Carl Dubois has a good piece today going through the team's reaction to its defensive woes the past two weeks. One criticism that's come at defensive coordinator Bo Pelini after the Kentucky game is that we didn't blitz nearly enough. For whatever reason, it tends to be forgotten that blitzing is a high-risk, high-reward trade. It doesn't ALWAYS work. And the times it doesn't, it can cause a defense to get shredded.
The bottom line is that our front four is supposed to be among the best in the nation, and shouldn't NEED blitz help in order to get penetration into opposing backfields. Dubois correctly points that out here, and the team understands it. Plenty of people will be watching to see how we execute on that this week against Auburn. The first step of correcting a problem is admitting it exists; at least we're aware of it. (And yes, plenty of kudos to the Kentucky offensive line for not allowing a sack...but that was a HUGE question mark for the team going into this season, so no one's arguing that we were up against a bunch of future first-round picks or anything. Hence our bewilderment.)
We're getting ready for Auburn. To me the recipe appears pretty simple: CATCH THE BALL. We're going to have all sorts of problems moving the ball on that Auburn defense, which did a masterful job against the Arkansas running game last week. If we devolve into the one-dimensional attack we've been the past couple weeks, our season - and quite possibly our SEC West hopes as well - will be flushed down the toilet. And it'll be another season of "What if?" for LSU football.
It's a talented team, and as I've mentioned before all isn't lost given our spectacular performances earlier in the year, but plenty of questions were raised last week that need to be answered immediately. We can't afford a single lackluster effort the rest of the year. Pressure's on.
Wherefore art thou, Early Doucet? WE NEED YOU!
The guys at Bleacher Bloggers were kind enough to give us a shout out on this week's episode. Click on over and check it out, they put together a roundup of what's hot in the the sports blogosphere every week.