That's an excellent question. There are those that believe that Oklahoma provided a blueprint on how to beat the Red Raiders last Saturday. Those people are out of their minds. If Tech comes out ready to play and is focused, we lose. We need to play our best game and Tech needs to be down for us to have a chance on Saturday.
As far as Tech not being ready to play, the stars seem to be aligning for that to happen. The loss to Tech virtually locks them into the Cotton Bowl win or lose, a weird week with Thanksgiving, and they are playing Baylor who has won 4 games this year. Tech also generally has a "WTF" game every year where they lay an egg to a vastly inferior opponent.
There are two ways in my opinion to beat Leach's offense. The first is what Oklahoma did on Saturday and what Missouri has done the past two time the Tigers have beaten Tech. That is to bring pressure with the front four and rush the decision making of the quarterback. Much easier said than done obviously. Baylor doesn't have the personnel to do that kind of thing and even if they had a good pass rush, the secondary is being held together with fishing line and scotch tape. The second possible way to slow that offense down is to confuse it. The best job I've ever seen a Baylor team do this was in 2005 in what I think was Bill Bradley's best scheme ever. You'll remember that game as the one that Baylor lost to the Red Raiders 22-0 but was 6-0 at halftime (Side note about this game: it would have been totally different if the Bears had not had a touchdown taken off the board for being out of bounds when the replay showed otherwise). Bradley basically had the front 7 or 8 guys standing up at the line of scrimmage before the snap. Between 3 and 5 would rush and the rest drop into coverage. Cody Hodges had a tough time making his pre-snap reads. He completed only 50% of his passes and threw two picks.
Given the Baylor personnel, the confusion method is our only chance. I'm guessing we'll see more of Lamb moving in to the tackle spot and Antonio Johnson coming down to end for more pass rush. We shouldn't care if we are basically asking for Tech to run for 8 yards a pop. I think Leach has too much of an ego to run the ball 12 times in a row even if we give it to him. Hopefully, Norwood and company have come up with something to slow this offense down. For us to have a chance, we need to keep them in the 30s. I think Griffin and the offense will be able to score. If by some miracle we get a two score lead at some point I believe the Tech offense becomes more predictable and their defense has shown that it has a tough time stopping teams with strong running games. We'll see how this plays out.
But like I said, if Tech is ready to play......
