New DB coach?

[instigator]

I'm going to do something rather unusual for message boards, and admit I was wrong.

I'd felt like we were pretty average most years in pass defense, and just plain bad this year. I think I listened to message board fans too much, though. While we weren't unbelievably dominant, we were pretty darn good in the two previous years. If you look at the following statistics, you should notice something:

2014: 118th
2013: 30th
2012: 29th

I say this over and over, but the thing I hate most about message boards is that fans overreact with unbelievable predictability. With Mike, it's pretty obvious here. He's done a fine job overall in the secondary, but had one awful year. I knew that we had some issues in our secondary that made things look worse than they really were in the big picture, but I did't realize how good we've been.

Some of you may be looking at 30 and 29, and think that sounds painfully mediocre, but you need to take a few more things into account. The "#1 pass defense" was San Jose State. Do you really think they're the best? Many non-P5 schools undeservedly were ranked ahead of us. Also, even if they are in a P5 conference, it still may be misleading, because the Big XII can throw the ball around a lot better than most other conferences.

IMO, one of the best, although still not perfect, statistics is how you rank in your conference. OU ranked #1 and #2 in 2013 and 2014. That's pretty impressive.

With all that said, I switch my vote to Viney.

I looked at these numbers and I am fairly pleased with them. It leads me to think maybe it was just our inexperience int eh secondary but I had an idea in my head that if we were good against the pass, we were bad against the run. I keep thinking back to 2012 and it felt like everyone ran all over us. I pulled the numbers back to 2008 for fun and it looks like we've only have a good defense against the run and pass twice. I'll define good as in the top 30 range or better. I might tend to think top 50 against the pass in the B12 would be fine if you are great against the run, but it doesn't look like we are doing that either. Here is a chart for fun.

[EatLeadCommie]

Our numbers were ok for 12 and 13, but the conference was not exactly stacked with passing juggernauts for those years. Outside of Baylor and Taco Tech (who has been down), who were the big passing teams? OSU? Not really. Not KU, KSU, Texas, nor ISU. TCU didn't go to a spread until this year. WVU used one of those years to put up a 300 yard rusher against us.