Ever since it happened, I've been puzzled by how a seemingly pretty mortal Georgia team came in to Austin and beat us by double digits. I wanted to refresh my memory on what happened, and understand what it means for our rematch tomorrow. So I bit the bullet and rewatched the entire thing, taking a lot of notes. What follows is a drive-by-drive recap and my takeaways.
First off, here's the game on YouTube:
1st Half Drives:
2nd Half Drives:
OK, so what did I learn from subjecting myself to this?
I thought we were physically outmatched on the OL, but it wasn't as bad as I remembered. A lot of the pressure they got on Quinn was due to intelligent blitz schemes, or miscommunications on our part. They also did a good job of keeping tight coverage and limiting Quinn's options.
That said, Quinn did not play well. His interception was a bad throw, and he got away with a couple others. He threw at covered receivers several times. He was responsible for the self-sack deep in our own end, which really hurt us. There were a couple of opportunities for him to scramble for yardage that he didn't take.
Mykel Williams in particular played absolutely out of his mind. We had no answer for him.
Special teams hurt us and really contributed to the field position difference.
I think we got too cute at times with the horizontal passing and running game. I feel like we saw this some against aggy as well. Georgia's defense was too fast to be beaten like that.
They capitalized on our turnovers, and we largely couldn't on theirs, with the exception of the 3rd quarter interception. A big reason is because almost all of the turnovers happened deep in our end of the field.
Our D can play with them. They had one sustained drive (that admittedly came at a crucial time), and that's about it.
I feel somewhat better about tomorrow after rewatching. A lot of the negative things that we did can and should be cleaned up. We need Quinn to take care of the ball, special teams to not be a net negative, and Sark to not get too reliant on the east-west game, and we'll be ok. I expect that going into a hostile environment at College Station last weekend and coming away with the W will help our guys not feel like the moment is too big for them.
Hook 'em, fuck Georgia, ou sucks, let's fucking go.