Locker Room Wrap: More of the Same as the Hokies Give Away a Win

After watching the Hokies' latest crushing home loss, this time to Georgia Tech, suddenly last week's letdown against ECU doesn't seem so bad.

Combined with the fact the Pirates looked pretty dominant while hanging 70 points on North Carolina yesterday, the 28-21 defeat to East Carolina looks downright pleasant compared to what happened in Lane on Saturday.

In yet another sloppy, bizarre game, the Hokies managed to turn what seemed to be a win into a crushing loss.

"At times we look really good and at times we don't, and it's inconsistency that is killing us," said offensive coordinator Scot Loeffler.

Despite claiming they'd address the issues that plagued them against the Pirates, once again the Hokies blew a winnable game due to some costly turnovers, a nonexistent running game and some major blown plays in the secondary.

"This game was a must win, and we came up short," said running back Shai McKenzie.

When it happens once, against a team that does seem to be going places, there's reason for frustration, but not despair.

When it happens the very next week, in all the same ways, that's when the team has to really start looking inward.

The Mystery of Michael Brewer

After yesterday's games, only 15 quarterbacks in the country have thrown six or more interceptions.

Of those players, Michael Brewer easily has the best completion percentage, coming in at 64.6 percent.

Of the 22 players that have thrown five or more interceptions this season, Brewer comes in second in completion percentage, finishing only behind Washington State's Connor Halliday.

This would seem like a fundamental contradiction. Logically, passers that are very accurate won't throw a ton of interceptions, yet Brewer seems to defy logic in this regard.

He's thrown eight interceptions in four games, two more than even the turnover-prone Logan Thomas managed through his first four contests last year.

Brewer's three in this game were particularly costly, with two indelibly shaping the outcome of the game.

The first wasn't so bad. Brewer tried to throw the ball away with pressure in his face, and missed a cornerback playing deep.

"The first one, I just didn't see the guy," Brewer said. "It came off play-action. He was sitting out there in centerfield and he made the play."

However, it still proved costly. The Hokies had driven 25 yards down the field before the pick while holding a 13-3 lead, but that turnover let the Jackets march down for a touchdown to get right back in the game.

The second throw is completely indefensible. Loeffler tried to set up one of his innumerable screens, but pressure broke the play down quickly. Instead of taking a sack or throwing the ball away, Brewer tried to make something happen with disastrous results.

"It was overthrown, and he had somebody in his face," said head coach Frank Beamer. "I think the guy in his face kind of got to him."

That led to a defensive touchdown that gave the Jackets' their first lead of the game, and is exactly the type of mistake that Thomas would've made a season ago. The coaches surely hoped those errors would be a thing of the past with their new, "game-managing" quarterback, but like Thomas, an irrational trust in his arm seems to have led Brewer astray.

"You always try to shake it off," Brewer said. "Any time something negative happens, you just try to forget about it."

If anything, Brewer seems to be a little too good at forgetting his past mistakes.

Sometimes, it works out for the better. For as damaging as that throw was, Brewer bounced back on the very next series to complete a clutch 19-yard throw to Cam Phillips to key the Hokies' touchdown drive.

"The (interception returned for a) touchdown wasn't a huge effect on what happened after," Brewer said.

But sometimes his confidence and short memory are his most damaging traits.

On the very first throw of the team's potential game-winning drive, Brewer got fooled by cornerback D.J. White as he tried to fire a laser to the sideline.

"We got the ball back with a little over two minutes left, had an opportunity to win the football game and the corner baited me into throwing the corner route, and he dropped underneath it," Brewer said. "We don't throw that interception, we probably drive down there and win it."

It's a fine line to walk between having confidence that you can make all the throws and having too much confidence that you can be the hero to win the game. It's something Brewer is certainly still working on.

"It's something I've got to get better at. I feel like we had a chance to play a good game," Brewer said. "You take three throws away and I had a good day. But I made those three throws, and it cost us the football game."

Brewer deserves credit for his candor, and that will likely help as he tries to rally an offense that must be feeling pretty terrible right about now.

"(I'll try to) just keep the guys together," Brewer said. "We've dropped two in a row. We've had chances to win both games and we haven't been able to make it happen."

Dysfunction in the Running Game and Illegal Substitutions

Two of the major reasons the Hokies lost to Georgia Tech are the lack of consistency in the running game and a barrage of costly illegal substitution penalties on the offense.

These issues might not seem connected, but there's a clear line to be drawn between them.

The blocking by the offensive line remains inconsistent, like so much of this team, but the most puzzling part of the running game right now is an absence of any clear vision about a defined pecking order among the running backs.

Shane Beamer long assured the media that they'd take a couple games to figure out who deserves the bulk of the carries and who should play a complementary role.

That doesn't really seem to have happened four games into the season, and that's a problem.

Against ECU, Marshawn Williams seemed to be the "hot hand" and the coaches went with him for 17 carries. McKenzie struggled, so he received seven touches with minimal results.

Fast forward to the Georgia Tech game, and Williams got 10 carries, while McKenzie notched 12. This time it was McKenzie that looked shockingly effective, ripping off some nice runs in the second half.

Going purely off the stats, McKenzie's the better back. He's averaging 5.2 yards per carry, even if many of those long runs came against William and Mary, and he deserves a shot to be the lead guy.

So why, exactly, did Williams get the bulk of the carries against the Pirates? Why did McKenzie barely get a chance to get into the flow of the game?

Conversely, after Williams looked productive against ECU, why was he not given a chance to get involved against the Yellow Jackets early and often?

Riding the hot hand in a game makes plenty of sense, but there also has to be some logic to who gets the chance to prove their readiness with some initial carries.

That lack of consistency, which can be laid solely at the feet of Loeffler and the younger Beamer, also bleeds into the offense's struggles getting lined up on the field.

"As you go on in the season, you get more and more personnel (groupings), coaches figure out who they want in certain situations, so you have more and more personnels," said receiver Wille Byrn.

Loeffler has a tendency to overcomplicate things and tinker with different formations, and it showed yesterday. The staff hasn't established one lead guy in the running game, and it's to the detriment of the offense.

"Just knowing who's on the field and who isn't, that will help us a lot," McKenzie said. "We go over that all the time before the game, in practices, and honestly we're just not talking to each other, just not using communication, so we've got to work on that this week in practice."

Byrn agrees that there has to be a renewed focus on the issue in practice this week.

"That's something we definitely did take for granted. During practice, everyone's kind of not fully on the sideline watching because they've got to go in," Bryn said. "So we've got to act like we're on the road in a hostile environment all the time and communicate like it, because it obviously bit us today."

Not only did the penalties hamper the offense, but the lack of confidence in the running game stemming from this hesitancy to ride a lead back affected the team's ability to kill the clock late.

"We started running the ball better in the second half, we just didn't finish," Loeffler said. "We had ample opportunities to finish."

Even with McKenzie running well late in the game, Loeffler wouldn't go to him.

On the offense's second to last drive of the game, with six-and-a-half minutes left on the clock, McKenzie kicked things off with a six-yard to run to set up a second-and-four.

Instead of turning to McKenzie once again, Loeffler tried to fool the defense with a screen to Cam Phillips. The Jackets shut it down for a loss of four yards.

That led to a long third down that Brewer couldn't convert, and a punt. Quarterback Justin Thomas marched the Jackets right down the field with all the extra time, and the game was suddenly tied.

Loeffler didn't have the confidence to ride McKenzie when the Hokies needed it the most, and it cost them in more ways than one.

Another Secondary Meltdown

The defense's performance against the Jackets' deep passing game in the fourth quarter was enough to give any fan deja vu.

The secondary gave up some long yards on deep balls late in the game to seal the Hokies' fate against ECU, and history repeated itself on Saturday.

After allowing just 42 yards through the air in the first three quarters, the Hokies let the Yellow Jackets nearly double their passing total in the final quarter.

"They didn't move the ball much at all in the second half except for that last drive," said defensive coordinator Bud Foster.

Thomas burned the defense for 83 yards in the fourth, including a pair of 19-yard throws and one back-breaking 31-yard touchdown.

"We knew he was capable, we watched film on him, we knew he was able to get balls in tight spaces," said cornerback Kendall Fuller. "It just came down to not executing."

No long throw was more damaging than the one that converted a seemingly insurmountable 4th-and-15 for the Jackets en route to their big touchdown.

"4th-and-15, a big play and the whole game changes. One play can change the whole football game," said linebacker Deon Clarke. "It's kind of shocking because we should've had it."

Much like last week, cornerbacks Chuck Clark and Donovan Riley played well in stretches, but they wilted as the game went on.

Cornerbacks as talented and experienced as Kendall Fuller, and likely even Brandon Facyson, could probably stand up to the pressure of Foster constantly leaving them in man coverage.

But the smallest dip in talent and experience, and suddenly, the results are different. If the front-seven can't bring the pressure needed to disrupt a quarterback, then things get dicey.

"When we blitz we know that we have to get pressure on the quarterback," Clarke said. "They're limited back there covering people, so if (Foster) sends a blitz, he knows what he wants out of it."

For the most part, the Hokies did get solid pressure. They hit Thomas eight times and sacked him once, an impressive feat considering he only dropped back to pass 18 times on the day.

But the Hokies also got plenty of pressure on Shane Carden, and everyone saw how that turned out.

Foster is known for his flexibility, so it wouldn't be surprising in the slightest to see him start moving away from this hyper aggressive approach and start taking the pressure off the secondary.

"I know they can do the job, I have confidence in them, the coaches have confidence in them or they wouldn't be in there," Clarke said. "So we all know what they can do, we just have to go out there and perform."

It doesn't help matters that the secondary has been getting a bit unlucky when it comes to coming down with interceptions this year. They have just three on the season, all coming against Ohio State, and they dropped several others Saturday.

"I missed one, (free safety Detrick) Bonner missed one," Fuller said. "It's just a matter of us not getting them."

But the Hokies can only blame missed opportunities for turnovers so much. Foster likely knows he needs to make a scheme adjustment, and now he finds himself making a similar plea for patience from the fanbase.

"I appreciate the great crowd we had today. We need them coming back next week," Foster said. "Instead of pointing fingers or jumping off the band wagon, we need to pull tighter. That's kind of the Hokie way."

Knowing Tech's supporters, he'll likely get what he's asking for. But fans will also demand that the staff started examining some of these very fixable problems before this season becomes lost.