08-16-2021, 02:36 PM
(08-16-2021, 01:21 PM)jwalker3853 Wrote: Overall, I thought the 1st unit - for what little they were on the field looked Ok. We honestly didn't get a good look at how things will play out for the 1st team based on last nights game. Having the 1st team OL, Burrow, Mixon in for a good part of the 1st half (not saying we should have done that by any means) would have given us a MUCH better view.
Otherwise, we saw that the OL is improving and their footwork was MUCH improved over last year. Their hand placement is coming, but they overall looked better. Is it good enough? hard to say as of yet because we were letting the 2nd, 3rd teams and others get reps in and see how they compete. However, it was good to see the OL starting to show they are being coached correctly and with some technique. They've had 2 years of Turner's crap. It's going to take Pollack more then a few weeks to get that corrected.
Two interesting things that we saw during this preseason game was:
It wasn't a perfect game by any means, but its preseason. I don't know that it's reasonable to expect everything to be perfect out of the gate. Honestly, I can't say that TB looked very good against us and they won the Super Bowl last year. However, that doesn't mean a thing as it's the 1st week of pre-season and there is still time to improve.
- Ration of run vs. pass over the course of the game. The play calling was more in favor of running the ball vs. passing. That could have been due to adjustments in play calling due to the players, but is hopefully a trend we will see even when Burrow is in.
- They stuck with the running game - even if it was struggling early on and managed to break off some decent runs in the second half/later in the game.
I like that we stuck to the run against the best run stopping D in the league.
