Hollis Thomas in 2007

I agree. I only saw it live once (plenty for me, thank you), but I saw Hollis in on many plays. Besides actually making the tackle several times, he also clogged the middle a lot, only to have Shanle and Simoneau miss Addai coming through the gap. Hollis and Fujita played well. Will Smith played well, just too aggressively, often blowing right by the play in his efforts to school Ugoh (I put this to smart offensive planning on the Colts' part). It's bizarre, because in truth, he outplayed Ugoh, yet at the end of the game, it appears that Ugoh got the better of him (really it was the Colts coaching staff that got the better of him) because of his lack of actual tackles and sacks. Despite slamming Peyton to the ground several times, he was always just too late to land the sack.

On offense, EJ had himself a great game. He blocked well, caught the ball well, and fought like mad for everything. He's not going to make tons of yards after the catch, but he's going to grab a lot of passes for needed yards. Can't say much for anyone else, but I think Deuce would have been a much larger factor had Coach Payton stuck to ramming him up the middle in the second half of the game. I know several have decried the O line's blocking, but I believe the staff gave up way too early on the old "pound 'em 'til they're dust" plan.

There's a great post on this board to shows that we did run the ball, it just didn't work. Review the game info and see that we ran ourselves into third and long all day and didn't convert.