All of us suffer from "immediacy bias"--whatever we experienced most recently becomes exaggerated in our minds and makes it hard for us to have a longer range more balanced perspective.
Lose a game (even a close one) and it seems like the end of the world and we are convinced we stink and will never get better. Win a big one (i.e., Clemson) and we think we are better than we really are and will expect more the next time than we really should.
So, we give up (a truly horrible) 61 points and we believe that there is no hope our pass defense will ever get better even to the point of respectability--not just this season but even for future seasons. Some of us call for the head coach, or at least the defensive assistants, to be fired because it has been so bad this season.
Yes, there is no doubt the pass defense this year has been truly the worst any of us have seen. However, it wasn't anything close to this bad a year ago. So, shedding the immediacy bias of this season, it is not unreasonable to assume that next year's pass defense is at least as likely to be far far better as it is to remain as bad as it has been this season. Narduzzi and his defensive coaches didn't suddenly forget how to coach pass defense between the end of last season and the start of this season. The reason(s) for the epic fail (assuming the schemes didn't change much) has to be other than just coaching. The suspects list to choose from (and probably more than one from the list) would include players who graduated last year and lack of sufficient major P5 level defensive talent on the roster, players who are injured, an offense that kept the defense on the field for too many minutes, and injuries and lack of quality depth on defense. Others?--I haven't forgotten the charge of Narduzzi's being stubborn in making DBs play man to man without help; but I am not fully convinced changing this scheme would have been an overall defensive improvement--it might have led to larger defensive problems in other areas; but we cannot know that answer for certain--we can only have opinions.
Our hope for next season is that the offense remains great--even though it will likely slip due to graduations and Connor turning pro--and the defense returns to at least the level it was at in the 2015 season. I believe that hope is not unreasonable.
Lose a game (even a close one) and it seems like the end of the world and we are convinced we stink and will never get better. Win a big one (i.e., Clemson) and we think we are better than we really are and will expect more the next time than we really should.
So, we give up (a truly horrible) 61 points and we believe that there is no hope our pass defense will ever get better even to the point of respectability--not just this season but even for future seasons. Some of us call for the head coach, or at least the defensive assistants, to be fired because it has been so bad this season.
Yes, there is no doubt the pass defense this year has been truly the worst any of us have seen. However, it wasn't anything close to this bad a year ago. So, shedding the immediacy bias of this season, it is not unreasonable to assume that next year's pass defense is at least as likely to be far far better as it is to remain as bad as it has been this season. Narduzzi and his defensive coaches didn't suddenly forget how to coach pass defense between the end of last season and the start of this season. The reason(s) for the epic fail (assuming the schemes didn't change much) has to be other than just coaching. The suspects list to choose from (and probably more than one from the list) would include players who graduated last year and lack of sufficient major P5 level defensive talent on the roster, players who are injured, an offense that kept the defense on the field for too many minutes, and injuries and lack of quality depth on defense. Others?--I haven't forgotten the charge of Narduzzi's being stubborn in making DBs play man to man without help; but I am not fully convinced changing this scheme would have been an overall defensive improvement--it might have led to larger defensive problems in other areas; but we cannot know that answer for certain--we can only have opinions.
Our hope for next season is that the offense remains great--even though it will likely slip due to graduations and Connor turning pro--and the defense returns to at least the level it was at in the 2015 season. I believe that hope is not unreasonable.
