Final Thoughts

It was a crazy night at the Doyt.  BG gets outplayed for most of the night, puts up a terrible performance, and then on a collection of absolute gifts from Buffalo, has an improbable and pretty much unearned chance to win the game, which ends with a FG that looks great off the foot and somehow ends up wide.

Buffalo was only marginally better.  The game featured a mind-numbing 11 turnovers and 14 penalties.  Buffalo made one of those turnovers at the absolute worst possible moment, when they were running the clock out.

BG stayed in the game thanks to big plays.  Robert Lorenzi had two INTs, one of which he scored on and one of which he took to the 5 and the offense scored on.  The offense scored on a bomb to Ty Pronty and a screen pass to Willie Geter in which he made something out of not much for another TD.

In the play-by-play business, we were beaten pretty badly.

• On offense, we had only 10 first downs, 5 in each half.  
• Our longest drive was a 10 play drive.  That's a 10-play, 22 yard drive, sustained only by Buffalo penalties.
• We punted 8 times.
• Even if you remove the sacks and the struggles we had with the wildcat snap, we ran the ball 25 times for 56 yards.
• We completed less than a third of our passes, with 3 INTs and 2 sacks in 39 (sack adjusted) attempts.  BG had only 167 passing yards, and 97 of those came on two plays, meaning that our remaining 37 attempts netted us only 70 yards.
• We got to the red zone only once--from an INT.

• On defense, we gave up 27 first downs, and allowed Buffalo 92 plays.
• Davis was over 50% passing, and averaged 7.1 yards per passing attempt.
• Buffalo was 12 of 19 on 3rd down, and according to Coach 8-11 in the first half.
• BG had only one sack (for one yard) and one hurry.  
• The middle was wide open all day.

The defense did have a couple positives I do feel like I need to mention.  Buffalo did get to 200 yards rushing, but it took them 58 attempts.  They averaged only 3.4 yards per carry which is pretty good.

Their longest run was 19 yards, which is also pretty decent for us.

For the last 20 minutes, Buffalo's longest drive was 4 plays.  They ran 20 plays for 53 yards in that period.

The bottom line is that I am impressed by our defense's resolve.  They were on the field a long, long time and yet they kept competing and eventually saw a little bit of success that kept us in the game.

We had some big tackle totals, but you have to factor in that Buffalo did run an incredible number of plays.

A few other observations:

It seemed like we had some opportunities to go to the wildcat in short yardage situations and did not, and then we went to it from the Buffalo 37.  From there, we had two muffed snaps, only to be bailed out on one late hit.  It seemed like we might have tried to go to the formation more in short yardage, given our difficulty running the ball.

Obviously, this loss really hurts.  We have a tough conference schedule, and this one (at home in particular) was one we needed.

It is obvious if we play like this going home, it is hard to imagine beating anyone.

I don't think we will, however.  We will be better with our QB back, which will hopefully be next week.  And, the MAC is crazy.  Ball State won easily at CMU.  Pierce is hurt.  OU struggled against EMU.  There are no teams that are dominant and unbeatable.

There's still plenty of runway left.