Bowling Green made 22 first downs in the game. That's a relatively impressive number playing against a defense that is as good as the Florida defense, which is probably one of the top 10 in the country.
BG did have 3 4th down conversions. In fact, on 3 and 4 down conversions, BG was 7 of 17.
Florida only made 14 first downs which is also pretty low for a game you won. I think that penalties really hurt them. They were OK on third and fourth down--6 of 18--so that wasn't it.
Consistent with those two numbers above, BG ran a lot more plays than Florida did. The Falcons ran 79 plays and Florida only ran 63.
Which leads us to a part of the stat sheet that could be misleading. In terms of total yards, the game was relatively close: Florida had 365 and BG 327. However, when you factor in yards per play, Florida had a significant advantage: 5.8 to BG's 4.1.
As for rush defense, John Wagner pointed this out:
Saturday, BG allowed Florida to gain 243 yards on 46 attempts, but that number comes with an asterisk. The Gators had 125 yards on 15 rushes in the second quarter. In the other three quarters, they managed just 95 yards on 27 attempts.
BG had some moments where it ran the ball well, but ended up with 3.7 yards per carry. Samuel had only 3 yards per carry (and a dumb penalty) and Pettigrew averaged 4.8 yards per carry. Both had a TD.
The Pettigrew TD was the kind of play Coach Clawson has been talking about since last year. We needed to be able to power the ball into the end zone. He was stopped, kept his legs moving, kept churning and was still on his feet, which allowed Chris Pohlman to essentially carry him the last yard into the end zone. Point is...we haven't had someone who could do that in a long time. Clawson gave him a big hug on the sideline.
We passed 52 times and only ran it 27 times. I'd expect a different ratio next Saturday.
Speaking of passing, BG had 226 passing yards for the game, which is not a lot to show for 52 attempts. BG was 25 of 52 for 48%, which is part of it. The other part was we had to run really short routes to try and negate the Florida pass rush. The longest pass play was 22 yards, though we did do it twice.
BG averaged 4.3 yards per pass play and that's against last year's MAC average of 6.5.
Coach said that Schilz played a smart game. To that point, he was not sacked once and threw just the one pick that probably wasn't his fault.
The leading receiver was Ryan Burbrink, who had 8 catches. He is being compared to a Cole Magner type receiver, and he seemed to play that role. He is a freshman and a walk on.
We will look at special teams in a day or two, but in general, they were not good. The punting game was up and down, FG kicking is something we have discussed and we fumbled or muffed a punt late in the game.
In general, the stats are little more one-sided than I thought I would see.
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