It wasn’t just that I didn’t feel like talking about the game.
I didn’t get home until the early afternoon, and owed it to the wife and kid to spend time with them for allowing me to indulge in the trip and everything else. So you can expect on home games where I’m spending the night in the ‘Burgh that I won’t be posting right away.
The nice thing about this blog — no deadline.
I still haven’t read anything on the game at this writing. Even managed to miss discussions about Pitt in the College GameDay Final. Just the box score to confirm some stuff.
Well, wow did that suck. I did not see that coming. Not that we lost — even when picking Pitt to win, I could see us losing. I just didn’t expect to see Pitt dominated like that.
After the game we just found ourselves in the lot just kind of looking at each other and cursing, trying to figure out where Pitt looked good. We didn’t find much.
The lines were absolutely dominated.
No pass protection or room to run up the middle for the offense. It was hard to tell whether it was by a bad game plan or the lack of time for Tyler Palko — and at the moment I’m favoring the latter — that kept Pitt from trying to get the ball to Greg Lee more.
On defense, the pass coverage had to play soft — in no small part because a lot of help was needed for the line. This allowed short, underneath passes all night long. And Quinn had all day for someone to get open with his O-line. To Quinn’s credit, he was also a lot faster than I expected at escaping when he did face pressure or on a roll-out.
Darius Walker, the ND RB, looked very, very impressive. The way he changed directions and hit the holes with a real burst was something.
Pitt couldn’t make ND punt until early in the 4th quarter. Special teams looked bad. Furman had that costly fumble mid-way through the 2nd quarter on a kick-off, and when ND capitalized to make it 28-10 that just took the crowd completely out of it. It was completely deflated.
The one bright side I could find, was that our corners defended rather well. ND wisely discarded any pass over 10-15 yards after the Revis interception in the 1st quarter. There’s a reason that their receivers only caught 8 of the 18 passes from Quinn. Over half the passing yards from ND came on the run after the catch.
Well, I expected ND to run a lot, and they did. At nearly 2-1.
I’m starting to drift. I’ll have more later.
