Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Guess the source of Athlon's bulletin board material?

I am not buying Athlon's preview this year. However, their use of candid and, at times, biting critiques from anonymous sources does have me intrigued. Here is what their ACC source said about BC:
Boston College: “Overrated. Good coaches, and their kids play hard. But their cupboard is bare this year. They lost that edge of toughness on offense when the new coach [Jeff Jagodzinski] came in.”


Fair enough take. I think our cupboard is less bare than perception. Other ACC teams dished on include Florida State, Duke, Georgia Tech, Maryland, and Miami. Because of the assistant tag, we'll never guess the coach serving as Ahtlon's Deep Throat but you can narrow which staff he came from.

Who is out? Obviously the schools named. I also think you can cross off anyone from NC State. I just don't see one of the former TOB staffers degrading our talent and crediting our coaches. My guess is that it is someone from Clemson. The Tigers played all of the teams listed with the exception of Miami. However, if they were scouting BC, Duke, Georgia Tech, and Florida State they would have seen the 'Canes plenty on tape and noticed that "Last year the defense was extremely vanilla. Mostly just man-free with occasional blitzes. You’ve got to mix it up once in a while.”

Because the unnamed source mentioned Miami's vanilla schemes, I am guessing he was watching his potential opponents' offenses. Therefore, if it is someone from Clemson, he is probably on the defensive side. I won't go so far as to guess which Clemson defensive coach may have been the source. You can do your own speculating by looking at their staff bios.

3 comments:

Scott Weigman said...

The video of Tenuta in that article is great.

I was pretty unimpressed with his defense last year against us....espcially given all te attention he gets from the media. for being a matermind. Logan and Matty exposed him(and it would have been a lot worse if our OL was better...could have easily run out the clock at the end)

But it makes me giddy to think about him creating more infighting on the ND staff. Could their D actually get worse?

X said...

Notre Dame's defense wasn't as pressing a problem as their offense. In fact, I think the black hole at offense probably caused their defense to be perceived as worse than they truly were. The defense was fair, but obviously not strong enough to cancel out the lack of production on offense.

http://web1.ncaa.org/d1mfb/Internet/ranking_summary/2007000000513.HTML

link to ND unit rankings

Brian said...

it probably wasn't a successful season for ND if Army was the IA Independent Leader for passing offense.