Sweet Victory #3: The Offense

There are a few points to note about BGSU's offensive performance.

The first we covered in the recap.  Travis Greene is a beast.  He is within 515 yards of being the most prolific rusher in the program's history...and while I understand you play more games today, etc, etc, you also get fewer rushing attempts.  If you're talking Miles, Preston, Pope and Durig, you are going to have to put Greene in there.  In fact, his career yards per attempt is just a hair over 5.5 yards per game and is within hailing distance of the school record, 5.7 (Durig).

He's just hard to tackle.  He makes guys miss.  Coach was asked about it and he said "that comes from the man upstairs, he decided he wanted to make a guy who was hard to tackle."  He's also a strong runner, especially for his size.  He's a historic performer in our program.

Yesterday, he was just great.  I have already talked about how he got the first downs that put the game away.  He had 119 yards on only 17 carries, which is 7 yard per carry.  Plus, they were clutch.

The BG running game was strong overall.  Fred Coppet had 75 yards on 10 carries.  Donovan Wilson scored once and had one crucial first down blast, Matt Johnson had a running TD as did Ronnie Moore.

Overall, BG "only" had 536 yards, which is low but mostly attributable to Buffalo being able to run long drives, especially in the second half.  BG played turnover-free ball with 7.5 yards per play, which is good in any league, any time.

Matt Johnson had a quiet day for him in terms of bulk numbers, but the same story applies here.  He threw only 29 times...BG ran only 71 plays--so the overall numbers are going to be less.  He was, however, 23 out of 29, (79%) with an absurd 11.2 yards per attempt and 14 per completion.  A good benchmark is 60% with 12 yards per completion.  He was just very efficient out there.

Roger Lewis also a great player.  I think he might easily be an NFL receiver and if BG keeps this offense he will leave with school records in receiving yards going away.  He had his third 200 yard game of the season, which is more than any other BG receiver has had in their career.  That's 201 yards on 10 catches.

He's just a weapon.  Coach said that Buffalo switched their top CB over to Lewis part way through the game and if there could have been five minutes that didn't count he would have loved to see those guys battle, but "we were trying to win the game" so we adjusted to throw the other way.  Point it, defenses have to account for Lewis on every play and that makes it hard for them to also account for Dieter, Burbrink and Moore.

BG was 7 of 12 on 3rd down and went on to get 1 more on 4th down, which is very good, and had 4 touchdowns in five red zone trips, which, in contrast to Buffalo, was the difference in the game.

The one area of concern was pass protection.  Johnson was sacked 4 times on one possession in the first/second quarter, but after that there were no more sacks, so BG was able to lock that down moving forward.

Overall, another good offensive performance.  It can still get better, but it was good, especially given the elements.