The second quarter of the SMU game saw both teams cool off a bit on offense. The defenses started to settle in, and both teams made big stops on third and fourth down.
Koen Entringer continues to have issues in coverage, which leads to another easy touchdown. Louisville is bringing pressure on this play with man coverage behind the blitz. Jennings puts two players in dummy motion to try to get a feel for the coverage, but the defense doesn’t bite. Pre-snap, this looks like it could be zone coverage with the linebackers
dropping back into coverage.
The defense actually does blitz, and to me, it looks like Jennings is unsure of where to go with the ball. He keeps getting depth until he sees a receiver clearing through the middle of the field. This defensive call works if everyone executes.
I can’t explain what Entringer is doing on this play, as he never looks at the receiver he is covering. He glances over before the snap and then never looks back. He also doesn’t react to the snap for some reason. He allows this receiver to just run free across the field before he runs into a different receiver at the goal line. He ends up roughly 15 yards away from his man. I wish I could explain this one, but I have nothing.
I abhorred this play call. Louisville needs one yard here, and Jeff Brohm called a play that put the ball five yards from where they need to get to. It also played into what this defense does well. They get up the field and blow up plays in the backfield. You have to go right at them, or you need real misdirection. You can even see that they had the jet sweep covered to the bottom of the screen. You have to muscle up and get downhill in this situation.
This was such a great call by Mark Ivey. SMU loves to line up in trips to the wide side of the field to spread out the opposing defense. They run all kinds of plays out of this formation, and it appears that Ivey had a plan to disguise the coverage.
On this play, you can see that it looks like UofL is in man coverage with one safety deep in Kaleb Beasley. The rest of the defensive backs are lined up across from a receiver. Right before the snap, Beasley starts to sneak to the middle of the field. However, as the ball is snapped, Antonio Watts drops into deep coverage, and the defensive end to the wide side of the field drops into coverage.
Instead of man coverage, this is Tampa 2 with Beasley and Watts playing deep zone coverage. The corner to the top of the screen (I believe this is Tayon Holloway) does an excellent job forcing the receiver into the boundary, which leads to the timing being completely off for Jennings. The confusion from the coverage leads Jennings to make a poor decision, and Beasley gets the easiest interception of his career.
This was a very welcome new wrinkle from Brohm, and it nearly went for a touchdown. As teams continue to key on the running backs, he uses motion into what looks like a screen pass that they ran earlier in the game as misdirection to get Lincoln Kienholz around the corner on a designed run.
Lance Robinson is at left tackle on this play. He gets the opportunity to take on a corner in the open field, which is a dream for linemen. He honestly does his job a bit too well on this play because he gets good depth on his pull. He has the room to cut off the tight ends here, but the design of the play is for him to get this level of depth so that he doesn’t get caught up if SMU gets into the tight ends here. Linc has to slow down a bit and cut off of him, which runs him into the safety.
This play was blocked perfectly, and it is such a great design for a quarterback who has excellent instincts as a runner. Hopefully they continue to run this through the season.
Here’s my weekly pet peeve. Louisville decides to rush four and drop into coverage on third down here. I have no problem with that, and I actually hoped they would do this on every third down in this game. The hope being that their edge rushers would win as pass rushers, as we see here from Clev Lubin.
The issue I have is that the linebackers continue to drop well past the first-down marker, which gives the opposing offenses the opportunity to make these easy conversions. While you don’t want to give up a big play on third down, the offense is more than likely going to look to just get the first down. The expectation is that you are going to bring pressure, or at least your pass rushers will be pinning their ears back. The ball is going to come out quickly, so your zone drops have to be at the sticks to take away these types of throws.
