Compare and Contrast, Please

[friarwolf]

For grins, could some of you guys who were at last year's Red Blue game as well as this year's compare how the team looked from last year to this year. Are we noticeably better this year overall, the same, offense and defense look better, same, etc................

[SMU Football Blog]

I barely remember. My impression is the offense looked much better this year than last year. This year's game looked more "in sync" or crisp. Basically, there was more of a sense that everybody knew what to do.


Here's the link to last year's game:
http://smumustangs.cstv.com/sports/m-footbl/spec-rel/040905aaa.html

[ponyboy]

Oh, I was very underwhelmed by the offense last year. This year we looked, well, potent. Willis appears to be the real deal.

[Otto]

Agreed -- the offense, even without DeMyron and while breaking in new QBs, looked lightyears ahead of where it was last year.

[mr. pony]

I know one thing, from an attendance standpoint:

At one I went to 5 years ago, there couldn't have been 50 people in the stands. What did we have Saturday, maybe 2, 3 thousand?

[LonghornFan68]

wow, that link reminds me of what could have been with that picture of Phillips. Oh well.

[JasonB]

Very hard to tell. we run a base 4-3 in the R-B game, so all the quarterbacks always look decent because they are able to read the zone or match an inside receiver on a LB. I came out of it with these thoughts:

1) We are so young at QB, bad things are going to happen at times. Willis had some open guys deep that he didn't see and also had some misreads where he threw into heavy coverage instead of to an open player. I didn't see him progress to a third receiver during hte scrimmage.

2) We know our D-line is really good, so I am not sure if they are great or we don't have depth on the O-Line, but they absolutely dominated the second team O-line. I think the offense will suffer considerably if we have some injuries to the front 5. Our starting O-line is decent, but was able to handle the 2nd team D-line pretty easily, which implies that we may not have a lot of depth over there either, although we are certainly bigger in depth than we have been in the past. Everyone in the two deep d-line at least LOOKS like a college d-lineman, which couldn't be said in the past.

3) We are going to really miss our kicking game from last year. That was two wins, at least.

4) I came away pretty impressed with the CB and WR situations. I think we are loadad at each. Haynes and Lindley are solid, and Settle is athletic and pushing both.