Game recap of the short and not-so-sweet variety
Posted by kj on Sunday, October 19th, 2008
In retrospect, we were sandbagged.
We were told we could play toe to toe with the preseason conference favorite because quarterback play was holding back their offense. Of course, the quarterback in question was the most heavily recruited freshman college quarterback to come along in this century. And he showed us why. When Terrell Pryor is running with the ball, it looks like he’s playing on a different VCR tape speed than everyone around him.
The 5 MSU turnovers obviously made the loss even uglier than it otherwise might have been. Take a couple of those away and give us one or two recoveries of Ohio State’s three fumbles and maybe the final score is more respectable. Nevertheless, we were clearly beaten by a better team.
As evidence, here are the first down stats in the first half, when the game somewhat resembled a real football game:
- MSU ran on 5 first down plays and passed on 5 first down plays.
- The 5 rushing attempts totaled 10 yards (2.0 yards/rush).
- The 5 passing attempts resulted in two completions for 22 yards and one interception (40.0% completion percentage; 4.4 yards/attempt).
The best two first down plays in the first half occurred consecutively: a 14-yard pass completion to Keshawn Martin followed by a 5-yard run by Javon Ringer. The next play in that sequence ended with a fumble by Martin when he didn’t switch the ball to his outside arm running toward the sideline.
I ended up only seeing bits and pieces of the second half, so I can’t comment intelligently on Kirk Cousins’ play in relief of Brian Hoyer. I’ll take Witless Chum’s word for it:
Cousins looked sharper throwing the ball than I thought, but the blitz and fumble play showed why he hasn’t moved ahead of Hoyer. Even if Cousins is as good of a passer as he looked yesterday, the more situational awareness parts of QBing look like they aren’t quite there yet. He’ll certainly be a good QB to have around going forward.
How worried are people about Hoyer going forward? He followed up his nearly flawless performance against Northwestern with a clunker of a stat line 5-13-27-1. (The “27″ is passing yards, just in case that didn’t immediately process as a passing stat line.)
The key, of course, is not allowing this loss to create a downward spiral to finish the season. Again, we turn to the comments section, courtesy of DP99:
Nothing really changes. MSU is still on the inside track for a 9-3 finish, they are just going to have to keep playing hard to get it. Last year this team showed it could get itself together to finish the season after multiple tough losses, so there you go. If they survive the next three weeks, and PSU does a job on OSU, who knows, we’ll light the candle of hope one more time.
Having now allowed my readers to supply a good portion of this game recap, I’ll let you all of you finish it off. How confident are you in Mark Dantonio’s ability to get this team to bounce back emotionally, construct a solid game plan against an erratic Michigan team, and get the win in hostile territory on Saturday?
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Filed in game recap4 responses so far
4 Responses to “Game recap of the short and not-so-sweet variety”
Kurton 19 Oct 2008 at 11:21 pm 1I really liked how accurate Cousins threw and thought to myself “Why isn’t this guy starting above Hoyer?” but like Witless wrote, we soon found out why. I am not all that confident in Hoyer, either.
I’d like to say Im completely confident that Dantonio will keep this team from the typical Spartan slide of letting a bad loss stay around and create another bad loss. But he still has a lot of John L’s recruits hanging around so I don’t know. I trust Dantonio. This year might be different, they don’t seem to be the same typical Spartan teams of the past. But I’m taking a wait-and-see approach.
Stukaon 20 Oct 2008 at 12:43 am 2The Spartans finished strong with two conference wins to end the season under Dantonio last year – a solid beatdown of Purdue and a comeback win against PSU.
I am very confident in Dantonio’s ability to get this team to bounce back emotionally. MSU was down 14-3 at the half to a much better UM team last year, and they rebounded to score 21 straight.
Even in this game against OSU, I don’t think the team was emotionally out of it until the Cousins fumble killed our drive and made it a 28 point lead again. For my sanity, I don’t want to believe that a similar combination of dominant performance by the opponent and back-breaking turnovers can happen again this week.
Go State. Beat Michigan.
witless chumon 20 Oct 2008 at 6:58 am 3I’m very confident. I hear Dantonio makes a bit of a big deal of this Michigan game of which you speak.
Even if it wasn’t Michigan, I don’t think those guys are going to be happy about being blown out. I think the coaches will be able to give them a convienent target. I don’t think there’s much danger of them coming out flat after a big loss with this opponent. The danger would be underestimating the Wolvies.
This loss was certainly bad and on a national stage, too, but MSU has played like a good team in the previous games. I’m sure David Mayo has already written his same old Spartans column and while it’s true Dantonio and the staff have never had to handle a blowout loss, I’m not worried about any strange collapses. The team’s got every chance to win the next three and go into Penn State with maybe even a chance to play for a share of the conference.
Rewertson 20 Oct 2008 at 9:57 am 4I would be much more worried if MSU had outplayed OSU the entire game and still found a way to lose. If that was the case the players would be thinking about every little thing they could have done different in order to get a W.
With the way the game turned out, there should not be any player on MSU thinking, “If I would have done this one thing different on that one play, we would have won this game.” Because noone can be thinking this, us fans are the only people still thinking about this game. MSU cares about UofM as much as conference titles IMHO.
Coach D will have his team fired up and ready to go. I expect the most intense week of practice since Coach D arrived in January 2007.
The only concern I have is with UofM’s d-line. If MSU’s O-line does not establish dominance early on then Michigan’s front four will cause a lot of problems for the running game. This will be a game of lots of RB and WR screens, something Toledo showed us Michigan is very susceptible to.
Is it Saturday yet?