I haven't had a chance to check the stat line yet but I liked how we played. For all the negative Nancy's out there were went extremely vanilla especially on offense. The line got a nice push. Newby ran hard and Ozigbo looked the stud I knew he was. The receivers although limited made the plays when called upon. The defense played hard and fast. Again, we played it very close to the vest yet we didn't give up any big plays. Fresno State earned everything the got. I was very impressed on our closing speed on the ball especially on the outside. Special Teams played kind of like I thought they would. Losing Foltz is going to hurt especially in big games. On punt returns they were kicking high and short so that was going to be tough. In the end we played a team that gave everything to win and we took it and blew the out. We imposed our will and dominated in the end. Pretty good win for our first game.
Games all have to judged in context. We were playing a team at home who has six new coaches. If that isn't like starting over I don't know what is. They won 3 games last year.
Congratulations on being the first person that I know of to use the term vanilla. Tell me what that is? That simply is not true. We were running reverse plays, jet sweeps, counter plays, you name it. We didn't throw much which seems to have been the plan all along. I wasn't as impressed with the O line overall play as you were. We caught them in some dogs and they simply had no one to anchor the corners.
This is not to say we didn't play well. While one is playing the what if game - then what if they score a TD on their first possession where they missed a field goal and then get a late on when they threw the INT? I hate the what ifs but that is the game you want to play.
We definitely need to improve significantly going forward. I will see who well we "dominate" the fronts gong forward. One game doesn't tell us much.
Riley wasn't very please with the overall performance - so what does that tell you?
