Point #1 - K-State offense vs Miami defense: (I will be making some points here today/tomorrow instead of a blog preview)
Miami's pass defense looks extremely suspect. Most have seen that Boston College threw for 400+ yards last week, but I think its important to put that into context compared to what kind of passing team BC was last year. In 2011, BC threw for over 200 yards just twice, and both of those were in September. At the end of the year BC threw for 196 yards against Miami. BC's QB Chase Rettig finished 2011 with an average of 165 yards passing a game and 54% completions. He had 441 yards and 63% completions last week. Granted, BC threw the ball 51 times and has a subpar running game, but that amount of passing for a team that was pretty average last year throwing is a real plus for K-State.
We already know the issues Miami had last year defending our running game, and that was while K-State's offense was still figuring things out. Miami allowed no other team to gain more than 5 YPC in any single game and we averaged 6.0 against them in Miami. Our option attack gave them fits and the majority of our running yardage came on option looks. Between read option and speed option we gained over 210 of our 265 yards on the ground and averaged nearly 10 YPC on option run plays.
With our high number of pass attempts, and the growth Klein and our receivers made last year, it looks as though we have a large advantage in this phase of the game. Miami is already working with what looks like a subpar secondary, now they have to contend with how they can add numbers to the box to stop a running game that tore them apart last year, and then manage to deal with a poor pass defense. I look for K-State to have a big day offensively and I'd expect to see 200+ yard on the ground and threw the air against the Hurricane defense. As long as K-State avoids turnovers, scoring in the mid-20s should be the minimum expectation on Saturday.
