THE GOOD A win in an opener on the road against a ranked SEC opponent and a raucous crowd. Fournette sets a career high with 159 yards and 3 TD's. Les allowed him to make up for the game he lost last week with 28 carries and he is on everyone's Heisman list. 64% passing from Harris and no turnovers. He still needs to check out of some plays against stacked defenses, but he won on the road in the SEC. And he is still green, he will improve. The offensive line blocked very well in the run and the pass, but has to watch those penalties. Freshman Arden Key is the real deal and will likely start next week. Defense had three sacks. We won't face a better quarterback this year. Teheuma may be a starter soon at guard. The big freshman did well. The defense absolutely stuffed the run. State could do nothing on the ground. Linebackers looked very good. Two tight ends caught passes! Freshman Kevin Tolliver can also play this here game. THE BAD The defense still can't stop the two-minute drill against a passing quarterback. Prescott owned them in the second half. Les went to the run too early trying to keep the ball out of Prescott's hands. It worked and we won the time-of-possession, but it was too close a thing. Keehn did well keeping the ball out of the end zone, but punted short a bit too much. Harris was a little shaky on the zone reads and should have checked out of some of those runs into stacked boxes. He still needs the call from the sideline on every play. A couple of those penalties were picky calls but the others were pretty blatant. Play calling was unimaginative, but Fournette was hot, hot, hot and a young QB was making his second career start on the road. Better balance will come as he continues to improve. Both offense and defense seem to run out of gas late in the second half. THE UGLY 95 yards in penalties that brought back 4 big plays including two Dural TD's. Without the penalties, it would have been a first-half blowout. LSU has to fix this fast.
I agree with everything except the play calling should be under the ugly. Any opposing coach will be able to figure out exactly what we will run on every down. If we didn't have the best tailback in college football, LSU loses to a mediocre Mississippi State team. I saw a quarterback that has grown leaps and bounds from the guy we saw a year ago, but it won't matter if the coaching staff has zero trust in him.
Re: #2 of The Bad. It only worked because Dak missed his guy on the 2pt conversion attempt and because of a delay of game penalty.
Absolutely correct. It didn't work because it was a good plan. It worked because they couldn't catch or kick when it counted.
If we didn't have 95 yards in penalties, the game would have been a blowout win. The coaches didn't want this to turn into another Auburn game for Harris. They will open it up when they need to. With a tailback like Fournette, they would be fools not to utilize him. Charles Alexander would get 30 or 40 carries a game back in the day. Well, he's still a quarterback that has to have the check-offs called in from the sideline. He will get better at reading defenses, but until he does I understand the coaches taking some pressure off.
Ugly Les Miles went to the run too early. We won the time of possession 16/14 in the second half, but not by a significant margin. To drain the clock you need long (distance and more important, time) drives. I think our longest duration drive in the second half was 4 minutes. I like the idea, but it was poorly executed. If our QB is as bad as Miles seems to believe, we're going to have some hard games. With lack of depth on the DLine, QBs will have time to sit back and dink and dunk on us when we don't have the gas to get pressure.
See, I thought at the time, that it may be better for us, given CLM is our coach, for MSU to tie it with the two pt conversion so that Les would be forced to try to score, and we'd do so while running time off. I feared that if MSU missed the 2 pt conv. like they did, we'd try to protect the lead by running the ball endlessly, then DP would have a chance to get them in FG range and win it. That almost happened, and would have happened if they don't get a delay of game.
