Georgia’s defense had a goal this year not to give up more than 13 points in a game. They held everyone to 13 or less until the Saturday they came to Knoxville. We scored 17 and while they won they had to have been disappointed in giving up more than 13 points. One of their other goals on defense was to win on 3rd down 70% of the time, meaning hold opponents to 30% conversion or less. We converted 45% of our 3rd downs against them.
Kirby considers his defense this year a once in a generation defense. At one point in the year their performance was ahead of the 2011 Alabama defense, considered by some as maybe the best defense of all time, at least in the modern era (No one believes the 1939 Tennessee defense will ever be duplicated). After 13 games they are now 18 points behind that 2011 Bama team and we helped.
Kirby doesn’t expect they will be as good on defense next year though with their talent they’ll likely still be at or near the top of the conference. He says it doesn’t have anything to do with coaching or schemes. In fact, he said they train against the hardest things offenses can throw against them and that’s really all they train on. What they see in games is the easy stuff and because they’ve simplified their scheme and rely solely on talent they can handle the easy stuff pretty well.
Georgia and Alabama beat us because they could stop our run game and we couldn’t stop their offenses. Florida didn’t exactly stop our run game but we couldn’t contain their QB (144 yards). Same with Ole Miss. Coral rushed for almost 200 yards but I don’t think that was ever the plan. It’s just what we gave them, same as we gave to Florida.
Against SEC opponents we had the worst 3rd down defense in the conference and we had the worst red zone defense in the conference. The thing about it though is that while we were last in the conference at giving up long scrimmage plays of 10+ yards, we were near the top of the conference at limiting gains beyond that. Teams just ground us down, and specifically the 5 teams that finished the regular season ranked in the AP Top 25, along with Florida, which hadn’t quit at that point and was ranked #11 at the time of our game.
As I noted in my last post, we only gave up 18.1 points per game in the games we won but in the games we lost we gave up 40.6 points per game. I think we may be better on defense than it looks. It looks bad because of our schedule.
Our defense was middle of the conference for sacks but 2nd in the conference in tackles for loss. We were also 2nd in the conference for passes defended.
One other thing that Kirby says about his defense, and not just him but opposing coaches as well, is a critical strength of their defense is its depth. For the front 4 they rotate 10 guys. We had games this year where Butler was playing almost every snap. Kirby said in today’s game with the way offenses are run you can’t have a good defense without a lot of depth, depth without a noticeable drop off.
I think we have a good defense but we had a limited number of guys this year and as the season wore on that showed. We needed more bodies. We did a lot of things pretty well. Our run defense on a yard per carry allowed basis was in the top half of the conference as was our pass defense rating. It was the same 5 or 6 teams that made us look bad on that side of the ball and I think maybe that’s because we didn’t have enough bodies to play 60 minutes of football against the better teams on our schedule.
Kirby said he runs a ball control offense and that goes a long way to helping his defense as well. On the other hand, while we were pretty efficient against the run and pass, we ranked 12th in the conference in rushing attempts against us and 14th in passing attempts against us. Our efficiency against the run was 6th best as was our efficiency against the pass (6th best).
At the end of the first half against Florida they led 17-14. They beat us in the 2nd half 21-0. At the end of the first half against Alabama, they led 24-14. In the 2nd half they beat us 31-10. At the end of the first half against Georgia they led 24-10. In the 2nd half they beat us 17-7.
We just didn’t have the bodies numbers-wise, especially on defense, to hang with the better teams on our schedule. All in all though, for our first year with a new staff and with the roster attrition from last year, I can't imagine many folks not believing we actually showed a ton of progress all across our team. jmo.
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