Double-T Nation News:
DTN's Top Six:
- Amazing coverage of cutting down those trees in Berkley from California Golden Blogs.
- EDSBS takes a look at the first year college football coaches.
- Philadelphia 76'er Samuel Dalembert gets it.
- Amazing hurricane photos.
- Coach RM Knight on his friend, Don Haskins and lots more here, this is worth your time.
- Rakes of Mallow, a fine Notre Dame blog, on why chucking it deep is the best option.
Texas Tech Football:
Somewhat of a strange article from someone at the LAJ that asks if quarterback Graham Harrell is hurt, perhaps as the reason why he wasn't his normal self on Saturday against Nevada. If he is hurt then he needs to sit until he gets back, but I do have my own theory as to why he struggled.
I was reading BC's dedfischer's post-mortem and although I watched it for myself and knew that Nevada was rushing 4, from various positions and dropping 7, and clogging up the middle. My thought was that those deep passes where Harrell just throws the ball up for grabs was game-planned, what about the possibility that he was told to do this. Imagine this, that the coaching staff gets together after the first couple of drives, identifies that Nevada isn't going to allow Morris or Lewis to catch anything over the middle, and tell Harrell to just throw the ball up for grabs and let the bigger Texas Tech defenders go up and grab the ball. If this is the case, that seems like a pretty piss-poor gameplan, but there's just not much explanation as to why Harrell would throw so many of those up for grabs. Again, you blame Harrell for them being under-thrown, but his arm is bigger than that, we've seen him throw the ball down field with more accuracy and zip than what he exhibited on Saturday night. In any event, if this was what the staff thought was a good idea, it's not. I think I would have rather seen a complete 180 from Captain Leach and would have liked to watch Nevada try and stop Batch, Woods and Crawford run for 5 yards a pop. At some point the Nevada defense will adjust and that's where you go back to your bread and butter, but you've got to make then adjust and running the ball until Nevada did adjust, at least in my opinion, would have been the absolute best plan.
On Nevada’s loss to Texas Tech …"I’ve obviously watched all of the game already and watched all their different blitzes. What they did with Tech was try to jam their receivers off the line. that really threw off their timing with Graham" Harrell "and all his receivers. And they blitzed him a lot and gave him a lot of different looks. At some points they had seven guys up at the line. Sometimes they brought all seven, sometimes only three. We have to really get that figured out this week, and I’ll be working hard with the offensive line to get that done."
On measuring himself against Harrell’s play against Nevada …
"Not necessarily. I’m not too worried about what other quarterbacks do around the country or around the conference. I’m worried about what I do and what our team does week in and week out. Does it make me worry that Graham had some problems with them? Yeah, of course it does. They are a very good defense. They’re fast, they fly around. They’re going to present some problems for us. But if we work hard throughout practice throughout the week, I think we’ll get it figured out."
DT's Adam Coleman writes that the SMU and the Texas Tech defenses have similar problems, stopping a prolific offense. Here's SMU head coach June Jones:
"They're offense hasn't changed much," he said. "They've done a great job getting the ball down the field, all different kinds of ways. (Leach is) a master at designing at what he has put together. We're going to have to obviously play a lot better than we played in the last two weeks. Our defense has got to create some ways to hang in there and compete with them."
I'll discuss this later when I post my "Us v. Them", but the SMU defense has been pretty bad about creating turnovers and opportunities, and Jones confirms that SMU knows it's a problem:
"We talk about turnovers all the time," Jones said. "You're only going to get so many opportunities to get them each game and we got five last week. That's a pretty good ratio. The biggest change for us, when Rice threw us the ball, it hit us right straight dead in the hands. We didn't get any turnovers. We made the plays this week (against Texas State). That's probably the biggest difference. "
Neglected Video: Leach talks about the defense with Fox34 . . . Fox34 with the Morris punt return . . .
Texas Tech Basketball:
Jeff Goodman of Fox Sports features men's basketball coach Pat Knight. I thought this bit about what Junior Knight intends to do about the talent gap in Lubbock:
Knight's plan is to try and recruit quality players and win games in Lubbock — which admittedly isn't all that easy due to the out-of-the-way location."You're going to see us go places we haven't been before," he said. "We're going to get out, and it's going to be me."
His father usually went out on the road in July for a couple days — maybe a day locally in Denton and a day in Las Vegas. Pat Knight was out 20 days that month.
"My dad told me it's a young man's game now, and you've got to be out there more than the assistants," Pat Knight said. "That was one of the reasons he got tired of it."
That is good news.
Texas Tech Recruiting:
Allen Wallace of SuperPrep.com pens a piece for RaiderPower on Lamar High School (Houston, TX) receiver Josh Gordon (6'4"/215). Gordon is considering Texas Tech, as well as Missouri. Here's Gordon:
Gordon says that being in the right offense is going to be very important to him. "I want a style of offense that fits me," he emphasized. "I want to go where I can get the ball and play early, so I'll be looking at the depth chart."Texas Tech is a team that Gordon says fits his game perfectly. "I love the style of offense they run," he said. "It's perfect for a receiver.
"I also like that they've been recruiting me the longest and I've gotten to know their coaches pretty well already."