Yes, this was a great season and players and coaches alike should be proud of that. That’s fine for a season end post, and I’ll do one eventually. But it doesn’t excuse what happened yesterday. We were the better team coming into this game, and we played more than well enough from scrimmage for 3 quarters that this should have been a comfortable win. And yet, it ended as a blowout loss. WTF happened? The short answer is if you shoot yourself in the foot enough times, eventually your foot is going to hurt, and then if you keep doing it you’re not going to be able to run any more. And boy, did we find way after way after way to shoot ourselves in the foot while being generally the better team from scrimmage:
So what happened? Where do you want to start. First, we spotted them 7 points by giving up the blocked punt TD right from the start. In a game where they didn’t want to throw at all, and we didn’t want to throw a lot, playing from ahead was critical and that play changed a game that should have had us up big in the first 20 minutes to one where we never got in front of them by more than a nose. I view the blocked punt as a combo of a low snap, the punter taking too much time and an unnecessarily risky scheme of not making any effort at all to even brush the outside guy. Any one of them different …. That then led to a coaching meltdown, and Mora benching Caratan, going to a walk on frosh who made two horrible punts that took us from a 50/50 game, where we were slightly behind but outplaying them, to one where we were two scores down. Penalty after penalty on offense, contributing to the first failure to score from the 1, but multiple drives killed by putting us in long yardage situations where we had to stop running the ball down their throat. The number of pre-snap offensive penalties this year was outrageous, and given the experience of the OL Chalton’s biggest failure. Then the two failures to score from 1st and goal from the one. Giving up 11 points. Now, while on both of those TDS were signaled on the field, I think the replays were pretty clear that neither was a TD (although both missed by inches and we lost a foot on the firat spot and two feet on the second). The play calling also contributed. Throwing to Rayonte Brown on 3rd and goal from the 1? Really? The pass was easily catchable by anyone who turned and ran, instead of trying to backpeddle for 5 yards. The one defensive penalty at the end of the 1st half on Malcolm Bell, a soft PI that probably didn’t have to be called but did happen, where instead of getting the ball back and trying to add to a 3 point lead it led to us going into the locker room behind. And then, for the second straight game, taking the lead in the 3d Q and watching the D give up a 70 plus yard TD run on a reverse WITHOUT ANYONE EVER TOUCHING THE RUNNER.
Beyond all the breakdowns and gifts we gave them, I thought we outplayed them by a decent amount from scrimmage. There was zero reason the offense shouldn’t have been able to dominate the game from the beginning, and forcing Army out of its offense, except that we kept stopping ourselves from grabbing the game by the threat. And once they got up by two scores, game over. We hadn’t come back from a 2 score deficit all year, and the team that went 5-1 at home beating Fresno State, BC and Liberty went 1-5 on the road, losing perfectly winnable games against very mediocre Utah St, Ball State and Army teams.
So while I don’t want to turn this into a review of the season, because yesterday was a really really disappointing loss and should not be sugarcoated, this is an incredibly young team. Subject to the new reality of the transfer portal, we lose one starter (Jake Guidone) and Robert Burns on offense, and 2 and a half starters (Trey Wortham and Swenson, with Bouyer Randle — who I thought was great yesterday by the way — sharing a spot with Shearin based on how many DBs we play with) on D, and the roster overall was unbelievably young this year. And while I am not convinced Zion Turner will be our full time QB next year, he played well enough for us to win 6 games as a true frosh and I have no doubt he’ll be better if he is on the field next year. By the way — I thought he played very well until we fell two scores down, but the first pick we’ve seen before from him and is why we don’t open up the playback — he’s really bad in man coverage on seeing where he’s leading a WR to a corner or safety who will be coming off someone else and in position to make an easy play. But one of the things a more mature team will have to learn is being able to win on the road. Because getting above 6-6 next year, based on our schedule and assuming that teams next year are comparable to how they were this year (which won’t be the case), we’re going to have to be able to beat better teams on the road next year than we did this year if we’re going to get above 6-6.
So that is it for now. A very disappointing end to a very unexpectedly positive season, not that we were more than mediocre but that I thought it would take an entire roster change and a few years to get back to mediocre, and that was without knowing we’d lose all of our starters at the skill positions. As I said on the Bowl Math thread this morning, I expect the odds are good that we’ll be bowling, but we won’t know that for sure at least until next Sunday, and if there are enough bowl eligible teams possibly not until selection Sunday. I’ll do a 241 talking about the season as a whole another time, when the annoyance and disappointment from yesterday goes away a bit.
