ZachTheZip

I'd like to see Malachi Freeman converted to offense. He's fast. I don't know how many of you watched the Can't game, but he ran down Dri Archer from behind and tackled him before it became a TD. Imagine having our own Dri Archer, but even faster.

And what if it was a Miami home game?

That block has Penn Station, a trophy store, and a phone shop. Everything else is just abandoned buildings. This is the same location that was rumored to see a new Chipotle and Five Guys moving in.

Buffalo and BGSU are playing in Columbus right now in Crew Stadium. I think it might be a good idea, if the right teams were involved. It's out of the way for both BG and Buffalo, though. It might work better if you had schools like Akron and vs Miami playing each other. Both sort-of along I-71 and seperated by Columbus.

Dri Archer was an unheralded 2-star recruit out of Florida. Can't was his only offer. They got lucky and found a diamond in the rough. This wasn't some feat of outrecruiting BCS schools for top talent.

Our poor run defense is a direct result of the lack of talent at the LB position.

I pulled the info from ESPN's stats page. I'll give it a second look. Edit: Here's where I saw the penalty numbers. Edit #2: Now that I think about it, maybe that's penalties for, not against? I would guess that a significant number of our penalty yards came from false starts called on our Center (seems like it happened at least twice per game) and from dumb personal fouls (remember the Miami game?)

Coach Bowden only had three weeks between when we hired him and signing day to recruit players. We'll get players. We'll also develop more of our current players.

Everything about this is stupid. From the player taking over 100 shot attempts, to the opposing team deciding to not triple-team him, to the player's teammates apparently agreeing to participate in this farce, to the other coach not playing to eat up the clock out of spite when it became apparent that his team was being used as fodder for the most gaudy of statistical records.

While the record is the same as last year, the football team has taken some significant steps forward this year in many areas, while also taking some steps backwards in others. Overall, the team improved their average point margin by 14.75 points per game. The offense was 12 points better and the defense about 3 points better. That's an enormous difference. You usually see a decent-sized bump in the win total with such an improvement, but we were coming from so deep a hole that that didn't happen. The most obvious changes came on offense. Here are how things break down compared to last year. I'm going to bold a few of the things that stood out to me: We improved from 277.8 yards per game to 427.2 We improved from 14.2 points per game to 26.1 The passing game was improved in almost every measurable category, except for INTs. We gave up 14 fewer sacks in 2012, despite over 200 more pass attempts. We gained exactly the same rushing yards as last season (1373), but did it using 48 fewer attempts. We actually averaged 1.3 fewer yards per pass than last season. We were significantly more penalized than last season. We went from 63 penalties for 523 yards to 196 penalties for 1552 yards. On third down, we went 50/180 for 27.8% in 2011. In 2012, we went 75/189 for 39.7%. On fourth downs conversion attempts, we went 11/24 for 45.8% in 2011. In 2012 we were 9/20 for 45%. On defense we had 5 INTs last year, compared to 2 in 2011. We improved from 10 sacks in 2011 to 16 in 2012. We tallied 31 passes defended this year compared to 25 in 2011 On special teams, we went 9/12 on FGs, compared to 11/13 in 2011. We attempted three fewer long FGs (40+ yards). We punted 16 fewer times this year (68 compared to 84), but gave up an average of 2.6 more yards per return. However, opponents tried to return the ball 24 times in 2012, compared to only 11 in 2011.

I think the coaches might be finished recruiting for the 2013 class. The focus now appears to be on offering players for 2014. It kind of makes sense. We have only 14 seniors graduating. We have seven or eight known verbal commitments and I think six or seven greyshirts who signed last year but aren't on the roster yet and will count against the 2013 scholarship total. Add in a few unannounced JUCO guys, and you have a complete, if small, recruiting class.

That's more like it!

Pohl needs to work on his timing on deep passes.

So much for any momentum.

Running between the tackles doesn't seem to be working.

The Lacrosse club likes to act like they're the greatest thing on campus. In reality, they have absolutely no ground to talk smack to anybody.

I was told the game is on Saturday?

From a pure RPI standpoint. No loss is good. But the result of an OK State game has something like 60x more of an impact on our RPI than the result of an NC State game. So an OK State win benefits us far more than an NC State win.

An OK State win today really helps us.

CCU beats Wake forest 2-1, as another seeded team falls.

St Louis becomes the first seeded team to get knocked out, losing to Fairleigh-Dickinson 2-1 in OT.

I guess the power went out at the stadium, except for the lights.

I think that the 9-man rotation in a given game would depend on the opponent and how we match up.

Looks like the crowd is very subdued thanks to the NCAA hawks policing the student section, just looking for an excuse to call a forfeit.

I wouldn't read too much into this. PSU is a very bad team. We'll know a lot more about how good we are when we play MTSU.