The Learning Curve: Why We Should Remain Hopeful For Our Defense

[It'sNotAFakeID]

It's no mystery that our defense is young. Youth brings with it inexperience. Inexperience results in a lower level of performance than someone who has a lot of experience with the subject matter. For example, you're not going to be able to perform high level calculus as well as someone who has been doing calculus for years.

 

Applying the learning curve to our situation allows (me, at least) to make sense of our defensive performance against Wyoming on Saturday night. We are a young defense, most of those players have not had any actual game reps versus a different opponent than the first team offense. That definitely makes sense according to the learning curve.

 

Here's the learning curve for those of you (myself included) who like graphics:

 

 

College athletics are slightly different, because you hear a lot about some of the young defenses that play lights out. What makes you a good player is a combination of athleticism and experience. Those who are phenomenal players as true freshman or sophomores are freak athletes. Those who are not very good players and are juniors or seniors are not very athletic. That, primarily is why I think our defense last year struggled. We had a lot of experienced players, but experience does not always equal success. They were not athletic enough, and all the experience in the world can not make up for that deficiency.

 

What the squad we field has is a lot of athleticism. We saw that on display Saturday night, our defensive line definitely got a push; they made Brett Smith move around in the pocket (Brett Smith by the way, great athlete, good experience). Yes, we couldn't get him on the ground, but I definitely think that won't be the case with some of the quarterbacks we play this year. Our secondary forced a couple of interceptions and pass break ups; and had the D-line and LBs gotten Smith on the ground they would've had less covering to do and less yards would have been given up. By the way, SJB had a phenomenal game Saturday night (great athlete, good experience), Ciante had a good game Saturday night, too.

 

You see in that picture that the curve starts off slow, and then becomes fairly steep until plateauing out at the peak performance level. It's no mystery that we have athletes on this defense, that their ceilings are much higher than the last two squads Pelini has fielded. What will be the crucial thing for Bo and his defensive coaching staff will be how soon they can get the players to hit that acceleration upwards.

[The Dude]

I suspect that steep acceleration will start sometime towards the end of this season, assuming it does at all in any noticeable way. Which would be good news for next year, when we're really going to need a competent defense to keep our heads above water. Let's hope it starts this week and we're plateauing by the time UCLA comes to town.

[It'sNotAFakeID]

I suspect that steep acceleration will start sometime towards the end of this season, assuming it does at all in any noticeable way. Which would be good news for next year, when we're really going to need a competent defense to keep our heads above water. Let's hope it starts this week and we're plateauing by the time UCLA comes to town.

 

That's honestly why I'm hoping that for the next few games, our offense should be serviceable enough. Give our defense the no-pressure situation and just let them learn to play college level defense.

 

A lot of this negative talk really felt unnecessary (believe me, some of it is necessary, just the abundance of it is ridiculous). So I thought I could probably help people take a step back off the ledge of the new east stadium expansion with some psychological research.