What Happened to Playing Defense?
In all fairness, Georgia has a much better quarterback than LSU, and a tandem of receivers with a lot of talent, and a young running back named Moreno with a few highlight clips. But still, I thought that LSU would be able to stay in some games this year because of their defense… hopefully long enough for a young quarterback (or backs in our case) to mature. In the past few games that hasn’t happened.
One article I read noted that the LSU offense scored enough points to tie the Georgia offense. The problem was, the LSU offense also gave up costly plays that allowed the Georgia defense to score. The first play from scrimmage was bookended with a similar play (to the same Georgia player, no less) at the end of the fourth quarter. Both were bad passes intercepted and run back for touchdowns. You can’t do that and win in the SEC.
In other conferences, Texas did manage to overcome a couple of bad plays by leader Colt McKoy (and I have to say again, was there ever any doubt that someone named “Colt McKoy” would be the quarterback at Texas?) to beat Oklahoma State by a few points. It was in doubt to the very end as the Cowboys only had to go 99+ yards for the final drive in order to take the game. I say “only” because they have the weapons to do it, and nearly pulled it off.
Penn State and Ohio State played. Penn State won. I didn’t watch the game, but it looks from the score to have been a defensive struggle with only one touchdown between both teams. At the moment there are several marque teams at the top of the polls (Texas, Alabama, and Penn State) and of those Penn State seems to have the easiest road to win out the rest of the season. Alabama has several big games remaining on their schedule, and Texas plays their fourth consecutive game against an undefeated top-ten ranked opponent next week. It will be interesting to see how the BCS standings play out over the last few weeks of the season, as both Penn State and USC are likely to be penalized for their strength of schedule. It’s possible that a one-loss team like Alabama or Florida (one of whom should win the SEC title game) could jump ahead of Penn State for a national title game.
The next few weeks will certainly be interesting.