REd you're right. Many of us forget that Clausen transfered when we had Mauck & Randall on the roster with JR and MF coming in. He was also told by Jimbo that he needed to get much stronger in order to play. He did the right thing in transfering, sat out a year, gained weight and strength and has improved, as QB's are supposed to do. I'm thinking one of the reasons he went to UT besides his brother having gone there was because he looked at their depth chart.
I don't usually buy into the whole "new coaches = losses" idea either but the fact remains that the defense next season will not be like the ones the last few years and that could be a downfall for us in some close games. Saban's D was insane and I am not sure Pelini's will be THAT GREAT. With Russell at QB, we have a great future but instant success next year as just a sophmore? It can be done but is still iffy. With that said, at worst I expect 2 losses.
This is going to aggrevate me to no end. Saban's defenses were good, not insanely good. They were flawed because they lead to mental mistakes due to their complexity and also, IMO, seemed to give up big plays at the end of games a few to many times (or maybe the Cap One bowl is still just to fresh in my mind). 2003's Defense was the best in the nation, insanely good, and definitely worthy of bragging about. Other than that, LSU's defenses were not the monster that people like to think they were. It was good, very good for most of Saban's term but I think the national championship makes people overexaggerate how good all of his defenses were. I expect to have a very good defense next year. Perhaps slightly less than what we would have if Saban had stayed, but with all of our returning starters & experienced back up we should still be awesome.
Last years "D" did give up big play's. A bunch of them seemed to be in 3rd and long situations. Tackling was not very good last year for some reason. I just hope we can still get in position to run plenty of blitz packages. The game with Georgia in Tiger Stadium in 03 was great on both sides of the defense. I would assume the speed is right for this does anyone know if BP is a blitzing guy.
Pellini is supposedly a zone coverage kinda guy, but likes to utilize the blitz to suprise teams - not used near as often as Saban used it.
I disagree. Though our defense struggled at times last year, for the most part I thought it was consistently one of the best in the game for the last 3 years. Bo is a very good DC but has a LOT to live up to and I am not sure he will be able to achieve the success Nick had
