The longest day in the Falcon Nation in many years. A fourth conference loss in five games at the Doyt. The lowest point total since a game against Penn State a lifetime ago. Our worst home loss (at least in our current stadium). And all of this to Kent, touted to be one of the worst teams in I-A football.
I don't know what to say. Kent 38, BG 3. The Falcon nation is in an uproar. Brandon must go, etc. I'd like to chip in with some thoughts--and I hope a little perspective...but with this caveat. We're young, but what happened today should not have happened.
I'm going to make my first post from the transcripts of Coach's post game press conference. My commentary in orange.
"Well, you can't turn the ball over six times and expect to beat anybody. Anyhow, I am not going to lie or try to paint a rosy picture, but I saw this coming. I saw it coming two weeks ago, we barely beat Buffalo then went on the road and beat an FIU team that was okay."
The Falcon Nation is driven to absolute distraction by comments like this. No, not the first sentence. No one thinks that six turnovers (when the opposition makes none) is a formula for winning.
No, we're talking about the second statement, where he saw it coming two weeks ago. Never mind that when we beat Buffalo and FIU, Coach talked about how they were both good teams on the comeback trail. Cut the guy a break. That's what you say.
No, we're talking about the fact that he saw it coming two weeks ago, and didn't do anything about it. We certainly seemed to be taking the "A win is a win" philosophy. Mine is somewhat different. Tesla once said that "nothing deceives like success." John Wooden said you had to evaluate deeper than winning or losing. And, when we barely beat Buffalo and FIU, a lot of people thought we were in trouble. You'd think a Coach would have tried something.
"Our youth has been exposed, so that's what we are talking about, to line up with as many freshmen as we are playing and expect these kids to execute consistently, that's what we are asking them to do, but we aren't getting it done. We just have to hang in there, keep coaching them, and do the best we can with them, because they are good young players."
This is a common theme of the coach. Indeed, if you go back on this blog, I have written a lot about it. We have a ton of freshmen on our two deep. We played a R-FR QB and then replaced him with a true FR QB. Our defense is really young.Now, whether they really are good young players remains to be seen, and cannot be taken on faith. It seems like they might be, but we are going to have to see it.
"Kent's tempo early on caught our guys off balance, which is really shocking because our offense does it everyday in practice."
Sounds like we weren't ready to play. And we were not. We were flat, unfocused and poor more or less right from the start....especially on defense.
"We are a deer in the headlights team right now, we have a lot of young guys that don't know how to win right now, we just have to fight through that and we will."
What can you take from this game?
"We are in the middle of the football season, we are playing a lot of young players who haven't been in there in crunch time, but it's hard to look for the encouraging things out there today, but there were some, I will have to watch the film to see if I see any of those."
"There were some guys who stepped up and played hard, we just don't have enough right now. We don't have enough guys who understand the tempo to win at this level, and you just don't show up and do that, that's what it is right now." < "We are going to continue to stay the course, we have won a lot of football games here, that's certainly not Bowling Green football that you saw there today, it was embarrassing."
No disagreement there."I am going to look at that as a temporary setback, that's what today was, and I know that my coaches will do that, and I hope most of our players will look at it that way."
I hope that proves to be true.OK, that's the entire transcript. Back to me again. I heard more than this on the radio. One of the killers was that we really moved the ball in the first and second quarter, and couldn't score. Here is a scenario from the first half.
Anthony Turner is injured and not dressed to play tackle football. So, Freddie gets the start. We hold the ball from the opening kick for 6 minutes down to the Kent 25. But, on 4-6, we run Freddie and they are wise to that.
Kent gets the ball and runs a reverse for a 79 yard TD run.
We get the ball. We drive for five more minutes, but stall out on the Kent 40.
You get the idea. We tried to open up the offense, but Freddie just isn't there. He completely overthrew Corey on one pass (he was wide open), and then we called the same play and were intercepted. Following that, it was clear to Kent that we were one-dimensional. (In Cleveland, Coach said you couldn't make a living running Freddie all the time, and then preceded to try and make a living doing just that for three weeks). They held Freddie to 28 yards. He was unable to get the passing going--and was not helped by dropped pass from our WRs. Meanwhile, as we turned the ball over, we reached the point where Kent was ahead in the third at 24-3.
Then, Coach Brandon showed how badly we needed the game. We ripped the redshirt off Tyler Sheehan, true freshmen, and put him in for a little bit of diversity in the audience. At first, the attack moved a little bit, but he threw an INT and fumbled twice. This is a pretty surprising decision. We basically gave up a year of playing for the guy to come into a game we were a long shot to compete in. Unless, of course, AT is going to be out longer than we expect. (Sheehan could always be redshirted next year).
Special teams were improved, except for one bad rugby punt.
The defense was awful, especially against the pass. We had nothing, and Kent's QB drifted some real weak passes and "our guys stood there are watched them catch it" as Coach said in the post-game.
This was as long a game as I can imagine. We will be lucky to draw flies over the next and final two home games. A couple points.
- We are young. We have a big hole in our recruiting--at a minimum.
- We are not healthy. In additon to AT. safety Mahomes, CB Antonio Smith, and our starting NG did not play. We don't have depth on defense to start with.
- We can expect a young team to have set backs, but right now we have played three bad teams since we left Cleveland, and we have two close wins and a blow out loss to show for it.
Case in point: can you imagine this happening to a Meyer team?
Didn't think so.
Getting beat by Kent State is not all that surprising, but getting beat that badly was a surprise.
ReplyDeleteKent State is much improved from last year's inexperienced team as they started a lot of freshmen last year - some of them true freshman.
Kent State has not been given much credit for their improved team, although Phil Steele, Kirk Herbstreit, and Bill Curry did predict them to win their division.
Kent's passing efficiency defense is ranked 6th in the nation - that's pretty good.
After getting thrashed by Minnesota in the opener and losing in overtime to Army, they've shown themselves to be a better team now that they're in conference play.
BG won those two games despite not playing well on defense and giving up 3 touchdowns on special teams. That will most definitely catch up to a team at some point, as it did yesterday. That's probably what coach was referring to when he said he saw this coming 2 weeks ago.
BG is young, so they may continue to struggle this year, but they'll certainly improve next year.
Thanks for the commment and thanks for reading. No doubt, Kent is much improved and they have shown it in conference play. But, I can't buy they are 35 points better than us on our field.
ReplyDeleteI hope you are right about the improvement down the road. I was thinking earlier that if these guys really are any good (and in fairness you can't tell yet), we're going to have an awesomee team when they are seniors.
When you start talking about taking your biggest loss in your Stadium's history, and it isn't to a powerhouse, but to a team in your own league that ought to be at least comparable to yours, it is discouraging.
The "we are young" excuse has been in use since the year before Urban left. At some point people have to finally stop themselves long enough to ask: when aren't we going to be young. The "certainly will improve next year" is becoming the motto of too many fans.
ReplyDeletePeople are going to waste years, hiding from how bad things are now, and will be for years to come. The willingness to accept poor play, under-achieving football teams, and leaving things until next year, are long-time, long-term issues about BGSU sports in general, and its administration and fans specifically.
The prevailing attitude about this season, last season, and years gone by, are more indicative of old Kent and Ohio thinking than Miami, NIU, and, yes, Toledo thinking.