Texas Tech football: Box score of HBU game shows serious defensive flaws
The box score from the Texas Tech football team’s 35-33 win over Houston Baptist reveals some serious defensive flaws that the Red Raiders must address.
Perhaps too many of us bought into the offseason storyline that this year’s Red Raider defense was going to be much-improved thanks to an influx of transfers and an extra year in the current scheme. Certainly, I did. But after what we saw transpire Saturday night in Tech’s 35-33 win over Houston Baptist, any optimism that we may have had has been doused by the coldest of waters.
Facing an FCS team that won just five games last season, defensive coordinator Keith Patterson saw his unit humiliated to the tune of 600 total yards. For comparison sake, that’s 311 more than the Red Raiders gave up to last year’s FCS opponent, Montana State.
So let’s go inside the box score to see just where the defensive issues were. And as we do, we will see that there are more flaws on that side of the ball than we feared.
The defensive line was a massive disappointment
We will get to the problems in the Red Raiders secondary in a moment. But defending the pass begins with the pass rush and on Saturday, Tech got almost no pressure on HBU quarterback Bailey Zappe and that’s troublesome.
On 49 Zappe passing attempts, there were only three sacks and eight pressures. That was despite the fact that Tech knew that the Huskies had no ground game to keep Patterson’s defense honest.
Part of that equation was the fact that the HBU scheme was designed to get rid of the football as quickly as possible. Also, Zappe is excellent when on the move allowing his OC, Zach Kittley, to roll him out of the pocket and away from pressure.
Still, this was an FCS opponent and Tech should have been able to assert its will along the line of scrimmage. Perhaps the sack total couldn’t be expected to be any higher but all night long, the Red Raiders should have been in Zappe’s face and they simply weren’t.
It looked as if the Tech defensive line wore down under the stress of the HBU tempo offense. That was evident by the fact that the final sack of the night came on the first drive of the second half.
What’s more, a closer look at the QB pressures reveals that only three came from the defensive line with Eli Howard, Philip Blidi, and Nick McCann the only players along the line given credit for hurrying the passer. That’s the opposite of productive depth.
We were led to believe all offseason that this team had far more depth along the defensive front and that would in turn help the pass rush by allowing the starters to stay fresh. That line of reasoning proved to be a load of malarkey in week one and that’s one reason why Red Raider fans fear that nothing has changed with this program’s defense.