LSU 27 Miami 3 Halftime
Joe Burrow only looks a hundred times better than Smith. And why not? after all Burrow has a whole 30 minutes experience with his new team, while Smith has had ONLY 15 games, that's just 900 minutes. Not a fair comparison...
33-17 Final. Miami did play a little better in the 2nd half. Diaz's defense didn't do much. LSU's OL was "player(s) of the game." And ultimately Burrow looked like what most LSU QBs do...average, at best. Which does make him 100X better than Smith though.
In other action NC A&T, which is a phone company, I think, beat East Carolina!
Joe Burrow was 11/24 for 140 yards and zero touchdowns. I realize Miami has a good defense but LSU has very talented skill players around Burrow. I was not impressed with him at all.
I thought Burrow made some great throws and looked very poised. He would have thrown for 350 against South AL. And Miami’s defense only has a pulse when they are forcing turnovers.
North Carolina A&T, an FCS MEAC team, beat East Carolina of the FBS AAC 28-23 on Sunday.
That's why I said he was 100X better than Smith. I didn't say he was a 1,000X better. (try to keep up)
But QBs need to do more than just throw the ball, they are also the leader of the offense, directly, and as everyone knows, also set the tone for the whole team. Burrow stepped right in and inspired confidence in the entire LSU team. Smith causes the opposite to happen.
And, did you see how Burrow was changing the play, resetting his blockers, using the snap count to get Miami to jump offsides. He was in command of the LSU offense. LSU WRs had 4 clear drops, and a couple more they should have caught. No, it was not a lights-out passing offense performance by Burrow and the LSU offense. It was mostly business as usual, a power running game, with a brand new QB who called that audible when he saw Miami stacking up for a safety blitz to his right, so he changed to a trap play to the left. The result was a TD run. Has Smith EVER done that? I don't recall seeing it.
Bottom line, this is your typical LSU team. Mostly a power running team, behind a very good OL, and a stout defense, loaded with NFL talent. And we have got to get a whole lot better in a matter of a couple of weeks, if we hope to do what Holtz cares about...."compete" with 'em.
But first, let's not pull an ECU and lose to an FCS team.
Weather for this Saturday? There's a tropical depression brewing in the Gulf and long-range forecasts put in squarely in North Louisiana for late in the week. Lots of rain, if it all bears out.
Hopefully, the weather will blow through on Thursday night and be well north by Saturday. From what I saw this morning anyway.
Random thoughts on Week 1
- Jim Harbaugh is what he is. ESPN’s Tom Luginbill put it best on his SiriusXM show on Sunday morning. He has a QB in Shea Patterson who can only succeed in a spread offense, which is not what Michigan is running. Harbaugh refuses to accept that fact and change. He is Les Miles 2.0.
- For all their problems over the past few years Rice and Charlotte might just be better than expected. Rice took a 27-17 lead over Houston in the 3rd quarter before falling to the Cougars. Charlotte took care of business in a win over FCS Fordham.
- The AAC might just be a top-heavy league this year, as UCF and Cincy look much stronger than the rest of that conference. ECU, SMU, Temple and Navy all looked terrible on Saturday. Tulsa struggled with Central Arkansas, and USF looked average at times against Elon.
- The Sun Belt got through the weekend. The league didn’t have any eye-opening wins, but it also didn’t have any brutal losses. ULM and Georgia State both survived upset bids by FCS opponents. And for all the good App State’s performance did for the Belt’s brand, that was somewhat offset by another Belt game going on at the same time. During highlights of South Carolina’s win over Coastal Carolina throughout the afternoon on both ABC and ESPN, former coach and analyst Mack Brown repeatedly called the game a glorified scrimmage.
- The MAC was the only G5 league besides the Belt to not have an FCS loss coming out of the weekend. But that didn’t come easy. Ohio needed 3 horrendous calls, including a phantom holding call, from a MAC officiating crew in the final 3 minutes of its game against Howard to stave off an upset. The Howard Bison didn’t have a single 3 and out all afternoon and ran up 645 yards of total offense. Way to protect your own MAC Nation!
- For all that talk about Chip Kelly’s hiring at UCLA he still faces the same problems Jim Mora faced the last few years at UCLA. The inability to bring in recruits, both entering freshman, as well as transfers, because of academic requirements, hasn’t gone away.
- New Orleans based talk show host Scott Alexander was correct in his assessment a week ago of LSU’s football team and the exaggeration of its problems by many in the media. The Tigers were an 11-2 football team last season with a head coach who decided to meddle with his offensive coordinator’s play calling. That cost the team 2 wins, including a bowl win over Notre Dame. Coming off an 11-win season with its best front 7 on defense in almost 10 years returning, the media outlook on LSU football would have been far more realistic heading into the season.
- Matt Canada appears to be a pretty good football coach. With all its been through over the past 3 months the fact he’s been able to keep the Maryland program together and playing winning football is eye opening.
Willie Taggert has been in over his head since he left USF IMO.