Final thoughts.
What a weird game. Such a long game. Our players seemed to be in a fog all night. When they were going good, they were going good. When they were going bad, they just seemed dazed—in a fog. The crowd left early. How fitting.
Another season, and one game in it is time for me to pull out a familiar theme.
We beat our opponent. We beat ourselves. Then we beat our opponent again.
We should get credit for three or four wins tonight. We kept beating them and then letting them back in again—over and over and over. First half and second half.
And it could have been worse. The touchdown they had taken off the board was awfully close. Tough call. I think it was the right call but still a huge break regardless. Morgan fumbled the safety kick but the whistle blew. Wow, we caught a break there. We just kept doing whatever we had to do to drag this game to a suspenseful BYU type finish.
Play calling. With seven minutes to go, a two touchdown lead, and gaining huge chunks of yards on the ground, why the swing pass to Stanley Morgan on second and five near midfield (which would have gained a whole yard if completed)? That forced a pass on third and five. Next series, we pass on third and four. We left huge chunks of time on the clock.
But also, why were we snapping the ball with 15 seconds on the play clock when the game clock was running? Our game management added almost two full minutes to the end of the game by my quick calculations. (We did almost exactly the same types of things two years ago against BYU and Illinois. Remember how those games turned out.) I just don’t get it. It was like we were in a fog.
Okay, on to some positives.
Pretty good first outing for Tanner Lee. He made some big time throws. His last incompletion by the way was a pretty good play really—he threw it away because ASU was trying to sucker him into throwing a pick 6. His TD throw to Morgan was a thing of beauty. He used his TE.
I’ll repeat that. He used his TE.
He made a couple of huge third down throws to keep drives alive. He distributed the rock. He made some bad throws but given he hasn’t played a real game in two years or so, pretty nice performance. It was a performance he can build on nicely.
J.D. Spielman takes one to the house 99 yards on his very first touch. He also make a couple of nice grabs. He looks like something special.
Stanley Morgan gains over 100 yards. Could a 1,000 yard receiving season be in the works? Morgan looked like a leader out there tonight.
I guess Riley wasn’t kidding when he said they wanted to get Lindsey involved. Lindsey caught three early passes. Welcome to the Big Ten.
One more negative, De'Mornay Pierson-El. Young man, run the ball all the way into the end zone. Celebrating on the ten yard line and getting caught from behind is a good way to get royally embarrassed. Granted, that part of the play didn’t count anyway because he did step out of bounds AND he did end up being tackled in the end zone BUT he was tackled awkwardly from behind. A player can get hurt that way. Hopefully the coaches point that out to him.
Okay, back to the positives.
Tyler Hoppes with his first three career catches including one great catch at the one.
Mikale WIlbon with his first NU TD. I though Wilbon looked pretty good except for the screen play that was blown up because everyone in the stadium knew it was coming (including Arkansas State).
But the star of the offense had to be Tre Bryant. 31 carries for 192 yards is an outstanding day at the office. Bryant looked like a thousand yard rusher out there to me.
Defensively, I have commented that I am not sure what I saw out there. It seemed like we were keeping it pretty vanilla for the Oregon Ducks and we were trying to protect our young CBs. In the second half, I thought we did a much better job attacking their bubble screens which kept Arkansas State at bay for much of the half.
The substitution patterns were a bit weird to me. I saw reserves playing large chunks of minutes and some of the starters I don’t really remember seeing as the game progressed. I don’t know if there were some injuries but certainly some young players got some valuable snaps.
Ty Ferguson with his first career interception in what really amounts to his first game playing on the defense (as opposed to special teams). Luke Gifford had some nice stops especially tackling ASU players in bounds short of the first down or who knows how many more minutes we could have given them at the end of the game.
Perhaps the play of the game was Aaron Williams slapping the ball away in the end zone taking a TD off the board—that is, I believe it was Aaron Williams. Nice to see Kalu with a pick from the safety position.
By my line of sight, it seemed like Deontre Thomas actually played quite a bit. Didn’t see much of Stoltenberg in the second half. I may have just missed him.
Young with a sack. Carlos Davis with some nice pressures although his roughing the QB penalty in the first half was unfortunate.
All in all, just a weird, crazy game. Give Arkansas State credit for not only playing hard, but being patient in their game plan and approach. They never panicked. They made some costly mistakes but they kept coming at us.
First game in the books. We are 1-0 and next week’s trip to Oregon will tell us much, much more about this team.
I have no idea what I saw tonight. I suspect we are still in the same half-full, half-empty purgatory we have been in seemingly for a lifetime. Me thinks there may be some ugly games coming down the pike—hopefully some ugly wins in those games.
Better strap up and get ready for the ride. It’s going to be bumpy.
How good are we? Too early to tell.
Take care, all.
