You want some base defense? Here you go.

When you’re facing a team that averages less than seven pass attempts a game, parts of your defensive playbook get tossed out for the week.

Don’t expect to see Georgia play many nickel or dime defensive packages in the next two weeks. The Bulldogs will be single-minded in their intention to defend the run on every down mostly out of a base defensive package.

“We’re really just in one personnel group,” Richt said. “It’s not like Georgia Southern plays a lot of different personnel groups, really. We’ve got to be in run-stopping defense every single snap, I don’t care if it’s third-and-25 or if it’s two-minute drill. When you start playing some defense other than to stop that system, that’s when they get the biggest and longest runs that you could imagine because you’re just not equipped to stop it.”

But some things don’t change.

Grantham said defensive fundamentals, such as playing blocks, tackling, getting to the ball and knocking the ball out, carry over no matter the offensive scheme.

“The way we’re going to do it this game is unlike any other game we’ve played,” he said. “The mindset we’ll play with, the attitude we’ll play with, those kinds of things are still going to be there. That’s the core of your unit.”

That “getting to the ball and knocking the ball out” could be big, as GSU has a problem holding on to the ball.  The Eagles rank outside the top fifty in 1-AA in turnover margin and fumbles lost this season.

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Sco’ and sco’ some mo’.

A great quote from Chip Kelly about offense, from Chris Brown’s excellent look at why Oregon succeeds at the level it does:

“Every coach has to ask himself the same question: ‘What do you want to be?'” Kelly said at a recent clinic. “That is the great thing about football. You can be anything you want. You can be a spread team, I-formation team, power team, wing-T team, option team, or wishbone team. You can be anything you want, but you have to define it.”

There seems to be an awful lot of defining going on this season.

Through Tuesday, the 124 teams in the Bowl Subdivision have scored 36,130 points over 1,232 games, an average of 29.3 points per team per game. If that average holds, it would break the record of 28.4 points a game set in 2007.

More significantly, it’s not a one-time thing.

The climb in scoring has been a trend since the 2007 season. Prior to that fall, the national scoring average had only twice climbed above 26.9 points a game since the NCAA began tracking the statistic in 1937.

Over the past six years, however, FBS scoring average has moved above 28 points a game four times and never dropped below 27.

Wake Forest’s Jim Grobe thinks the war is over and offense won.

“People want to see a lot of scoring,” Wake Forest coach Jim Grobe said Wednesday. “They like seeing football scores like 38-35, they don’t like seeing a 3-0 game. I don’t think we’re going backwards in this deal. What you typically see is offenses take the lead then defenses catch up. It’s point-counterpoint, punch-counterpunch. But right now, I don’t see the defenses getting to where they’ll ever be dominant again.”

Maybe he’s right.  But it’s worth noting that of the top thirty teams in total defense, only two have losing records.  And those two 4-6 teams, Connecticut and Maryland, rank among the worst offensive teams in the nation at #107 and #120 respectively.  So is it a question of defense weakening across the board as a new offensive philosophy seems to be taking hold at the college football level, or is it more a case that what good offenses are doing these days simply exposes bad defensive teams to a greater extent than before?

Ask and ye shall receive.

I think the “Herschel vs. Gurshall” stat meme that’s popped up in the last week or so is silly, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t a cool little story:

Murray recounted the start of a drive at Auburn, saying, “We get in the huddle before the series, and the offensive line is like, ‘Can we just get one big run to get this drive over already?’”

Three plays later Marshall scored from 62 yards.

If they’d known it was that easy, they would have asked for it a lot earlier in the season.