Lincoln Rileys description of the strategy to run prevent offense, rather than traditional offense on final 4 plays. (Reflector--Nate Summers, 12/08/14): Lincoln Riley said he didn’t communicate East Carolina’s fourth down play well enough from the sideline to his quarterback late in ECU’s shock 32-30 loss to Central Florida last Thursday. The Pirates rallied from 26-9 down with three straight touchdowns in the fourth quarter to take a lead, but ECU failed to close the door completely on a drive deep in UCF territory with one minute, 47 seconds left. A couple of kneel-downs by QB Shane Carden and then a couple of costly lost-yardage run plays by the passer on third and fourth down gave UCF enough time and a field just short enough to pull off the unthinkable on ECU’s senior night. According to Riley, the Pirates’ fifth-year offensive coordinator, the plan to kill as much clock as possible was solid on the late drive, but he admitted the play on fourth down didn’t go as planned. After it, UCF took the ball with time to run two plays, the second of which was a game-winning Hail Mary touchdown. “I would say through the first three downs, we were right on schedule with what we wanted to do,” Riley said, noting that such late-game decisions are normally made by head coach Ruffin McNeill. “The fourth down is where it gets tricky. Our plan, the plan that Ruffin wanted and that we all wanted, which was spot on, was to have Shane drop back and put the ball up in the end zone, eat up a few seconds of clock. We had some receivers prepared to make a tackle, so if worse comes to worse and it gets intercepted, we can make a tackle right there and no harm, no foul.” Riley said the Knights showed a different defensive look than ECU expected, and Carden was on the receiving end of an 11-yard sack. “My job is to relay (the plan) to the offensive guys, and I did not do a good enough job relaying to Shane what we wanted,” Riley said. “He didn’t feel great with the look, to put it up, and ended up basically just taking a kneel. You don’t want to give up a turnover sack there, where the ball comes out and they run it back. We ended up giving them 10 yards, and probably if we had thrown it up, you’re probably talking two to three seconds more to work with, and that was the fault in the execution. They still had to go 70 yards or whatever they did in two plays. We got the clock run the way we wanted, and the 10 yards we gave up on the sack were 100 percent my fault.” Riley, who has been linked to the offensive coordinator post at Kentucky this week, said he had faith in his head coach’s blueprint in the final minutes of the game. Riley said the victory formation the Pirates ran on the first two plays and the two Carden rushes were designed to prevent any possible turnovers. Instead of handoffs, Riley said the plan was to eliminate ball exchanges. For the same reason, Riley said McNeill opted to avoid a special teams play on fourth down, especially against a UCF team that had already blocked an extra point in the game. “I think Ruffin had a great strategy, and he made it very difficult for them to win the game, and they made a one in 1,000 play to win the game,” he said. “It was an emotional game, an incredible comeback, and some of the best football that we’ve played in all the years I’ve been here was in that fourth quarter. It was just one of those things.”
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 12:21:35 +0000
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