Think the SEC Officials have given up on calling holding

... This is dumb. And beneath us. We got beat in pretty much every aspect... The house caught on fire and you're upset that the mailbox has to be replaced.

Our DL didn't do a good job of getting off the block enough to create obvious holds (in this game or others)... were they holding? Sure... but so is every OL at every level. I feel like there are some teachable moments there for sure though... both in terms of what is/isn't a hold as far as officials are concerned (help our OL) as well as how to better *draw* the holding penalty if an opponent is going to do so.

The early PI was bad, and I'd agree that the way the officials "let them play" played right into what Auburn wanted to do... aggressive press man coverage to shut down the short passing game knowing that their front 7 was not going to give Fromm a lot of opportunities for deep passes. We had no plan B... that's a bigger problem.

I agree with you on the holds but at a certain point you have to realize how the officials are calling a game and adjust. That goes for both how we call plays on offense and what we tell our offensive line to do. Thomas should have hooked whoever lined up across from him all game long on passing downs and waited to be called for a hold. My guess is that it never would have happened.

UF showed them how to run on us and they did the same holding, I remember in UF and AU separate plays at the line where our guy was in position and has beaten the guard and he just reached his forearm around d our defender enough to get the ball carrier by.

It is how Johnson kept sqruiting through and why we left 2-3 sacks out there.

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This... hell our entire OL should have been holding and force them to call it once we got down a couple of scores. There was at least one time where we had 7 men in to protect against 5 and they still managed to get pressure... (see: Seth's piece for reference)

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Agree - this was a game where we should have been more physical (aka bend the rules) with every aspect of the game on defense and in the trenches. The only thing we did well that I really liked was put Stidham on his arse a few times early on. You could tell that was a point of emphasis for our defense was to hit him as much as possible even if the ball was out and get him off his game. It seemed to have an impact too - he never really got going outside of his screen passes where they picked up a large majority of their passing yardage.

I'd love to see a rematch of the two teams in the SECCG. If we could get up early on Auburn and force Stidham to try and beat us passing the ball down the field, we'd boatrace them just like they did to us. Obviously if we play them again and they are able to run for 5 yards a pop, we will get destroyed again. That will ultimately be the key to whether or not this team can compete for a national championship - can we stop the run against the elite rushing teams?

It seems to be an SEC thing as a whole. They've been letting holding go a good bit for a few years. Not anything slanted against us, I've seen us get away with a ton of them too.

You know what...here's the thing about holding calls or any call for that matter when it comes to zebras. If we would have held their DL, we could have had more calls against us, but it would force them to look for it on both sides of the ball for both teams. The calls against us were for stupid obvious infractions, but I bet the zebras were watching for the same on both teams.

I'm just saying we made it too easy for them to watch us closely and once that precedent was set, we were screwed. Hell even the announcers were calling us too amped up.

I hope we see this in film review and hammer down on being more disciplined.

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once that president was set

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Is this why you are ing? You could have edited...

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I hope we see this in film review and hammer down on being more disciplined.

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I'm certain that it will be a point of emphasis... Smart has been very pointed with his remarks about penalties all season. He's not going to coach *caution* but he's also not going to put up with *dumb* penalties either. The late hit out of bounds penalty early in the game was ticky tack IMO... was close enough. The leaping penalty, the halo violation (went on Walker I think, but when I looked it was actually caused by Sony for not being able to stop and pushing him into the return man), and then Sony's penalty were all just silly/bad.

If there is an upside to it at all, it's very clear evidence that if you give an inch to an opponent, they'll take a mile. We gave up the edge in every facet and it was all Auburn needed to out execute. I think the LOS issues might still be a significant problem, but would like to see what our coaches can do to mitigate them in a rematch.

Didn't watch most of the Bama/Miss St game last weekend, so really don't know if there was much to read into that one other than they are down a bunch of LBs.