Static alignment calls will doom any defense and blitzing often an accurate QB with a plus Oline/WRs is more likely to cause a route than rushing three. White knows this, which is why he'll try to disguise what's happening. He has alignments that he knows his film shows as three rushing, so he'll send 4 this game from those alignments. Conversely, he has alignments were his film indicates 4-5 are coming and he'll rush three and drop eight. He does that because he hopes Hooker checks into a hot route, thinking and edge is coming and that's when he throws a short slant or out and that's when our OLB jumps the route for an interception. To counter, UT runs tempo, which makes it difficult for the defense to get their play calls in quickly enough and eliminates our ability to substitute and since they practice it daily, they feel the chaos is a net positive for them. They will go balls out in Q1 and White will play a lot of shell zone in order to take away the big play, in the hopes that they make some mistakes or, if they don't make mistakes, then we will force them to eat yardage 4-5 yds at a time. If the latter happens, then that is a win for us because they cannot play uptempo all game or they will be gassed by halftime and we'll roll them in the second half. If you bet, bet UT to cover the Q1 and maybe even the H1 spreads, then flip it to UK for H2 and final score. Regarding special teams, we don't suck. We are plus on the return game, but our long snapper sucks, so it the FG unit that is the problem. As an analytics guy, this bothers me less than most because I believe Stoops, in the past, has been overly conservative on going for 4th downs and our kicking woes has caused him to go on 4th more, which is a net positive given our ability to pick up short yds.
