I heavily bet the under in this game. I completely expected a low scoring game and I thought UCF would struggle early and over 4 quarters grind out a one score win against a more experienced FIU team. I was right if I was predicting FIU's night...
Studs:
Studs:
- Tre'quan Smith: Kid looks legit and is young and has great hands. Very impressive for his first collegiate game against decent corners.
- Jordan Akins: Looked like a MAN out there. Was working so well in the first half not sure why we didn't go back to him as much in the 2nd half. FIU couldn't cover him. I was screaming to keep feeding him. I think he only caught one or two balls in the 2nd half after about 8 or 9 in the first.
- Holman: Having a great QB fixes a lot of problems and he looked great tonight. He missed on a few high but the throws he hit were absolute darts. he also threw no picks and on some of the passes his arm was getting hit or he was about to get hit. He looked really good and I think we are going to need him and Smith and Akins to be on point if we are going to win conference this year. Oleary ground and pound doesn't look like it is going to work so far this year.
- Students: not the loudest they have been but they certainly came out, packed section tonight.
- Some Half Studs for Honorable Mention: Niles and Pittman looked good at times, also looked like they got a bit winded out there. For whatever reason we looked like we had more guys holding their hips on defense and I wish we could have gotten more consistent pressure from the edges. Shaquill Griffin: Thought he had a pretty good game. Great job on that downed punt and I think he lead the team in tackles. Defense gave up to many yards but in the end held them to 15 pts, cannot put this loss on them.
- Everyone Involved in the Run Game: The line couldn't open crap for holes, the running backs (especially Stanback) looked slow to the line and the play calls for vanilla runs with 8 in the box when we are lighting up the secondary was very frustrating. 30 runs for 46 yards against FIU, let that one settle in for a moment.
- Offense Line: I actually though, despite a few plays, the offense line did a pretty good job in pass protection, definitely improvement over last year but the run blocking was so bad.
- OLeary: I am a huge Oleary supporter, I love what he has done for us but I have to come down on him for two key plays that I know he made the call on. FIRST is passing up the relatively easy FG to go up by 8 points late in the game. I thought due to the score and the way the game was developing going up 8 was huge for momentum. I thought had we done that we would have almost guaranteed a win or OT and it was worth trying the kick. I was about 70/30 for kicking it. What made this call worse was we actually got the first down on a Holman sneak that they blew the whistle on for a review. At this point I am 100% to put the kicking unit out there especially if you are going to run the same damn sneak again. The whole play looked bad, you could see that coming from a mile away. SECOND the handling of the last drive. We went to the air in a hurry up style which was killing FIU, we looked awesome. Like an SRT Charger flying down 528 at 2am but then we get to the 25 and basically concede to kicking a 42 yard FG. Mind you this is our kicker FIRST collegiate fg and it is 42 our to WIN the game. Oleary called it a chip shot on the radio show not much further then a XP when it was DOUBLE and XP. We lost two yards on three awful effort runs and then another 5 on penalty for good measure and are at 47 to win the game. I had 0% confidence in that kick at that point. Had we just hit one more Smith curl or Akins comeback for another 8 - 12 yards we would have been sitting pretty. I was actually arguing that since it was our FG kickers first kick that we should have tried to score a TD or get absurdly close but I could have lived with settling for a 32 yarder but NOT 42.
- Not Calling Screen Plays; I thought when they were killing us off the right side of our OL that we needed desperately to get the rush off Justin and a screen pass would have been perfect there to take advantage of the over pursuit and instead we played right into their hands with the straight 7 step drop back and we almost turned the ball over in their territory.
- Karma: Us UCF fans know we almost always put ourselves in these last minute positions playing down to our opponents. I once likened it to an old person at a stale green light, we just have to make it interesting, ****ING DRIVE. In this game we had a few bad breaks that were tough to overcome, a bad no call on the obvious face mask that lead to a three and out, the no call on the safety, the review whistle after Holman made first down sneak, the tipped ball endzone TD by FIU, a few long 3rd down QB scrambles by FIU on broken plays, etc... If you play tight and the breaks do not go your way you lose late to teams you should beat by small margins. Think of how many of those we have won in the last few years (Temple, Memphis, UAB, etc...)