re: Florida - Defense Play Charting - Full Game (cliffs - DL not dominated, the ILB were)

Not quite finished but my takeaway is actually a little different than what I first thought.

The narrative the last 24 hours has been that we were "bullied up front". I don't think that's the case at all. What we were was tentative against the read option, and almost every single one of Florida's runs the 2nd half were read option plays where we had a man in position to attack the mesh point and he didn't do it. Secondary to that, HTT/Harris got sucked into the LOS mess repeatedly, so anytime that our OLB/DE (Sanders/Braswell/Young) forced a give on the read option play...........there was nobody behind them to follow and drop the ball carrier.


TL/DR - The DL wasn't great but they weren't terrible. The biggest issues were tentative play by the OLB on the Read Option (which may actually be taught, thinking the ILB/S will fill in behind and take the ball carrier once the give is forced). On top of that, just quite frankly poor play by the ILBs and Hellams. We looked like we just got frozen by the read play early and we never recovered. And Mullen, smartly, based his entire 2nd half offense around the read option (read options, play action off what looked like read option, speed option off a read option look, etc).

Ole Miss' entire offense is based around Read Options (with more of a slant towards RPO and not traditional old read option). The good news is we got a wake up call and tons of film on our failures now. The bad news is we looked like we didn't have any f'in clue what to do against it up the middle (ILB, S).