re: Stat Model - #1 Bama vs #3 OSU (Title) (7 PM CST) (Jan 11)

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Can someone share what HuskeyPup on BOL said about the game? it's a thread with his thoughts on the game.

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Championship Game Thoughts
Huskypup
Jan 4th, 1:28 PM

My conclusion is that OSU is a really good deep-ball team due to speed, Fields's arm, and their OL. But the secondary play, especially the safeties, is just horrendous from Clemson. This is the issue with total conference silos - in retrospect, no ACC team outside Clemson and UNC can actually throw the ball downfield this year. I think Clemson honestly had this huge deficiency all year, and while it did flash some, we really didn't know how bad it was because they never played UNC (I honestly walk away from this thinking UNC would have had a very good shot at beating them). I do think Ohio State is a very good team, but I'm a bit concerned that this was more a result of 1) intense preparation, and 2) a terrible matchup for Clemson. This is why I note in the video whether any of this really translates to the championship. We have had our issues, but our secondary is just miles ahead of what you see in these clips (especially athletically). Offensively, Ohio State spent the whole game disguising coverage, rolling down, and catching Clemson trying to be very horizontal - which is very much not our offense. Notre Dame's secondary, for all their issues, is probably a lot better than OSU or (especially) Clemson against the deep ball, so our schemes will change too.

Something I'll add - if you watch Wilson/Olave highlights, you'll realize they're wide open about 70% of the time. Ohio State probably could have made this even worse if they wanted, but that was in large part because Clemson just absolutely couldn't cover a deep ball to save their lives. Given that they were consistently in a deep zone with numbers, it's astonishing.

In truth, both OSU and Bama were choosing to just run the ball for most of the game and get it over with. The difference, I think, is that OSU was actually facing cloud coverage concepts and a lot of very weak fronts that made it easy for Sermon to tee off. We were facing 7-or-8 man boxes and it made it much more of a grind. But the truth is that both teams were able to take a deep completion about whenever they wanted.

I feel like Wright's issue is much more about reaction time than speed. Battle gets isolated on true receivers and loses, but that wasn't Clemson's issue in clips (the safeties are in deep zones, not man). Hellams is a great athlete overall, I think.

But the ultimate point is that we probably have 4 safeties that are better/faster than anything Clemson can put on the field. Clemson's strategy was to generally put guys that know the scheme and can tackle, but at a certain point the lack of athleticism falls apart. It's the same exact thing you saw with Arkansas this year - great defense against most teams, but the good offenses absolutely shredded them.

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