Reply With QuoteVandy went from the #85 scoring defense the season before Shoop to #33 under Shoop then #20. Penn State went from the #52 scoring defense the season before Shoop to #4 the first season under Shoop.Originally Posted by Todd4State
It also depends on where the injuries are. We weren't dependent on our WRs for the most part. We were able to get around it because of how good our run game was. If you have injuries in some key spots then it makes it a lot harder to be successful.
Vandy went from the #85 scoring defense the season before Shoop to #33 under Shoop then #20. Penn State went from the #52 scoring defense the season before Shoop to #4 the first season under Shoop.
2016 Tennessee absolutely had a ton of injuries on D, even more than Bama did this year. yes "every team has injuries", but us loosing Dez is not as bad as if we had lost Dez, Sweat, Durr, etc.
https://www.sbnation.com/college-foo...-injuries-2016
That was written in late October. Tn D had lost: 2 starting LBs, and both backups. They had 2/6 of their initial 2 deep still healthy. They also lost 2 starters in the secondary. Things only got worse as the season went on. They also lost both starting DTs and the main backup.
But really though, put our top 10 D from last year in those shoes: Starting LBs Green and Harris go down, as do their backups Spencer and Thompson. We have to go through SEC games with only Leo Lewis , Tim Washington, Willie Gay, and walkons off the bench. Durr and Abrams go down, meaning more time for Rayford and Bryant in the secondary. Simmons and Thomas go down, as does Hoyett, meaning our starting interior DL is now Tre brown and Grant Harris, and we probably burn the shirt on Autry to have 1 guy to rotate.
Can anyone in here really say wit a straight face that the D I just described would finish above 50th?
Really, TN lost 6 starters by mid october. 4 starters and 3 backups from the front 7 alone. That's far worse than what Bama dealt with last season. Citing injuries might sound like an "excuse", but it's 100% accurate
Don't bring facts and common sense into this!! How dare you!!
Experience matters too. There's a reason why those guys were running 3rd or 4th team and it wasn't because they were freshmen. If you don't think injuries impact games then go back and watch the Egg Bowl. Injuries in the wrong places can and do impact a unit's performance significantly.
Again, I don't think Bama would have shut us down, but a healthy Bama would have prevented us from controlling the ball for 38 minutes. Credit to Mullen for seeing the weakness and exploiting it, but our success in the Bama game was mostly due to our offense, and NOT our defense. Especially in the 2nd half.
http://www.espn.com/college-football...meId=400933916
Great points. I've been as cautious in my reaction to Shoop as anyone here, and I still am to some degree. (In 2016, a 4 - 8 Missouri team ran on them for 420 yards and gained over 700 yards of total offense. That's hard to explain away for a D that finished in the top 25 the year before and had 4-star-or-higher caliber players returning across the board.) But the injuries in 2016 really were ridiculous. According to Phil Steele, TN had the most injuries on its team among any school in a Power 5 conference in 2016 -- it lost 52 starts due to injury. Or, as another article noted, look at it like this -- by the end of the 2016 season, only two defensive players had started every game because of all the injuries. Let that sink in -- two dudes on the entire defense started every game. Two. They lost 4 of their top 5 DTs to injury, so by the end of the season they were rotating back-up DEs on the interior of the line. That's a recipe for disaster.
Now, I still think that the buck stops with Shoop and 2016's horror-show was his to own. And he did, at least back then:
My only real qualm with his press conference the other day is that I wish he would've repeated some of the stuff I just quoted re: 2016 instead of glossing over it with quick references to a bowl game and 9 wins in 2016 to imply that he was successful that year, too. UT won in the back half of 2016 in spite of its D, not because of it. But that's a pretty minor gripe. It's a press conference.Bob Shoop turned the page on his first season as Tennessee's defensive coordinator months ago.
Until the Vols take the field again in another couple of months, though, he's going to continue to answer questions and reflect on what went wrong during the final month of his maiden season at Tennessee.
That was the case at the Big Orange Caravan stop at the First Tennessee Pavilion here on Saturday, when Shoop acknowledged his role in the stunning collapse Tennessee's injury-ravaged defense endured last November.
No defense is going to play well when it's forced by injuries to play reserve defensive ends at defensive tackles and multiple star players are either out or playing at less than 100 percent as was the case with the Vols at the end of the 2016 season, but Tennessee still shouldn't have reached the historic lows it did.
Shoop showed candor on Saturday when said he didn't do a good job of adjusting his defense on the fly as the injuries took their toll.
"I think at the end of the year you always critique yourself and you quality control your personnel, your philosophy, your scheme, your execution and your personnel," he said. "I relate to Jonathan (Kongbo) on that. I think I might have billed it (with) some unrealistic expectations, and when we got guys injured, maybe the guy calling the shots was a little bit stubborn right there, me. I really wanted to force-fit, this is my style of defense or whatever. I probably didn't do a great job at times of tailoring things."
The results were gruesome.
Tennessee allowed 353 and 409 yards rushing to Texas A&M and Alabama before playing well enough for the Vols to win at South Carolina, only for the offense to play its worst game of the season.
It was after the shutout of Tennessee Tech that it really got ugly for Shoop and the Vols.
Kentucky racked up 635 yards, including 443 on the ground.
Missouri rushed for 420 yards en route to a 740-yard performance, the most yards ever allowed by a Tennessee defense, replacing the dubious mark set against Troy by the Sal-Sunseri-led disaster defense of 2012.
It got lower for Tennessee when Vanderbilt quarterback Kyle Shurmur torched the Vols' inept secondary as the Commodores scored 45 points, their highest against an SEC opponent since 1970.
I tend to agree with you. Most everybody seemed to be sad when Mullen took Grantham with him to Florida. Maybe I'm the exception, but I don't think Grantham was the great defensive coach that everybody seem to think he was. In addition to the Alabama game loss, which we could have won if we had better defensive play, we also were blown out by Georgia and Auburn. I'm anxious to see what Shoop can do with the defense.
That national champion and 2 top 10 teams (were top 5 for a lot of the year). Can't really knock him too much for those, although the blowouts were pretty bad. Still, if there is such a thing, those were "good" losses.
Shoop can put all that whoa is me crybaby crap behind him. We demand perfection, I don't give a crap if you are coaching middle school girls softball with a ton of injuries. Perfection, zero TDs allowed is what I want.
Great post.
No excuses for our D in 2018
Walk like the King or walk like you don't care who the King is
This is basically all I was trying to say.
And yall can slice it and spin it however you want to defend him, I get it I want him to be good as much as anyone. BUT he did make some excuses.
Nobody wants to hear that. If you allow that you wont win
But he hasn't even coached a practice here and you are already bashing the guy. That is SO MSU.
He coached lots of practices and gave up 700 plus to a 4-8 Mizzou team and 630 plus to Kentucky.
Color me concerned. Sorry if this bothers you
I just don't get bashing a guy before he has done anything here. His record everywhere except under Butch Jones is stellar. I guess you are a Butch Jones fan, or possibly Butch. Only thing that makes sense.
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