These past two defenses are also way worse...

than any of the others we've played so far, including Toledo, FSU, etc.

Not including yesterday's games, these are the F+ ratings by unit of our opponents so far:

Florida St
Offense: 28
Defense: 46

Toledo
Offense: 108
Defense: 22

Purdue
Offense: 68
Defense: 20

Wisconsin
Offense: 72
Defense: 2

Cincinnati
Offense: 29
Defense: 7

Virginia Tech
Offense: 62
Defense: 42

USC
Offense: 27
Defense: 92

UNC
Offense: 12
Defense: 66

Notice the trend. Minus Florida State (which people were feeling... not great about Freeman there either), everyone of our opponents until the past two games had a significantly better defense than offense.

Now that we've faced some better offenses and worse defenses, the script has flipped. The easy answer has been the up-tempo / OL play. Maybe that's helped. But maybe we would've moved the ball regardless of pace. Maybe our OL has only marginally improved - or not improved at all - but the weak (UNC) / terrible (USC) defensive units we've played the past two weeks haven't exploited it.

The fact is, both our offensive and defensive units probably are just not very good when facing a strong unit on the other side. Defense looked disastrous yesterday, offense looked mostly disastrous against Wisconsin and Cincinnati.

Looking ahead, Navy won't tell much because they're pretty terrible all the way around, but I could see us beating UVA in a similar manner as VT, but a final score in the 40s for each team. People will see it as a sign of continued offensive improvement and weak defensive performance / regression, but UVA's rankings (BEFORE their 66-49 loss last night):

Offense: 6
Defense: 84

People on Twitter will cite Quinn doing a great job of turning it around and Kelly/Rees genius up-tempo, while complaining about Freeman. Perhaps the latter will be justified, the former will likely not be.