A few other Ball State notes....

One thing that I didn't mention in the previews to the Ball State game was the long losing streak their Coach, Stan Parrish is on.  It dates back a long time, all the way to when he coached at Kansas State, where he immediately preceded Bill Snyder, Part I.  In fact, Parrish has a 35-game winless streak, as far as I can tell.  (Information on this is considerable scarcer than pantie-less starlets).

The Ball State board is apoplectic about now and demanding he be fired.  I can't imagine Ball State making a move after giving him only one year (not to mention costs and potential buyouts.)  It is hard to imagine that this team went from 12-2 to 0-7.  It is also hard to imagine that he is that bad a coach.

In the post-game, Coach Clawson was asked about the Chris Bullock TD run being (what I thought) was the longest TD run of the year for BG.  In fact, upon further review, it was BG's longest RUN of the year from scrimmage.  As Coach said, in response, "that isn't very long, is it?"

No. It's not.

We'll be watching the injury wires this week nervously.  In addition the injury of Ray Hutson, which we haven't heard much about, we had two O-lineman go down (Minturn and Bojicic) in the game.  It will be interesting to see how much they play against CMU.  Blaec Walker had been getting reps at tackle, so I think he might be better prepared than the back up at C is...plus C is a really important position, especially with all of our shotgun sets.

Just over 10,000 hearty souls endured the contest in Muncie.

There is sort of a prevailing idea that because Freddie Barnes has a ton of catches, he is some kind of bubble screen "system guy" who racks up numbers on easy catches behind the line.  Certainly, we do run those plays, but in the past few games, he has been downfield quite a bit.  He appears to be borderline unguardable on a slant, and at least two of his three TD catches involved him out-fighting the defenders for the ball.  He does get open deep, and while he's not a pure threat on a go pattern, he is a complete receiver who does everything well.

We did only have one sack against the porous BSU line.  There were four "hurries" on top of that.  From listening to the call, it did sound like our guys failed to "get home" on some blitzes, and to the extent Ball State was able to capitalize with downfield passes, that helped.