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Our team is built on defense and we legitimately have a top 10-15 defense at the FBS level. We have two elite, NFL caliber defenders in the box and three corners who will play in the nfl. We last lost a home game in 2013. You know all of those high powered spread offenses that light up the score board and are fun to watch? Well, we don't have that here. Coach Clark is an old school, defense wins championships kind of coach. In his system the offenses job is to run the ball, control the clock, and grind teams down, hitting a couple of big plays off play action along the way. Our offense is basically just power running out of the spread paired with a vertical passing game to make you pay if you bring your safeties up to help in the run game. We went 9-5 last year, losing in the CUSA championship game to FAU, the Bowl game against App st, to WKU (congrats on your win against them last year) to Tennessee, and to Southern Miss.
The blueprint to beat us is exactly what Western Kentucky did last year. If your defensive line is good enough to slow down our running game without overloading the box, then you can play two safeties deep and take away our deep passing game. Thats what they did. They rushed four, dropped seven in zone and dared our QB to dink and dunk his way down the field. He responded by throwing four interceptions.
The caveat to that game was that we had lost two offensive linemen to injury in fall camp and lost a third in practice the week of that game. It really handicapped us offensively that game and all year long. We were just decimated by injuries on the offensive line last year, and a good part of the season was played with four starting offensive linemen and our best backup lineman out. That was compounded by injuries to our starting QB who missed 4 games and was no where near 100% when he came back. We do return 18 starters from last year, and even with all of our injuries we still had nine wins and were in the CUSA championship game last year(the injuries on offense I mentioned, but our best cornerback, who was widely considered the best corner in CUSA two years ago, also missed all of last season and is back this year as well.)
We were ranked 8th nationally in total defense last year and return 9 starters from that unit and are expected to be better this year. We play a lot of press man and get pressure with four. Will blitz a decent amount just because we trust our corners and like to cause havoc.
There are six players on our team that are likely to get drafted and four of them are on the defensive side of the ball. They are:
Austin Watkins, all CUSA receiver, is on the Biletnikoff Award watchlist and our primary deep threat.
Spencer Brown, the nation's second active career leading rusher, only behind Clemson's Travis Etienne. Bruising back with great vision, was slowed by shoulder and ankle injuries last year but healthy this year.
Kris Moll, All CUSA LB with 4.3 speed who seems like he is all over the field. He's on the watchlist for the Chuck Bednarik & Bronko Nagurski Awards
Jordan Smith, 6'7 260 LB/DE that led us in sacks and is also on the Bednarik & Nagurski watchlists. If you remember DeAngelo Malone at WKU last year, he's a taller, heavier & stronger version of him.
Brontae Harris, missed all of last year due to injury, was considered the top returning CB in CUSA last year and is a legit shut down corner.
Dy'Jonn Turner, This is what pro football focus says about him as a draft prospect: "Turner is the best player in C-USA, and the only players sniffing him in that regard are his own teammates. He produced the highest slot-coverage grade among Group of 5 defensive backs last year and had three more plays on ball (10) than the number of first downs he allowed."
TD Marshall, was Brontae Harris's backup and when Harris went down teams thought they would try and pick on him. That was a mistake. Very physical press corner.
I think we will win, but I think it will likely be a closer game than most Blazer fans think and give yall a very good chance at scoring the upset. The reason I think you have a good reason to pull off a win is that against FCS teams we traditionally take our already vanilla offense and dumb it down to the point where you will be able to sit in the stands and know exactly what it coming. Your players definitely will. You have a better team than any of the other FCS teams we've scheduled. Especially with us playing Miami in week two, I can see us going into the game with the idea of not giving Miami anything on tape to look at that they havent seen 1000 times on tape already. Assuming yall come out of tonights game healthy, you will have the advantage of a game under your belt to work the kinks out and thats probably going to be a huge factor in the game. Your offense is good enough to score on us even if I dont think you will be able to sustain drives. We will need to be able to score as well and I can definitely see a scenario where our offense is stuck in first gear most of the night and yours has a game under its belt to work out the kinks and hits a couple of big plays.
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