At a MINIMUM Tony Franklin has to go, he is fundamentally horrible when it comes to the players he's able to recruit (Quarterbacks) and the ability to design a system for the players MTSU has at its disposal. I'm a big time football stats guys and my observations is that a large part of the MTSUs problem is offenses inability to maintain drives (-34 less 1st downs (and we have +11 1st down penalties), +14 more punts) which results in two things, defense spends more time on the field (33:37 avg time spent) and great starting field position for our opponents. At the moment our 3rd down conversion rate is 35%, which is 3-5% under average which indicates that we are getting ourselves in 3rd and long. Asher is has ~48% of all our rushing attempts and 2nd lowest ypc (5.4) against our top 5 runners.
The 2nd guy is Mike Polly needs to be removed from his special teams duties. Rice AVERAGED 24.9 yards on returns on Saturday, I told someone I think Rice starts their possessions on the -45 yard line for every possession (outside of the opening fumble or the unsportsmanlike on KO). To date we've only returned 4 punts and average 2.8 yards per while our opponents are averaging 7.8 but what is worse than that MTSU averages 20.1 yard on kick offs.
The facts are pretty simple if offense pulls their weight defense does fine, but when every game starts out with a large number of 3 and outs we're putting our defense in a bad position and we can't afford for sub-mediocre special teams play to exacerbate the problem.