Coach Clawson Sees More Positives than Negatives...

The Falcons lost 33-20 to Tulsa last night in their second straight road game to open the season.  Coach said in his comments after the game that he saw more good things than bad, and I think that is probably true.  We made mistakes, which he does not like, but he said it is not unexpected.

The mantra for this year is to keep getting better.  Tulsa is a pretty good team that scored 49 in its first week, and did not score that against us.  We are a young team, and if we can continue to improve, we can be ready for the home stretch and the conference games.

To me, the key sequence in the game came late in the second quarter.  Tulsa had scored to go up 20-7 and then when BG got the ball they blew up 2 straight running plays and forced us to punt.  Even with 1:37 left and Tulsa on their own 11, you have to figure that they can extend that lead.

Instead, Dwayne Woods intercepts a pass and runs it down to the 1 yard line and Geter scores on the next play, and suddenly you can see something happening.  We head into the locker room down one score with momentum, and maybe we have a shot to make it a game.

BG kicked off--and covered the kickoff, Tulsa started on their own 26 with 1:19 left.  Keeping them off the board is important here, but Tulsa ran a six play drive in :54 that resulted in a TD running only 2 plays in our territory and got the TD right back.

There was still one chance though. BG got the ball back with :25 left, worked the ball to midfield and then threw a hail mary that Kamar Jorden made a great catch on for the TD, but he was called for pass interference and it was called back.

To me, that's the key sequence of the game.  If BG can come out of that down one score (a tie is even a possibility) than I think the second half starts off differently.  Tulsa has a good attack, and they won the battle with our defense and made sure that didn't happen.

Note to Tulsa.  I'm no coach, but you might want to work on his hail mary thing.  Most teams give up a hail mary TD about one a decade, and you have 3 in your last few games and are averaging one a game this year.  Seems like something that might help.

Coach mentioned our resiliency on defense, especially in the second half.  I think this is clearly a hallmark of his regime.  I don't think we had this under our previous coach--things instead seemed to sbowball.

Tulsa had 375 yards of total offense at halftime.  That is enough for a whole game.  Its hot, they are running huge numbers of plays, you have to fear that it isn't going to get better in the second half.  BG held Tulsa to 171 yards in the second half.  They had 18 first downs in the first half and 13 in the second half.

The game was never out of reach, so I don't believe Tulsa was pulling back on the stick.

Coach said afterwards that the second half is the best the defense has played this year.  We can build on that for next week.

On offense, the coach said that the biggest problem we have is that we are one-dimensional.  Our playmix from last year is not what we want...and we hoped to even it out this year.  Even adjusting for sacks, we had 66 rushing yards on 20 carries, and that is not going to get it done.

It seemed to me from listening that there were lots of plays where their d-line just blew plays up.  Again, I didn't see it, but it seems like Geter is often dodging guys in the backfield before he even gets to the line.

The offense did make mistakes.  We had a great TD by Jorden called back on a holding penalty on Walker, and the hail mary was called back and we turned the ball over 3 times and gave up 5 sacks on 40 passing attempts.

Kamar Jorden, as predicted on this blog, is having a big year.  He had his second straight 100 yard game and made a huge play on a 72 yard TD that was called back.  He caught 14 of our 29 completed passes.  Tulsa sounded they were committed to stuffing our screen game and it worked.  Geter caught only 2 passes.

Finally, though we scored 20 points, there are a couple things to keep in mind.  2 of those TDs came on short fields--the first after Magnone recovered a fumble, and the drive that started on the Tulsa 1.  In fact, the third TD drive started on our 44 and that  56 yard drive was the longest of the game.

On the stat sheet, Tulsa did dominate the game.  They outgained us by 243 yards and 13 TDs.

On a last offensive note, BG's best lineman, Ben Bojicic was injured and did not return.  No word on his prognosis yet, but Nick Torresso moved to C and BG brought a true freshman in on the O-line.  I believe that the O-line is the least likely place for a true frosh to play.  Dominic Flewellyn had a short adjustment period and then played well, according to Coach.

Finally, one positive was special teams.  Damaris Johnson was controlled on special teams.  Bryan Wright averaged 48 yards a punt, which was only 1 yard below Tulsa's stud punter, and 3 of those were inside the 20.  Ty Pronty busted a 49 yard return on a kickoff.  Overall, a nice effort for the special teams.

So that's the tale from Oklahoma.  The home opener is Saturday against a Marshall team that had their heart ripped from their chest Friday night.  I'm looking to see us continue to improve our play and pick up the season's first win.
Special teams