Who won Week 1 in the Big 12?
The “last dance” 2021 season of the Big 12 is underway. Obviously it’s not set in stone this will be the final season for the conference as it’s currently constructed, but once something like “we’re bailing for the SEC” is put out there publicly, you expect Oklahoma and Texas to move quickly to make it happen.
Meanwhile, we have some real football to talk about now so we don’t need to get hung up on conference realignment. We got a full slate of Big 12 games on Saturday and a number of interesting things happened. I’ve gotten decent at not overreacting to the events of Week 1 in college football, but there were certainly plenty of things to overreact to, if you’d like. Let’s dive in.
Contrar-Ian says the glass is half full
For Iowa State to play Northern Iowa close in Week 1 is basically an annual tradition. The Panthers took them into triple overtime in 2019, last year the Cyclones drew Louisiana instead and got dropped 31-14. So their 16-10 victory, propelled by defense and Connor Assalley field goals, was a pretty run of the mil event for Matt Campbell’s Iowa State.
The concern for Iowa State was how ineffective their run game was against UNI. Here’s the trick though, the Panthers play defense and we’ve seen more or less this exact Iowa State run game be plenty effective in the past. If you play vanilla run schemes against a defense like this who’s been gunning for you, it may not work out. These guys play in the Missouri Valley Football Conference with South Dakota State and North Dakota State, which is a fairly fierce league. Obviously it would have been a disaster for Iowa State to lose, just noting it’s so predictable they would have muddled their way through this game that I predicted it.
I haven’t been able to find much in the way of offensive highlights for Iowa State, in particular I was curious to see their rotation at right tackle and what factors held up the run game. They did rotate walk-on Derek Schweiger there with big Jake Remsburg but it’s not obvious to me what went wrong for their run game to limit Breece Hall to 69 yards on 23 carries. PFPurdy completed 21-26 passes for just 199 yards at 7.7 ypa.
Those are numbers you see when a team is vanilla.
I did find this amusing highlight, check out the right tackle here for UNI going up against Will McDonald, fourth of that name.
Let’s turn to Waco next.
I get the sense the mood there is fairly sour, just gauging from scattered tweets I’ve seen by the Baylor faithful. They played a competitive game against Texas State, as opposed to a convincing victory where they were far and away the superior team. As someone who was already very down on Baylor football this season, the outcome was less interesting to me than some of the specifics.
Here’s a few things I saw which might cheer up Bear fans just a little.
- The Texas State quarterback Guy McBride was a pretty good player, his numbers were bad but he was out there making a lot of chicken salad, as Gus Johnson would say.
- The wide zone run game looked solid and varied with a lot of different play-actions, sweeps, and quarterback runs attached.
- Gerry Bohanon is a dangerous runner (not good on the fumble, of course), he can throw rolling left, he has a strong arm, and he was able to execute the option routes they attached to the mesh play. The latter point is interesting and could be a big deal if Baylor gets great receiver play from Tyquan Thornton this year. Interestingly, Thornton didn’t look amazing on those.
There were a few negatives of course, there have to be when you barely beat a mediocre Sun Belt opponent. I continue to be skeptical about Baylor’s ability to make a full leap into “best defense in the Big 12” with these cornerbacks and edge rush and Gerry Bohanon is currently a one-read quarterback. The latter point doesn’t have to be crippling to Baylor this season, if their receivers can get open he’ll hit them often enough to deal some damage.
One more “half-full” team…the Oklahoma Sooners.
Oklahoma very nearly lost to Tulane. They needed three fumbles and a late stop by their defense to hang on for a 40-35 victory. Meanwhile, Spencer Rattler made a few questionable plays, two interceptions in particular, both on leak concepts where he stared things down. There was some other bad news as well for Oklahoma.
The offensive line didn’t play great, they haven’t really meshed yet and the run game was not nearly as intimidating as we’re accustomed to seeing…not by a long shot. They also let a lot of things slip on defense, but I suspect both issues are correctable. Bill Bedenbaugh will settle on the O-line rotation and clean up their play and Alex Grinch played a gazillion kids, so their mistakes on defense aren’t super alarming either.
Two issues I did notice: their play on the edge of the box both on defense and on offense. Oklahoma has three “tight ends” who play regularly in Brayden Willis, Jeremiah Hall, and Austin Stogner and only one of these guys can block a defensive end. Defensively, Billy Bowman and Jaden Davis both played some at nickel and closely resemble Brendan Radley-Hiles both in terms of coverage skill/versatility and iffy play trying to defend the edge.
Neither of those issues are new but Tulane sure knew how to make the most of them.
Contrar-Ian says the glass is half-empty
There was a lot of good news for the regime in Lubbock with Matt Wells escaping the “oh crap, I’m so fired” bowl in NRG against Dana Holgorsen and his Houston Cougars. The Red Raiders overcame a 21-7 deficit with 31 unanswered points…pretty nice. Included in the good news is the fact Sonny Cumbie seems to recognize the value in preserving Tech’s existing run game (hooray for wide splits!), Tahj Brooks proved as capable in the run game as Sarodorick Thompson, and they fed Erik Ezukanma and were rewarded with seven catches for a whopping 179 yards (somehow zero touchdowns).
The bad news is Houston was terrible and the matchups proved to be disadvantageous for the Cougars.
Tech played a good game, but Houston clearly had a lot of hope vested in their star cornerback Marcus Jones holding up against Ezukanma and their ability to attack the Tech defense in space was totally compromised by this:
Good protection, horrible decision. Clayton Tune played a miserable game with four interceptions, including a pick-6, and the Cougars melted down as Tech made their comeback.
I’m curious if they would consider Art Briles down there or if he’d be deemed a risk given their push to be an attractive option in realignment.
Anyways, Tech won and many of their assumed strengths showed up with the run game, Ezukanma, and a solid day by Tyler Shough.
Next up, K-State. They whipped Stanford and a lot of assumed strengths were present. The defense looked pretty good and fall camp emergents Felix Anudike and nickel Reggie Stubblefield showed up, always a good sign. However, the K-State space force on offense looks a bit suspect. Right tackle Christian Duffie got whipped a few times and Skylar Thompson threw a pick on a slot fade where the Stanford nickel devoured slot receiver Phillip Brooks. I’m just not sure if this team will be able to line up and beat people in the deeper passing game and will instead have to rely on steady gains and situational play.
They can do that and win a lot of games, 8-9 maybe, but I don’t think this team can be a serious Big 12 title contender if they can’t generate some margin with the play-action game.
Who won Week 1 in the Big 12?
Steve Sarkisian had a great opening game as the new Texas Longhorn head coach. Louisiana was considered a risky opponent to open against, due to having something like 20 returning starters and an extremely poised quarterback in Levi Lewis.
Obviously Texas was more talented, Texas is theoretically more talented on almost every single Saturday, but could they out-execute a veteran winning team in their first try out with a new staff and quarterback? The answer was, “yes, quite easily in fact.”
One of the more interesting dimensions to the game was a bit unexpected and should be yielding some optimism in Austin. Bijan Robinson didn’t really get loose in the run game until the second half, instead Texas built their lead by throwing the ball and often did so from pro-spread sets.
In clip one Texas is in 20 personnel but with running back Bijan Robinson flexed out as the boundary slot. He gets to run a skinny post matched up on the boundary safety and Hudson Card’s lightning release hits him coming out of his break for a big gain.
Clip two features Bijan flexed out as the boundary outside receiver and fellow running back Roschon Johnson flexed out as the field outside receiver. Inside you have your normal outside receivers running vertical routes up the seams with Jordan Whittington all alone inside matched up on a linebacker. This is “hoss y-juke” which the Patriots made famous. Ideally you run schemes like this with motion or wonky alignments with tight ends and running backs flexed out and Texas did so.
The protection was good here to buy time for J-Whitt to execute the “juke” and boy did he ever, the Cajun linebacker hurt himself trying to keep up. If J-Whitt and turned upfield instead of trying to bounce outside Bijan’s block it’s six points.
The Longhorns will get another opportunity to cast aspersions on their own new staff and potential next week on the road against Arkansas, but thus far things are going quite well. The run game needs some work, but Hudson Card may be pretty under hyped for what he can do in this partnership with Sark. Simply by avoiding a loss Texas did a lot for themselves in terms of recruiting narratives and momentum, but winning in this fashion is going to instead offer a nice boost provided they don’t leave it behind in Fayetteville.
