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Come on Ruffin, light my fire

Posted by HenryJames on October 24th, 2007 under Football

There’s an article in today’s Lubbock Avalanche Journal titled ‘McNeill tries to re-light fire under Tech defenders.’ McNeil is Texas Tech defensive coordinator Ruffin McNeil.

McNeil took over for former DC Lyle Sentenich, and he had Tech playing pretty good defense for 3 games. Then they went to Missouri. Thirty four points and 422 yards later and you wonder if they’re back to square one.

“I thought we played 29 plays very good,” McNeil said Tuesday, “and I thought we played 38 where we didn’t play 11-man football.”

That’s still 29 plays better than the old Tech defense, but to compete in the Big 12 you have to play consistently solid defense. The Red Raiders might have finally figured that out after a decade of conference play.

“He (McNeill) said that wasn’t us,” senior cornerback Chris Parker said. “He said we didn’t look as fast as we have been. He said we needed to get back to the basics and start moving fast like we did the last three games.”

Those last 3 games included Northwestern State and Iowa State, two steaming piles of shit on offense. The third team was Texas A&M, about as one dimensional as a team can be. A good and balanced Missouri offense rolled them.

So the jury is still out for me regarding whether Tech has actually turned the corner on defense.

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4 Responses

  1. dedfischer said:

    October 24th, 2007 at 2:14 pm

    As a Raider fan, I can tell you we are better, but we’ve got a long ways to go. Our defense got outcoached formationally last week, and it wasn’t pretty. Mizzou ran the same play for 95% of their rushing yards and we made no adjustments. More or less, I guess Ruffin was saying, “we’re going to take away the pass and make you beat us with the run.” And, that’s exactly what proceeded to happen. Paul Williams makes Bobino look like Dick Butkus and that’s not an exaggeration. The biggest difference he made was replacing our old, slow LBs with our young faster ones (except Williams). We’re still about 3 or 4 hosses short of having a good defense. However, the true freshman DT Whitlock looks like he will be a player at some point.

  2. MIA said:

    October 24th, 2007 at 4:36 pm

    I am gald we don’t have to play mizzou this year. I have a feeling it would get ugly

  3. Crown & Coke said:

    October 24th, 2007 at 6:42 pm

    Getting outcoached by Gary Pinkel is no small feat, congrats to the Red Raiders’ staff.

  4. Gary Pinkel said:

    October 24th, 2007 at 7:37 pm

    HA! If you don’t think I’d whip that braintrust of yours this year, you’re dumber than a box of rocks.

    See you in the Big XII CG. Oh wait, no I won’t.

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