Post by hoidOfYolen on Nov 24, 2019 17:22:05 GMT -5
What an amazing effort by the team to come from behind, at one point losing by 15 points at 20-5 in the second half. Grit and perseverance were abound by the Phoenix yesterday. They looked like a team that belonged on the same stage as teams like Towson in the top 25. They haven't always looked that way this year, but they did yesterday. I don't mean to encroach on fc4life's thing, but I usually give my own thoughts anyway. I look forward to his thoughts as well.
Offense - B+
The offense did well in spots, but not as well in general as you would think. We only ran the ball for 114 total yards. This marks the first time this season that we won a game without rushing for more than 150 yards; all 4 of our other wins included that metric. Towson out-rushed us 143 to 114, and I think our offensive line showed in spots why they were junior players and not experienced. The pass game was a little better, with 214 yards of offense in the air, the same exact number as Towson. The offensive line did better at pass blocking than usual yesterday too, with only 4 sacks (compared to the 6 per game they were giving up consistently), and I saw a few different times that Cheek had time to throw the ball, which was a really promising sign. I was actually surprised to see the 4 sacks on the stat sheet, because I only remembered 2 maybe 3. 3rd down conv. was good but not great at 47%. We won TOP 31:17 to 28:43, as well, which kept our defense off the field. Overall I think the offense played well enough to win us the game, and that's all you can ask against a good team like Towson.
Defense - First Half: C-, Second Half A
I split this up into halves because there was a significant difference in how the defense played in the second half compared to the first. Only allowing 6 points in the second half to the Towson offense is phenomenal, including the 2 INTs made on Tom Flacco, who only had 4 coming into today's game. We held Flacco to 214 yards passing, which is below his average of 236 yds/game on the year. Our run defense could have been better at times, giving up 143 yards, mostly on big run plays that went for 20+ yards. If we could have shut down those big plays to under 10 yards, we would have probably held them to under 100 yards rushing. I'm extremely proud of how gritty the defense played yesterday, how they buckled down and stopped a great Towson offense in the second half to give us a chance to win the game.
Special Teams - A
I know, I know, we lost a fumble on the second kickoff return of the game, and that sucked. But other than that, we were perfect on special teams. We only gave up 6 yds per punt return and 14.8 yds per kick return. They were often held back before the 25 yard line on kickoffs, which is excellent. As for our kicking game, it was perfect. No missed XPs AT ALL this year, and Skylar Davis made up for his miss against W&M with 3 field goals for us in this game. Not to mention the fact that we had no blocked punts (and it wasn't even close any of the times). I was very proud of our special teams this game.
Coaching - A-
The coaches did a fairly good job this game with playcalling and managing the pace of the game. We didn't run the ball up the middle 45 times like we always did with Cignetti here, which was very good to see, since we did that a couple times this year as well. They called plays that put trust in the offensive line, even when they hadn't shown they deserved it yet, and I think that really payed off big in this game. We called plays that allowed Cheek time to throw, and the offensive line usually showed up to the task (other than the 4 sacks, Cheek mostly only had to run all those times because of great coverage downfield). Most important of all, though, was the fact that the coaches DIDN'T PASS THE BALL when we were well in field goal range to win the game and had 3 fresh downs to run out the clock. We trusted our field goal kicker and didn't take any risks throwing an INT, however rare that may be with Cheek. I was very happy when I saw that. We did have 7 penalties, though, so I couldn't give the coaches too much love. All in all, the coaches coached a great game and I think our grit starts with our leaders. Something was said at halftime by Trisciani and the other coaches that fired up this team and gave us the will to win. That's invaluable and I really think that speaks volumes for the future of this program.