Virginia Tech-UNC Review: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

UNC thoughts?

Okay, UNC thoughts. I’ll focus more on smaller stuff you might not have noticed in the midst of all the major malfunctions.

Steps Forward in the Passing Game

There is plenty of blame to go around, but I think Grant Wells (#6) is getting more dumped on him than is fair. The pick was a bad, under-duress situation, and missing the deep ball was bad, but some of the other stuff isn’t quite fair. I see complaints about him not seeing open guys, but the plays in question can be like this:

On another venue, someone went off on Wells for missing an open Connor Blumrick (#4) on this particular play. I’ve paused the clip where Wells stops his drop and I’ve arrowed Blumrick. This is the moment where Wells decides who he’s throwing to. At this point, the zone is soft below the line-to-gain. Meanwhile the deep receivers are bracketed. You can see this at the top of the screen, but the camera work prevents you from seeing that the safety to Blumrick’s side drifted to the sideline early, while you can barely see the cornerback tagging along with the Hokie TE. Instead of forcing one to Blumrick, Wells takes what the defense gives him, which is how it’s drawn up. And with a rusher coming free at him, taking the short throw makes double the sense. It’s not an ideal result, but I’d blame the call before I blamed the quarterback.

I’m not keeping track, but we might’ve seen our first big completion off an RPO:

At least I hope that’s an RPO and not guys getting downfield because they misheard the play or something. It looks like they’re reading the linebacker on the hash. I wonder if we haven’t seen much RPO stuff because the run-blocking is so bad that linebackers haven’t had to trigger.

When Wells did err, it was usually forcing things outside of the scheme. The interception is an obvious example, but he also tried forcing balls to the sideline. UNC had problems defending the sideline the previous week, and against Tech they were inconsistent. Once or twice Wells looked there and tried to make something out of nothing when the coverage clearly should’ve had him looking elsewhere.

Devolving Defense

This didn’t look like a prepared defense. At all. Forget the talent differential…there were mistakes galore.

The Hokies run a single-gap defensive scheme. That means, unless there’s a high-risk blitz called, you should see no more than one defender between any two blockers; you also should see no more than one defender outside of the last blocker on the line of scrimmage, unless someone’s watching the QB for a keeper or something like that. We saw something different:

Dax Hollifield (#25), Keli Lawson…