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Friday September 29th, 2006
12:01amAg Football Preview: #23 texas tech
That was probably the raciest Yell Practice moment I've heard....but I did laugh. I must advise you to not lean on any of those walls. You see, lubbock county has the highest STD rate in the state.Greatest Yell Practice ever: 2000 texas tech.Yell Leader: "I see lots of you red raiders made the trip down here for the game."
tt fans & Yosemite Sam: (put sissy guns up)
Ags in attendance: "Hissssssssssss"
Yell Leader: "Well, I wish I had known so many of you were coming so we could have padded our walls for your wh*#@s."
Ags in attendance: "WHOOOOP!"
Yell Leader: "And that's what we're going to do to them Ags...."
texas tech really hasn't played very well this year. I went into last weekend very cautious but this week I feel fairly confident.
tech's '06 Season ===================== SMU W 35-3 @UTEP W 38-35 (OT) @TCU L 12-3 SE Lou. W 62-0A typical tech team would have slaughtered SMU by at least 50, wouldn't have needed OT for UTEP, and would never score a mere 3 points against TCU. They played better against SE Louisiana so I'll give'em that.
I think there are a couple of simple causes for their struggles. The first is that they lost tailback extraordinaire Taurean Henderson after last season. He left the school with just about every record they had. The second explanation is that Jarrett Hicks, their Preseason All-American, was deemed ineligible until last week as a result of some sort of academic problem. He is back and contributed immediately last weekend against SEL. The final explanation is having a sophomore QB which is the first time in ages they haven't had a 5th year senior running the offense. Graham Harrell has played much more his age and the guys before him played theirs.
G Att-Cmp Yds Yd/G TD/INT =============================================== 2006 G.Harrell 4 177-117 1167 291.8 11/2 ----------------------------------------------- 2005 C.Hodges 12 531-353 4197 349.8 31/12 2004 S.Cumbie 12 642-421 4742 395.2 32/18 2003 B.Symons 13 719-470 5833 448.7 52/22 2002 K.Kingsbury 11 529-365 3502 318.4 25/9As you can see, he isn't throwing for as many yards per game as his predecessors.
Harrell's favorite targets are as follow....
RECEIVING GP No. Yds Avg TD Long Avg/G Po. Ht. -------------------------------------------------------------- #9 Johnson, Robert 4 34 282 8.3 3 23 70.5 IR 6'1" #8 Filani, Joel 4 24 290 12.1 4 34 72.5 WR 6'3" #2 Woods, Shannon 4 18 102 5.7 0 33 25.5 RB 5'11" #20 Amendola, Danny 4 12 128 10.7 1 45 32.0 IR 5'11" #4 Walker, Todd 4 10 88 8.8 2 18 22.0 WR 6'1" #88 Hicks, Jarrett 1 3 59 19.7 1 48 59.0 WR 6'3"They sure spread the ball around. Interestingly, Amendola grew an inch this off-season from 5'10" to 5'11". Big ups to him for that ;)
Leach has had to replace Henderson with sophomore Shannon Woods who has only run the ball 45 times for 296 yards (6.6 ypc) and 3 TDs.
One of the reasons that I'm feeling alright about us right now is because I think I'm seeing Fran's big picture. Every game thus far it seems we have taken one aspect of the offense and almost used it to an extreme. We've had halves where we've run the ball almost exclusively, halves where we've thrown to the TE a lot, halves where we've thrown the ball all around, and halves when we've played the field position game. We have not yet had a game where we have put all the pieces together for one big bang.
This week Martellus claimed that we've only used ~17% of the offense.
I've had that feeling for a couple of weeks. Fran has been playing with his play sheet awfully tight to his chest....almost too close for too long in a couple of situations."Coach Fran has a lot of stuff up his sleeve," he said. "We really haven't showed that much."Ags, we need to be loud and we need to sustain the sound.....because it's tech. And I can't stand tech.
Gig'em Ags & BTHO texas tech
Tuesday September 26th, 2006
12:10amAgs Take It To LaTech 45-14
It certainly started interestingly. Zach told me on Tuesday that we had seats on row 36 of the second deck and the time I wasn't too excited about it....that was until I saw the dark clouds roll into town Saturday afternoon.
We got into the stadium about 5:30, which was fairly late by our standards as we were walking up the tunnel we heard the announcement that the game was going to be postponed. Then it started to rain.
Two hours after we should have kicked off we kicked off.
Things started off really, really, really slow on the offensive side of the ball. We had 6 yards after the first quarter ended. Thankfully you play 4 quarters. I thought the defense played really well. We held them under 100 yards rushing and they were around 150 yards passing until we brought in the second and third team defenders (they finished at 229). As we finish non-conference play I'm quite happy to say that we have given up a total of 1 passing TD on the season. Texas State alone put up 3 TDs on us though the air last year.
Devin Gregg (West-FIELD) gets my nod as the defensive player of the week for the second straight week. Gregg picked up another fumble, this time of the goal line type. He now has come up with the ball four times in the last 3 games (two fumble recoveries and two INTs).
Offensively, as I mentioned, we started slowly. We couldn't get anything going as Justin Brantly was forced to punt four times in the first quarter (including a 61 yarder on the fly). We started throwing the ball around a little more and the running game opened up....but we didn't need it. Stephen McGee finished the evening 19-for-28 for 318 yards and 3 TDs. Two of those TD passes were to fullback Chris Alexander. It was sweet.
Chris was just one of eleven different Ags to record a reception. Riley led the way with 4 receptions (43 yards) and Chad Schroeder finished with a team high 82 yards on two receptions and missed another TD by about 3".
Howard Morrow had his second pass thrown his way and made his second big play of the season slipping through some defenders going 21 yards for a first down. I'm continue to tell you, he's gonna be a great one.
We didn't really run the ball like we have been in previous games but Jorvorskie picked up two more TDs on the ground giving him 10 in the first four games of the season.
One thing I want to harp on was the crazy amount of penalties we had. Really, we got hit pretty hard by the yellow flag against Army as well.
P-Yds ================= Citadel.. 5-35 ULaLa.... 2-24 Army..... 7-59 LaTech... 12-85We need to get this taken care of.
This weekend we have texas tech coming to town, so you know I'm going to be excited. It was also announced that the Kansas game (Oct. 7th) will be broadcast from Lawrence on FSN at 11am. It'll be followed on ABC by the Red River Shootout. This means I need to fluff the cushions on the couch cause I'm going to settle right in. I'm not sure what I would do if I couldn't watch a game. I think that the last game that I didn't get to see (either live or on TV) was the '04 Baylor game. Before that one I'm not sure when it was.
One final thing I wanted to say was congrats to my brother-in-law, TJ, who was selected to be a Ross Volunteer. Good bull.