Ready or Ott, here comes a major test for Auburn's run defense in Week 2
The Tigers gave up "too many explosive plays in the run game" against UMass. Cal is not a team you want to continue that trend against.
(Austin Perryman/Auburn Athletics)
For anyone who had continued concerns about Auburn’s run defense this season, the first drive of the campaign didn’t do anything to help.
After Auburn drove down the field to go up 7-0 on UMass, the Tigers’ defense gave up an 8-play, 89-yard touchdown drive in a little more than four minutes.
Following a 13-yard pass on the first play of the drive, here’s how the rest of the UMass possession went: 9-yard run, 12-yard run, incompletion, 31-yard run, 17-yard run, 6-yard run, 1-yard touchdown run.
“There were a lot of misfits, a lot of errors on our part,” nose tackle Jayson Jones said last Saturday. “And there’s no one to blame but us.”
Yes, more than half of UMass’ rushing yards for the entire game came on that opening drive. The Minutemen, somewhat inexplicably, called three straight passing plays on their second drive and went three-and-out. They wouldn’t get another first down until they were already down by three scores.
Auburn’s defense definitely rallied after that opening possession. Head coach Hugh Freeze said after the game he thought that the Tigers played with more passion following UMass’ touchdown than what he had seen in the fall scrimmages. Players talked about how they were able to quickly respond to what hurt them early.
“After that first drive, we all got together and said, ‘OK, we’ve seen the jab,’” defensive back Keionte Scott said Monday. “Me personally, as a leader on the defense, I feel like that drive was good for us to see. At the end of the day, teams are going to come out fast on us. … To have them go 89 yards, that’s not what we want as a defense.
“Just being able to get that early-in-the-year adversity and just seeing how we responded was really important. You’ve always got things to build on, but I feel like we responded well.”
While Auburn’s defense held UMass to 10 straight scoreless drives and turned the game into a massive blowout, the concerns about the run defense still remained.
UMass had back-to-back runs of 28 and 17 yards late in the second quarter, setting up a red-zone trip that ended in sacks and a missed field goal.
Take out the sacks, and UMass finished the game with 6.8 yards per carry — which is a really high number for an SEC defense against one of the lowest-rated FBS teams in the country. According to Game On Paper, 48% of UMass runs went for at least four yards on Saturday, and 26% of them went for double-digit yardage.
“We’re still giving up too many explosive plays in the run game,” Freeze said Saturday. “We’ve got to continue to work on that.”
And if giving up explosive run plays to UMass was a problem, Cal is not exactly the team you want to face the very next Saturday.