Editor’s Note: Former Temple player Dave “Fizzy” Weinraub posts his thoughts in this space every Tuesday. 

By Dave “Fizzy” Weinraub

Last week, I said I still was waiting for Anthony Russo to have a great game.  Guess what?  He had that great game against SMU, but his receivers were somewhere else.  He was 18 – 32 with at least seven drops.  Three of those drops were probable touchdowns and the others would have been key first downs.  Despite everything else, if we caught the ball, it would have been a tight contest.

What does a coach do about this lack of concentration?  Drill, drill, drill! One suggestion is to substitute different colored tennis balls for the football, and the receiver has to call out the color – contact allowed.  There are probably 100 other drills that may help.

While we’re discussing the offense, I really thought the play calling was exceptionally conservative.  On most of the third and fourth and shorts, everything was one back, up-the-gut – no trickery, nothing going back the other way. On other occasions, the passes were short of the first-down marker or dumps in the backfield.  Rolling out Russo and Centeio may have helped.  I still don’t understand why Russo doesn’t keep the ball on an RPO or bootleg once in a while, and if I see the quick screen to the outside one more time, I’m gonna scream.

On defense, I believe we gave up four long touchdown passes.  That shows we can’t cover speed man-to-man, especially if the QB has time.  (I thought we didn’t blitz nearly enough.)  Therefore, we need an alternative defensive scheme.  A scheme that both puts pressure on the QB, and also plays a deceiving zone. One way might be to have five guys playing the run with all sorts of blitzes, while six guys play a zone.  If six guys are playing zone, that zone could have many different looks.  It could be a 4-2, 3-3, 1-5, etc.  Most importantly, there has to be deep help for the corners.  C’mon guys!  You have almost more coachers than my 1959 team had players.  Innovate!  What you’re doing isn’t gonna get you to the league championship game, despite our talent.

In summary, we got the crap kicked out of us by a really well-coached and quarterbacked team.  However, one league loss doesn’t sink a season.  Can we come back?  Central Florida will fill the air with footballs.

Thursday:   Changing Things Up

Saturday: Game Night

Sunday: Game Analysis