More on the Falcon Win in Buffalo

Let me just say this....last night's Falcon win is as exciting this morning as it was last night.  It is just silly how good that makes my feel.

Anyway, I also watched Coach Clawson's presser, and it was five minutes of pretty good video, which I will post below.  He starts it off with "another day at the office," which is a pretty good description, given that BG has now won 2 games with four quarter rallies and had three others fall short.

I thought last night (and still think) that the story of the game was second half defense.  Coach says they "challenged" the defense at halftime, which I would guess involved a lot of yelling.  The basic messages were:

"We're tired of it."
"It has been 9 games."
"We're not making tackles, hitting gaps, finishing forward."
"We have enough good players here."

He got results.  In fact, he said it was our best defensive half of football, and I would have to agree.  We were absolutely shredded in the first half, but got the job done in the second half.

The BGSU defense gave up 302 yards of offense in the first half, but allowed just 109 yards of total offense in the final 30 minutes, including four straight 3-and-outs after the Falcons fell behind 29-16. The BGSU defense allowed no points and just 70 yards in the Bulls final six possessions.

That's pretty good.  The points we did allow in the second half were after a fumbled punt inside the 5 yard line.  I thought the defense was getting off blocks, making tackles.  Lots of improvement, and it would be great to see us get some confidence on defense as we move into the home stretch.

It was great to see #5 flying to the ball, too.  And blocking a punt.  Let's hope he continues to play with a mission from now until the day after Thanskgiving.

As Coach said, we are having a hard time defending the run.  I think he said that we put guys on the MAC Player of the Week list.  This was further stretched by the fact that Buffalo was using their fourth or fifth TB, and HE had 170-some yards.  Coach rubbed his face while he uttered the words "How many tailbacks do these guys have?"

On offense, we continued to run the ball very poorly. Geter never got rolling at all, with 15 carries and 13 yards net.  Sheehan also had a low completion percentage and threw a pick, but at the same time had decent yardage for "only" 40 attempts.  Coach said that they were doing a good job on Freddie, so BG went to 4 WR sets which forces them to into "predictable" coverage and that started to get Freddie open.

Any other time, we would consider 8 for 122 and a TD to be a pretty good day.

The TD was huge.  BG had just been pushed back to their 18 by a penalty, and the sad spectre of another red zone failure was looming in the air.  Here's how Coach described the winning play.

"They were in 2 deep.  The safety was in a press and bail, and Freddie got on top of him and the safety never got off the hash."

Maybe it is me, but that sounds kind of dirty.

It seemed like they got a lot of pressure on Tyler, which is a good formula for disrupting our passing game. Obviously, our line play continues to have room for improvement.

Anyway, there were two other critical parts to the game. Clawson faced a pretty big coaching decision with 8:00 left in the game. BG was on the 4 and it was 4th down and BG was down 6. A lot of people would kick the FG there and cut the lead to 3, and if we had, then the last drive would have only needed a FG and could have looked completely different.

Coach decided to go for it, which I thought was the right thing to do. BG had been playing very good defense and moving the ball well, so you have to figure you're going to get the ball back and get another shot, if you don't make it. You'd think the field position would be good too. That didn't work out exactly as thought because Buffalo was able to drive to the BG 42 before Buffalo failed on a 3-3 (the kind of play they undoubtedly woke up in the night thinking about).

They would have really pinned us back, but one of their players flattened Geter after a fair catch call and that gave BG 15 yards back and a respectable start on the 25.

Finally, the two blocked punts were huge. The first one was off a bobbled snap and accounted for one of our two scores in the first half and was pretty much the only reason we were still in the game. The other one (by Mahone) was huge and allowed BG to get within one score on a 17 yard drive. Coach has talked about our lack of big plays on special teams, but they were there Tuesday night.

(There were mistakes, of course. The fumbled punt and a roughing the kicker on a FG were two examples. The ICSTR is meeting right now to balance this all out).

Finally, coach said he has been using last year's game as motivation. When there is one rep left in a drill, he reminds them that it was the last reps of the Buffalo game that cost them a chance to be champions. He did point out that if they had closed the Buffalo game out, he wouldn't be working here (which was a pretty honest and funny moment....wasn't Greg Christopher just saying that Brandon would have been gone even with a win....never mind).

It was nice to return the favor on their home field. I'm pleased with the progress the team is making, and I still think there is nothing stopping us from winning out from here. It would be great to see the defense gain some confidence and build on this second half performance.