Why can't Auburn's secondary fly around and make plays like...

Lack of talent.

You miss McNeill. And Thorpe, McNeal, etc aren't Mattheiu, Kirkpatrick, Menzie, Claiborne, etc.

We have Ron Cooper

Bama has Saban

UF has Muschamp
/thread

I guess chizik needs to develop more thorp winners.

I've heard Thig is around because he can recruit. I wish Chizik would just fire Teddy today and do it himself. I honestly think I could do a better job... And I'm just a poster on TD.com.

Gene Chizik is your problem, not Ted Roof. Other than '04 Auburn, where has he had a defense that was any good at stopping teams from scoring? Even at Texas in 2005 his defenses had trouble stopping people. The offense, not the defense, was the strength on that team as well.

Because y'all are Auburn. Be happy y'all bought a NC last year but don't expect to be a consistently great football team ever or you will just be disappointed.

Remember...Little Brother is what Auburn football is all about.

IMO, its not because you dont have the athletes because you guys recruit as well as anybody. Therefore, it has to be on the coaching side.

Well, Antonio Coleman said it best.

"It's about ballin'. You have to get out there and make plays and fly around and have fun. If you want to get all these grades and stuff, go to school to get your grades."

I saw Auburn run a ton of Cover 2 and Cover 3. Not only do they run a ton of Cover 2 and Cover 3 but they are terrible at disguising the coverage. On top of that it looks like AU's D uses a spot drop tecnique. If they are pattern reading it sure as heck doesn't look like it. Take a look at the 3rd and 20 that USU converted. If they were pattern reading that middle backer would have turned and run with that receiver flashing behind him, but he just drop to his spot and waits and doesn't react until after the pass is thrown.

Auburn stayed in the base Cover 2 pretty much the whole first half. Auburn did that a ton last year, and that's why you see teams just chew up big chunks of yardage throwing the swing screen to the slot receiver. Classic counter to a base cover 2 as your outside backer has lost leverage to the slot receiver based on his alignment and that pretty much leaves a 2 on 1 on the corner.

Alabama runs a lot of cover 1 robber with pattern reading on the zone drops. LSU and Alabama are also very good at leveraging the receivers before the play even starts. What does pattern reading mean? When a receiver passes into your zone your basically cover him man to man. But the more important aspect of this is that there are pretty much 10-15 popular route combinations you may see out of a particular set, so in pattern reading you learn to identify the pattern the receiver is running which should give you a good idea what pattern another receiver is running, which with proper training allows you to better pass coverage of receivers between zones. With spot dropping a well trained receiver will know how to settle into the holes in the zone and a well trained QB will know how to exploit the throwing lanes.