone read with an automatic bubble screen to the read side, as that way you put the outside linebacker in a bind. If he collapses for the QB (which will happen a lot this year) Henry/etc just tosses it out to Edison. for 4-5 yards. It's part of the run game. Again, if you watched Auburn last year it was a bread and butter play, not intended to be  a gimmick but sound football.

 

Minuses:

 

• Quarterback. Now, this isn't really fair because Henry has the job because (a) he's apparently a great kid and (b) he has serious wheels, and there were plays where Henry might have run for a 50 yard TD but it didn't count. In other words, his job isn't to be Tom Brady just yet, it's to be a dual threat. That said, I counted several bad/missed reads on read run plays (including the one in the first half where he took it and jumped over a guy and might have scored -- if you watch the replay his "read" guy just stood there and he should have given it to the RB, who had a convoy of blockers). And the passing game still looks pretty shaky. We kept it pretty basic -- we called the same pass play twice in a row several times, which is just part of the teaching process (each time Henry hit the right guy the *second* time, which shows he's a learner). But several poor reads and throws, stuff Henry should be seeing by now. Also, the interception on the first drive that was called back that Allen picked off was a horrible read and play. Henry rolled out on the bootleg, had a blocker that he didn't use, and then launched a pass to a covered receiver off his back foot while falling away. Was a nice play by Allen but he cannot do that against Big 10 competition.
• The good news with Henry is he always seems to recover well -- he came back from the interception and found Siller on a *very* nice touchdown. And it's clear he has improved his passing skills and mechanics. What really shocked me is that Henry's stocky throwing motion looked much better than TerBush's, who generally was disappointing to me. TerBush is a big body and looks the part, but I was surprised at how slow he operated and shaky he looked. The walkons did their part -- I actually thought they made some nice reads until they threw it right to the defense. Maybe someone can tell me how Robinson looked this spring. I expect Henry to fight off Marve in the fall but Marve to pass TerBush for the backup spot, assuming his head is still focused.
• Wide receiver. We've clearly upgraded the talent at this position over the last couple of years (other than Keith Smith, who got by more on his great smarts and physical strength than blazing speed or quickness). But new coach Patrick Higgins clearly is still trying to get the young guys to learn and improve. You could often tell when receivers knew the ball wasn't going to be thrown to them by the way they would lazily run their routes, and we weren't very clean on breaks and cuts or with finding voids in the zones. (Our defense played mostly simple Cover 3/3-deep zones, 2 deep, and "quarter quarter half" (quarters or 1/4 cover to one side and Cover 2 to the other).) This is one reason I'd prefer guys like Ross and Edison to just focus on getting better at wide receiver than spending so much time taking handoffs from the backfield despite us having a six man runningback rotation. (The one exception is Siller: I think he looks significantly improved, pretty fluid, and he had some good blocks and some good catches. The next step for him is to improve after the catch -- he didn't get much of a chance for it in this game -- and he could be a 50 reception/800 yard type receiver. (We need both him and Edison to have those kinds of numbers.))
• As an aside, Patrick Higgins came from a very good staff at BYU, and goes back a long with with OC Gary Nord, so I'm hoping that over the summer he can introduce some practice methods and schemes they used over the last few years to complement what we already do.
• Back to minuses: Linebacker -- this isn't entirely fair by me either because the schemes were so vanilla, but our linebacker corps always seems the weakest part of the team, despite the experience. Our offense burst several runs right up the middle to guys who weren't touched until they hit the secondary, and most of that were linebackers not in position for their run fits.

So that's my initial impression having watched the spring replay, which is a woefully inadequate piece of information. I'm probably on balance less optimistic having watched this than before, when I had just been reading the news articles that came out about Henry's development, etc. This is still a very young team that needs to get much better, and I know I was hard on Henry but the coaches have really set the offense up to revolve around him (also by necessity, given the paucity of experienced runningbacks). For Purdue's offense to carry its load, we're going to have to be a 200/200 team -- around 200 yards rushing (with like 50-80 coming from the QB) and 200 yards passing. I'm more confident about the 200 yards rushing, but I'm not sure where our 200 passing yards will come from just yet.

 

On defense, our strength looks like the secondary, but there's going to be a lot of pressure on those guys with replacing Kerrigan up front and making plays at the linebacker spot. 

Here's my too soon prediction: The early schedule sets up well for this very young team, with all of September to play teams we should beat (though that hasn't worked the last couple of years). Unfortunately for Hope, I think given our recruiting woes, he needs to win seven games this year during the regular season or I'm not sure he's earned bringing him back. I do hope this team can do it.