A Tale of Two Halves...

Adjustments. That was the story for the Jackets offensively this week as Coach Johnson made a few subtle changes, donned the aluminum foil helmet so Kam Chancellor wouldn't read his mind, and went to work.

CPJ's unit is how big, Bud?

The first half was an offensive nightmare for the Jackets as our first three drives were stalled by penalties, poor execution, & a bad pitch over Embry Peeples head. Give some credit to Virginia Tech. Bud Foster used two looks that helped keep Nesbitt off balance. The first was "shade" 4-3 alignment with the nose tackle directly over our center, the other tackle over the guard, & the ends outside our tackles in their regular alignment. This leaves an enticing hole over the other guard that we should be able to exploit using Dwyer on the dive. But Foster was essentially trying to bait Nesbitt to hand it off up the middle as on every play he would fire a linebacker into the hole, making it impossible to run there. This 5-2 look (with some 6-1 mixed in) along with our own mistakes held us to only 7 points & 88 yards in the first half (the majority of those coming on a Josh-to-BayBay 51 yard pass play to set up the touchdown).

Nesbitt stole Kam Chancellor's lunch pail & went to work in the 2nd half Saturday night...

But there's no better "in-game" tactician than CPJ & we came out in the second half on fire with a 3 minute, 6 play, 60 yard drive for a touchdown. What did we do differently? Simple, we didn't stop ourselves with penalties & we made two subtle adjustments. The first was that we simply allowed the Hokie linebacker to blitz & handled that by either running outside (the linebacker takes himself out of the play) or firing the play-side tackle down onto the linebacker. The second adjustment was we changed the way we blocked the perimeter, using various players to cut the free safety, Chancellor. This created what Beamer called the "guessing game" for the Virginia Tech staff. And we all know who won that one. The A-backs as a group blocked extremely well on Saturday & this was a key to the game. On the day the Jackets rolled up 309 yards rushing on 63 attempts for a 4.9 yd average. Pretty impressive, Gentlemen....

You fell victim to one of the classic blunders- never engage in a land war in Asia & never, ever, mess with the triple option...