Razorbacks Have Trojans, But No Fun

USC 50, Arkansas 14.  Where to start?  It’s easy really.  Big game, playing at home, great crowd, seriously loud, new offense, serious defense, other team has a new QB and freshman running backs to break in, other team probably has one of the best defenses we will face all year, other team has a kicker that is money on kicking it out of the end zone causing opponents to have to start at the 20 every time…

What should you do if you win the coin toss?  Easy answer is ‘kick off.’  What did we do?  Choose to receive.

It is funny to me that in the Houston Dale environment of fear and green jerseys, won’t tackle to the ground in practice because someone might get hurt, constant preaching about turnovers, ‘the most important thing is to catch the punt,’ we pick this moment to get all brave and set ourselves up to lose the field position battle right off the bat.  Bad plan.

Now, I’m reading in the paper that the defense was great but just wore out because of the offensive ineptitude and turnovers.   Yes, Felix was easy money for USC on the turnovers.  On his third fumble – the one at the start of the second quarter (yes, they came that quickly, but surely not because he hadn’t been hit in practice since early spring) – the USC guy just slaps the ball from his hands.  However…

The turnover that led to USC having the ball at the Arkansas three was preceded by USC moving the ball from their own 13 yard line for 50 yards prior to punting our offense into a hole.  My point?  When we finally flipped the field (due to the defensive stop on downs at the Arkansas 44 and Jacob Skinner’s punting), we immediately let them flip it back.

And then, following Arkansas’ 13 play, 80 yard drive for a touchdown (6 rushes for 17 yards, 7 passes for 63, time used of 5:18, which narrowed the first half time of possession gap to 1:16 in favor of USC), the defense allows USC to move 44 yards in 2:23 and kick a field goal to end the half.

So why am I talking about this?  The defense gave up 94 yards in two possessions when USC was in poor field position.  The USC offensive line just dominated us all night long.  Coach Parcells says every 100 yards is worth 7 points.  While the defense was tough, don’t make them out to be big heroes in the first half.   The two possessions I’m talking about were not caused by turnovers.

It should have been a field position, defensive struggle in the first half.  We blew it in every way possible.  Receiving the kick off, early turnovers (which tend to happen to whoever has the ball first in big emotional games – emotion is better spent early on defense), three and out on four of six first half possessions, 15 yard penalty on the punt team, letting USC flip the field back after we had gained the edge in field position – all played a part in the storm.

I’ll make this simple for you.  While the turnovers were serious killers, we were going to be seriously dead anyway.  When USC opened up the offense in the third quarter, they took us to the woodshed.  They would have gotten to that without the turnovers providing help.  Seriously.

But the turnovers did give them at least a 17 point if not 20 point platform to allow them to easily think about opening up the offense in the third quarter.

Effectively the game was over at 13:12 to go in the second quarter.  It really shouldn’t have been, but that’s when I ‘called it’ from the stands because of the ‘look’ on the Arkansas sidelines.

The Arkansas offense didn’t know what it wanted to be.  The ‘Gus Bus’ was left in the shop for a mini-van model carrying Houston Dale’s version of offensive strategy.  Didn’t work.  I didn’t like the confusion on the sidelines with Houston Dale and Danny doing as much waggling of what looked to be like signals and attempting to catch Robert Johnson’s eyes as the people that were actually supposed to be doing those things.  Many times it was a bit of a mess over there.  There were issues to say the least.

If the coaches can’t figure out how to look organized it is no wonder national TV is commenting on our lack of saying ‘congrats’ to the guys coming off the field after a touchdown drive.  Quarterback in particular.

My view is that the only time we really saw Gus in action with freedom was on the series Mitch Mustain QB’d.  (I told you that if we saw Mitch it would mean things were really bad.)  I saw a lot of offense in practice sessions that didn’t make it into this game in the slightest fashion. My feeling was that we were doing Gus plays sometimes, ‘keeping Houston Dale happy’ run plays at other times, with the general Houston Dale context of ‘safe, run, safe, safe passes’ riding herd over everything.

RoJo was off target most of the night.   The interception at the beginning of the third quarter was a bad decision on his part to force what was a bad play call.  The strength of their team defense was the linebackers.  Why’d we spend so much time attacking their linebackers?

Damian Williams is by far the best receiver we have on the field.

Quarterback is going to be a mess all year unless we just play Mitch and be done with it.  He looked in command, threw the ball on target, and appeared to be a man on a mission.  I liked the look of it.  He did stare a zone down on the interception he threw later.  But oh well, let’s play him and get through the learning curve as quickly as possible.  He’s not ready, but after what we saw I don’t really care about that.  The other QB’s aren’t either.

In my view this was not really much better than last year.  Just happened in a bit of a different way.  We still got killed by a directional school type of score.   50 or 70, it’s about the same thing.  It was men against boys, again, from sideline to sideline.

USC is one of the top five teams in the nation.  We probably fit somewhere between number 25 and 40.   It’s not really fair to judge our team based on only this game.  I hope not anyway.