I've heard this staff referred to as "FSU North." Bowden-Bowden-Amato-Buckley. This staff is "the deal."

They're better than they were, BUT they're still Akron.  They haven't beaten a 1A team this year, although they've been close a couple times.  I'm sure the most-watched film this week will be their game yesterday.  BGSUcks held them to 10 pts and shut them out in the 2nd half, first time they'd been shut out for a half since their opening game.  Don't know what the Falcons did, but I'm sure we'll try to emulate it.

Fun little sidelight to the game is that Akron's Chuck Amato and OUr Dwayne Dixon coached together at NC State -- just before Dwayne came to Athens.

According to this morning's Beacon Journal, during the second half, BG amped up the pressure on Akron QB Dalton Smith, sacked him 4 times and limited him to something like 35 yards  - after giving up 200 or so in the first half. 

Mike, I watched the second half. BG opted to run the ball instead of throw, and they ate clock and Zippy after trailing 10-zip at halftime.

Homecoming... forecast 70 and sunny.....sold out Peden....#26 in AP poll....... a win all but guarantees a top 25 spot with #22 and #23 playing each other next week......lost on homecoming last year.... SI Article comes out next week....Akron fired up......

could a game against AKRON??? be the game of the century for Ohio?

Per news article, one of Akron's more serious weaknesses is a lack of depth on the defensive line. That could be a problems for them next week.

When I watched them against Tennessee, their ends seemed scrawny. I would think Ohio's tackles would be able to overpower them. It would be nice to get Tettleton through this week and to the bye with minimum dropbacks/exposure and let Blankenship and Boykin rack up big yards. With as banged up as the defense is, limiting the amount of snaps they take can't be bad, either.

I'd love a 28-7 type of game where Ohio grinds them down.

That bye week has to look like an oasis sitting out there  right now. Just get there unbeaten.

Interesting conundrum: if our offenseruns hurry-up, or even if they're just their normal selves, we'll probably be scoring in bunches, after short drives (as in just a couple of plays). Likewise, if the defense/return game preforms like it did for much of the UB game, we could be facing many short fields: at halftime of the UB game our average starting position was something like the enemy 43 yard line. In short, I could easily see another occassion where we "lose" the time of possession battle and have many fewer yards than our opponents, and its not necessarily a bad thing:

Time of possession: regardless of how long you take between snaps, if it only takes you a couple of plays to score, you're not going to have the ball for very long, and thats a good thing. NOT COUNTING the kick return for a TD, we had scoring drives of 1 play (14 yards), 1 play (15 yards), 6 plays (32 yards), 11 plays (65 yards), and 2 plays (55 yards) (all stats taken from ESPN's box score). Obviously the 11 play scoring drive was good for controling the clock, but the others are going to get the team back on the field quickly. Its one thing to control the clock, but you're not going to ask the running backs to take a knee after 10 yards to better control the clock. This is frequently a problem for high speed quick strike teams like Oregon

Yardage: We only had 333 offensive yards, but tack on another 150 kick return yards as well as the turnover recoveries and we had pretty good field position throughout, which is going to subtract directly from the O's total production, ESPECIALLY when the other team has 56 rushing attempts and 30 first downs. This was especially acute when our defense was bending heavily (not quite breaking, but damn we're banged up).

We haven't run hurry-up of late. The first two weeks of the season, we ran it extensively, especially in the second half of the Penn State game, I think especially when we got what we felt was a favorable assortment of defensive players on the field.