The Defense.

So, we are back to rushing 3 and dropping 8 on every play and getting gashed. I thought Tuiaki had turned a corner early in the season but since Keenan Pili has gone down, our defense has gone ultra conservative. There is no way USU should have converted so many 3rd and longs on us but Tuiaki's conservative defensive calling is freaking killing us. I sure hope that something changes this week because if we don't get Hall or Romney Healthy this week, we are going to lose to BSU.

I’m not too upset about how the defense played or the schemes chosen. They are a top-10 offense and we know our defensive depth is a problem now. We struggled against their passing game (to be expected) and yet somehow completely stymied their running game with nobody on the line because the defense was selling out to stop their passing attack. I’m hoping we get everyone back healthy soon though, because I think there’s a lot more frustration to be had when we’re playing so many backups against the teams ahead on our schedule.

They did very well in the 2nd half when we needed it. Our backup DB's are getting experience.

USU was 200 yards under their seasonal average to date. They rushed for 35 yards. They scored one TD in the whole second half. I’ll take that. Yes indeed I’ll take that.

According Desert News both teams had 35 rushing attempts but BYU had 211 rushing yards to 22 for Utah State. That's great defense and pretty well tells the story of the game. Allgeier alone had 218 yards so the rest lost 7 yards.

nuk13 wrote:

According Desert News both teams had 35 rushing attempts but BYU had 211 rushing yards to 22 for Utah State. That's great defense and pretty well tells the story of the game. Allgeier alone had 218 yards so the rest lost 7 yards.

That will happen when you lose 26 yards on a fumble. It gets counted as negative rushing yards.

I don't know how our D stopped their running attack. I bet Hans Olson does a video on it.

I would buy the above arguments if this wasn't the second game in a row where our defense couldn't get a team off the field on 3rd down. Yes the Run defense was good in this game, but the pass defense literally sucked. In the South Florida game, the defense didn't get a stop even once in the second half, they had 3 drives and scored touchdowns on all 3 drives. I hope things change. I was starting to become a believer in this defense but as soon as there were some injuries, Tuiaki went back to playing rush 3/soft zone and any competent QB is going to shred us. For crying out loud, the South Florida QB was a freshman.