I have no doubt that our regular season defensive backfield will play focused man coverage next year. Not only did we have the purest example in the Troy game... of a team eating our lunch in the first half... as we played "don't dare give up the big play soft coverage"... that resulted in big play after big play... but we did the most obvious second half reversal in our coaching history... played man coverage the entire second half... and ate Troy's lunch. The coaching staff fed off of that intelligence... and played man coverage against Nevada. If anything, I was expecting to see us play the "let the offense win this for us... and let's just not let Fajardo carve us up 'too bad'." It wasn't just that Fajardo had a bad day. We gave him a bad day.

If our staff didn't learn its lesson... there's no teaching this staff. This defense was ripe for playing athletically all year long. We screwed the pooch with soft cover schemes. The players admitted they were lost. If you go back and watch the replay of the bowl, you'll see the tightest man cover we've perhaps played since Hud's been here. It worked. It worked like a charm. We had the athletes on defense all along. Give those young men cover assignments, tell them to go after the ball, and get out of their way.