Revisiting the Keys to the game

First of all sorry for taking so long to get to this. My family took an unexpected trip to visit the in-laws and I only had my Ipod to get on the internet. Here is a look at how my keys to the game went.

1. Murray must play an even game. - Murray had some really good moments but was not consistent. Much of that can be contributed to drops and the pass rush but he still had times where he missed open receivers and missed reads.


2. Someone other than Orson Charles must step up as a play maker to help Murray. - Boykin did this on his one carry. Malcolm Mitchell had one nice deep catch. Outside of that Charles was the offense. King may have been the biggest disappointment in this area as he had 1 catch and 2 drops in 7 passes thrown his way. Those two drops would have gone for first downs and may have helped the offense settle down a bit.

3. Defense must be sound fundamentally. - On the plus side the defense came out and played great for much of the first half. They never gave up the big play to Boise. On the down side is that once Moore settled into the game Georgia's defense was unable to stop him at all unless they got pressure which they seldom did. I am going to re-watch the game to see if there were as many blown coverages as it first seemed but I believe a lot of that was the amount of time that Moore had to throw.

4. The defense must have a leader. - There was no one that stepped up to show he was THE man on defense. Jarvis Jones has a good game but no one stepped up to take over.

5. Trench warfare. - This was the worst part of the game for Georgia. From two false starts penalties on the first drive that never let the offense get started to giving up 6 sacks to the defense not getting pressure on Moore the lines were completely dominated in the game. The coaching staff deserves part of the credit for this. On offense Bobo had the chance to establish the run and try to over power Boise as the game was close the entire first half and into the 3rd quarter but by playing most of the game out of the shotgun he allowed their line to be the aggressor instead of our offensive line. On defense the same thing can be said. The defensive game plan appeared to be to not give up the big play and hope that Boise couldn't repeatedly drive the length of the field. That worked early but once Boise took control of the game it was shown we needed to gamble a bit by bringing pressure. When Grantham did pressure it worked more often than not. The problem was seldom more than 3 or 4 rushers.

Bonus - The special teams for Georgia let them down. It was the one phase of the game that should have been clearly in Georgia's favor. The entire game the special teams gave Boise an advantage in field position. With the exception of Butler's punting average and one return by Boykin, when he was still tackled by the kicker, the special teams did little to help the team win.