I hope that we all appreciate that our HC and staff had a plan that they hatched last season, experimented with last season and are perfecting before our eyes. We watched "conventional" football for so long that it was hard to see that this great departure from "conventional" was exactly what this program needed to vault into relevance and the cusp of prominence again. Our offense is simple enough to allow players to react and be athletes making plays but not predictable. The defense is throwing away the idea that dominance is defined by a boxscore with stats. Rather, our dominance is defined by the chaos that is caused and the extra possessions that we give to the offense. One thing lost in all the talk of bad defense is that we make every offense earn their yards and we don't give up quick drives. Time of possession is a dinosaur that means less than ever before. In the case of our Vols, winning TOP against us could be your death knell. When we score virtually every possession and we score more TD's than FG's and it takes you twice as long to try and match that, eventually you are going to make more mistakes that kill your drives (negating your TOP) or you just simply limit your opportunities with fewer possessions even though you possessed the ball longer. Our defense is either going to speed up the game by causing havoc and give our offense more possessions to be deadly efficient or they are going to make you drive the field, run the clock, kick FG's or turn it over in the red zone. As an opponent, you find yourself taking chances that you normally wouldn't at some point because you realize that more possessions and not merely possession is your only option. Pretty amazing to think about where we've been and where we now are.
