Good for our offense and run defense...Can't get much worse than our pass defense.....And that's with Ball State...Akron and UTM thrown in (no pun intended) For the life of me I can't understand why anyone would run against us....just throw it. The service academies would most likely throw for 300 plus yards against us.
http://stats.ncaa.org/teams/544598So yes, we are bad, very bad, if you only look at passing yards. However, note that yard per attempt and yards per completion are not as bad. This and other factors are taken into consideration when looking at Pass Efficiency Defense, in which we are 68th.
http://stats.ncaa.org/rankings?sport_code=MFB&division=11That's not great either, don't get me wrong, but its the difference between being below average and terrible.
I would agree that a true championship team needs to be better than 68th, and I hope the signs of improvement I have seen continue.
Let me also point out that because we are
almost always scoring huge points, teams are forced to throw a lot to keep up with us. We are dead last in passes attempted against us ((or first, depending on how you want to look at it) at 322. That would be either 1st or 131st. So the amount the other team is forced to throw inflates that stat.
It's not as bad as it may seem just looking at passing yards.
It can be a lot better though. No disagreement from me on that, but our pass D I would describe as "below average" and not terrible.
Furthermore, those stats also include the recent Heisman winner and a QB that on a given day will be an NFL prospect (Ricardson). Of course, it also includes UT Martin
, but in fairness they padded their stats against our 2-4 stringers.
