The FSU defense allowed a freshman quarterback in his first road start and second career start to throw for over 300 yards and rush for 64 in a 34-31 loss on Saturday against the Pittsburgh Panthers.
A defensive coordinator who has had back-to-back top 20 defenses in the past two years accepted the blame for that loss, and he should.
Tony White’s defense struggled on Saturday afternoon. The players had difficulty rallying to the ball, maintaining assignments, and appeared somewhat uncoordinated at times. It started in the first quarter with Pitt executing two long 75-yard touchdown drives, converting multiple fourth downs. They had nothing to lose at -10.5 betting favorites, but the other part was like they didn’t respect FSU’s defense at all, and had full confidence they could convert in those opportunities.
Tony White spoke with the media about his defense’s performance on Sunday:
White accepted responsibility, but seemed to call out the players (not specifically) for not making plays when they had those opportunities. He’s right, FSU had several instances where they had bee-lines to the quarterback and didn’t make the tackle. There were other times they had a spy on him and failed to play their assignment, allowing a huge third-down conversion.
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The maddening part is he’s saying he might have put too much on their plate, but they are merely spot dropping into zone coverage and rushing three or four guys. That’s about as simple as it gets, but the guys dropping back 20 yards from the line of scrimmage and allowing players to catch passes over the middle and run for 20 yards before getting touched?
He discusses how they initially had a linebacker in coverage on their star running back and then switched to a defensive back. Did they not look at scouting reports? They don’t have any linebackers who can run with that guy. The ends continue to rush past the pocket, allowing free lanes for the quarterback to escape all game.
The pursuit of the ball, physicality, and confidence we saw in Game 1 aren’t there for some reason. It’ll probably look somewhat better this week because Stanford is awful, but Tony White’s presser isn’t one to instill confidence that this defense will get better against anyone with a pulse.