Just back home from the game. Quick thoughts.
Fumbles. Lots. Both teams. Hurt and helped. Hillis fumbles — was simply holding the ball loose. Every team will be swatting at the ball the rest of the year when he’s got it. Monk after reception for a first down. Defense really good at times. Quickness and speed on display, linebackers and secondary. Was nice to see. Too many mistakes however. Gave up an 85 yard run, and a few other things that people will notice on film. The middle was wide open way too many times. Without the early fumbles Missouri State might have hung in longer and perhaps even put a scare in us. Never any doubt about the outcome though. I think we should be disappointed that we gave up over 300 years by the middle of the 3rd quarter.
Running game — 3 people over 100 yards, another with 70+. Can’t complain. Offensive Line was good (consider the competition). Hillis ran well and made a lot of yards after first contact. Felix Jones is a keeper. Emmitt like with speed. Good vision, good cuts through traffic. Ran over 3 guys once to get the extra 2 yards needed for a first down. By the second half Howard had plenty of motivation to perform or risk never seeing the field again. He came through pretty well, showing more speed at times than I thought he had.
Passing — starting quarterback had 88 yards in 12 completions, total of 108 for game and Alex completed 1 for 20 yards. Do you need to hear more? Waco RoJo made a terrible decision on the first pass of the game, but did much better thereafter. Has a gun for an arm and made a few really good throws. Mostly posession stuff, but not a good completion percentage. Houston Dale has to be disappointed with this. We did have 5 receivers in the pattern on one play, but had another with only a long post and a fly pattern — with the new feature this year of a dump off guy, so I guess that’s an improvement. Saw lots of 1 back, multi-receiver sets. Will be interesting to see what that all turns into at some point. As I thought, we didn’t push this much. Unfortunately, we didn’t end up working on this much either, as we got more than a little concerned in the 3rd quarter.
Special Teams — for the most part not sharp. Delay of game on a field goal attempt because we were just dragging around. Opening kickoff of the game was amusing — never seen that before. Except for 1 instance, kick-off and coverage wasn’t impressive.
First game. We saw them for real and know a bit more, but due to the level of competition we are still pretty much in the dark. Pretty much like I thought going in, except I expected to see a sharper passing game and fewer big gains given up by the defense.