Rushing

[gopherfield]

We are not a great runnning team yet and I'm not claiming we are ready to break-out, but we are not nearly as bad as some people think. We ran 30 times for 123 yards against OSU. That's 4.1 per carry. Gray had some nice runs, but these were designed runs. It's not like Pryor's yards which come on broken-containment when he takes off running from the pocket on passing plays.
I really thought we could have run more against OSU. We would pass way too much on first down when it clearly wasn't necessary. I was really disappointed to hear Greise say about our O-line that "they are just bad". You don't typically hear an annoucer say this about a group of kids. He could have said our running game has been bad, or not what we hoped, ranked 11th in BT, etc., - but he outright simply said our O-line is bad. I personally thought OSU's line did nothing special. We stuffed a lot of runs. Most of their big ground yards came on Pryor scrambling on broken plays.

 

[Go Gophers Rah]

I thought the same thing. If we hadn't gotten ourselves in a situation where we had the throw on almost every down in the 3nd half, we could've had a grand total of 200 rushing yards. Whaley is looking very good and this is his 1st year running the ball. As long as he stays healthy and doesn't get into trouble, Whaley should have a future full of 100-yard games.

 

[NewEngland_Gold]

Greise...

didn't say anything worse about the OL that hasn't been said on this board since the season began.

What did get my attention is that Greise is an outstanding former qb and knows a lot more about how an OL should be performing than the typical GHer...he sees things quickly that most of us overlook in the flow of the action. That's why when he blurted out "bad" so damningly it caught my attention more than the usual rants here.