After riding high through the week, I found myself wondering if there would be an emotional hangover and concurring lack of focus coming into a game that people were telling the team they could win. While confidence boosters aren’t a bad thing, the performance put up this weekend has a lot of people wondering what the home stretch of the season is going to look like. It is absolutely necessary to at least split the final four games and become bowl eligible to keep Joker’s first season as the head coach from being labeled a bust. Derrick Locke missed practice on Wednesday and his situation is looking darker with each missed game; and the running game will have to be at top form to beat the rest of this SEC lineup (at least against Mississippi State). So realistically, what can this team do to gain some momentum back and finish the season strong?
Having Locke return would be a huge benefit, but all stingers take are time to heal. Having a dual threat offense is the only way to win in this conference. Heading into a match up with a top-15 defense in the country without your pre-season all-SEC back isn’t a position that any coach wants to be in, but when you factor in that your top three receivers are all just getting back to the practice field on Wednesday means that other player’s are hurting too. A banged up defense that Joker said got physically outplayed Saturday will be getting some help back in the form of Dequin Evans and Martavius Neloms, who are getting better but still on the mend.
Rehabbing injuries is nothing anyone can hurry up, pushing players back on the field can lead to worse results and even more time missed. If Locke, Cobb, Matthews, and King can get going then our odds in Starkville, and the rest of the season, get a whole lot better.
The calls for Steve Brown’s job are still getting louder, but considering what he’s een working with, I’m still content with complaining. He has dialed up the blitzed a bit (thank God) but is still having problems in red zone defense, and also completely forgetting one out of the 11 players on the field, who happens to have the ball. Our safety play has to improve in order for Brown to have the confidence to send our linebackers, especially with Chad Bumphis doing his best Alshon Jeffery impersonation this year. As easy as it is to say it’s the coaching, having young players simply isn’t like basketball, you can’t plug in a player and expect him to excel. Our linebacker core has blown gap assignments all year and allowed 4.5 yards per rush in the Georgia game. That kind of production will not win you games and must be remedied. I’m all for the implantation of robot arms in Danny Trevathan.
One more thing that we can do that will improve the football program at all levels, is grow some patience. We, as fans have to realize that while we are on the rise as a program, we are still not a top-25 program and the rest of the SEC is, unfortunately. We can complain from a distance about the softness of our non-conference schedule, but when you play 5 ranked opponents at the time when teams like that are firing on all cylinders, you will get the hardest hit they can dish out. Fortunately, even if we lose on Saturday, the season can still be salvaged with three extremely winnable games. The battle for Tennessee looms after Charleston Southern and the sweep is possible; Vanderbilt comes in for what I truly hope to be a thorough beating in order to get the team fired up to take down a 25 year bane of my existence. A three game sweep to end the season would put us at 7-5 and worthy of at least another trip to Shreveport, or maybe even…well, I don’t want to say it. But hey, it’s still a bowl.
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