Monday, September 13, 2010

Observations and ramblings

During his Sunday teleconference, which might have been the shortest in the five years I've covered the team, Randy Edsall said he saw some inconsistent play from the secondary, wasn't happy with Jory Jones' play in place of Scott Lutrus, and found good and bad in Mike Box's play.

I just watched the SNY pregame and postgame coverage of Saturday's game as well as the game itself (not that I wasn't watching Saturday).

Some points of interest:
Athletic Director Jeffrey Hathaway said he likes where the Big East is at, but thinks it needs to explore a ninth team. Published reports out of Philadelphia say that the conference invited Villanova. The studio analysts said the Wildcats were a bad choice. Roman Oben said if the conference lost Boston College, Miami and Virginia Tech, it needs to add a school of that stature. Uh....good luck.

My take is there is a short list of schools that are viable: 'Nova, Central Florida (my choice), Memphis, East Carolina and Florida Atlantic.

Another subject Hathaway was asked about was playing a team such as Michigan in Week 1. He said he liked it because the team had longer to prepare. Imagine what would have happened if they had just a week? The players said they weren't ready for Michigan and that it was a bad practice week.

Speaking of Michigan, Dennard Robinson's big game against Notre Dame makes UConn look better than in the immediate aftermath.

Lost in the Huskies' 62-3 win over Texas Southern on Saturday was that the victory made Randy Edsall the program's all-time winningest coach. He has 67 wins.

There was a lot of hype surrounding D.J. Shoemate's arrival from USC. Two games in and it's been undeserving. He's been the least effective of the Huskies' running backs and looks tentative. His best moments came against Texas Southern's second string. Not good. He has three games to bounce back or you won't see him in conference play.

How dangerous is Jordan Todman? Two games in and both teams avoid him on kickoffs.

About Todman and Shoemate...both lost the ball in a game this season. Not a good trend.

The games are going to start getting harder. Temple plays UConn tight and Vanderbilt will be an athletic team that's faced better, yet the passing game hasn't distinguished itself. There were some drops at Michigan and just 15 attempts versus Texas Southern, not a real test.

UConn was unhappy with third down effectiveness in its opener. After a 4 of 11 game Saturday, I am sure that hasn't changed.

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