The bottom line is that Bowling Green dropped another home game today. In many ways, the story is familiar. BG was in the game, but made too many mistakes at critical junctures to win the game. In a couple of ways, maybe it is not familiar....or maybe we are just used to it.
I will say this. I was not totally disappointed with our performance. In fact, in many ways, I thought it was a positive. CMU took the opening kick and ran right down our throat, and you started to get pictures of a 49-0 rout in your head. The defense did stablize, however, and frankly kept the team in the game by getting CMU off the field. The yardage figures are ugly but the defense held a pretty good CMU team to 24 points.
Let's not forget that there was a point in the second half where we had a player running to the end zone with the ball in his hands and a very good shot at tying the game at 17. More on that later.
As good as Tyler Sheehan is--and he was good today, though not without flaws--Dan LeFevour is better. He is simply a dominant football player from the QB position. He can make the throws he needs to make, but combines that with incredible elusive running ability. He makes them very difficult to defend.
Just as importantly, Antonio Brown is a fantastic compliment. That option play they ran where Brown cuts in motion and LeFevour has an option to hand it to him or keep was just devastating and is very difficult to defend when you have two playmakers like that running it.
We did give up a lot of rushing yards. And as Coach pointed out post-game, in a cold wind like you had today, you really need to be able to have some balance on offense and to be able to stop the run on defense.
Ultimately, it was BG's lack of red zone offense that cost us the game. In the first quarter, after a 10 play drive where BG drove to the 4 before stalling out, Norsic missed a FG. It is enough of a blow to your momentum to try the FG....it is a killer when those short FGs are missed.
Then, in the late second quarter, BG had the ball on the 12, and BG looked to Barnes again, but instead of hitting #7 with the ball, it instead hit a CMU defender right in the numbers. I don't know what happened on the play, but it wasn't a tough interception.
Finally, BG had a chance to tie the game in the 3rd quarter, and on the back end of a 12 play drive, BG ran a statue of liberty play to Chris Wright. Sad thing is that the play worked and he had made a first down and looked like he might score when he lost the ball in traffic and CMU recovered.
And CMU is simply too good a team to make those kinds of mistakes against. They didn't play a perfect game, but they did play turnover-free ball, and that--along with some superior football players--was enough to get them the victory.
Coach had some interesting comments I will review tomorrow. Basically, one thing he mentioned that I had not considered was that our defense does not cause many turnovers, and they had a couple chances today, but couldn't rein the ball in.
More tomorrow. Freddie had 14 grabs, which keeps him on pace for the NCAA record. Yes, some of them were dinks, but a number of them were downfield and in traffic.
A final note for the Falcon nation. The team has improved and solidified its play in the past three weeks. Looking at our final four games, each one is winnable. A 7-5 or 6-6 season is definitely in reach for our team if our play can continue to improve.
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