Junior quarterback Greg Ward, Jr. was part of the “good” for the Cougars on Saturday, as he combined for 400 total yards and three touchdowns scored. | Justin Tijerina/The Cougar
With the football team defeating the Tennessee Tech University Golden Eagles in their season opener Saturday night, it is a good opportunity to take a closer look at the high and low points from the game.
The good: Getting off on the right foot
Kicking off the Tom Herman-era of football in Houston with a win is a big deal for the team.
While the team was favored to win over underdog TTU, losing the contest would have been a rough way to start what fans hope to be a new age on the gridiron.
Last season, the team was also favored to win over the University of Texas at San Antonio, but ended up losing 27-7.
Good teams win the games that they are suppose to, and they won in convincing fashion this time around.
“It felt good,” senior safety Adrian McDonald said. “Last year we lost to an underdog, so just to go out with this one for my last year, it was big, and it was a great start for (coach Herman) too.”
With all of the excitement surrounding Herman coming to UH and all the changes he is bringing, it is easy to forget that he is a first-time head coach.
The players didn’t forget though, as they had plans to celebrate Herman’s first Collegiate win after the game.
“The W is good enough, but the team was nice enough to plan ahead of time and the captains presented me with a game ball inside the locker room,” Herman said. “That meant a lot to me. It will certainly go up on a shelf and be cherished for a long time.”
The bad: First game jitters
In a game where the Cougars won handily, it is hard to come up with too many things that went wrong, but there were certainly some areas that need to be cleaned up before the team heads to Louisville.
For starters, there were first-game nerves for several players that resulted in potential turnovers and could have been more costly, had the game been a tighter contest.
The offense put the ball on the ground five times, three were the product of bad snaps from a red-shirt freshman center, Colton Freeman, seeing his first collegiate action, and the other two were from veteran players.
“The W is good enough, but the team was nice enough to plan ahead of time and the captains presented me with a game ball inside the locker room…That meant a lot to me. It will certainly go up on a shelf and be cherished for a long time.”
– Tom Herman, head coach
While the botched snaps can be chalked up to rookie mistakes, the ones from senior running back Kenneth Farrow and junior receiver Demarcus Ayers are more concerning for Herman.
“The two fumbles were interesting to me, because we pride ourselves on being absolutely fanatical about the way that we teach and demand ball security,” Herman said. “If we need to have a whole period on how to carry the football next week, then we will.”
While the Cougars were able to recover four of the five fumbles themselves, ball protection will be a major area of concern during this week’s practices.
“That’s just something about the first game and being too excited. We weren’t as patient as we should have been,” junior quarterback Greg Ward, Jr. said. “If we correct those, there’s no telling what the score would have been.”
The ugly: Defensive lapses
For the most part, the defense played well against the Golden Eagles, coming up with two sacks, an interception and holding the TTU offense to just 10 points before replacing some of their starters in the fourth quarter.
Against the run, they held their opponent to a mere 0.9 yards per rush for 29 yards on 33 attempts, but were not so efficient against the pass.
While most of the night, UH was able to handle TTU quarterback Jared Davis and his receivers, there were “three gigantic plays” that have to be alarming for even the Cougar faithfuls.
On three different occasions, Davis was able to find his favorite target, TTU wide receiver Brock McCoin, for huge gains of 46, 71 and 77 yards.
McCoin found holes in the coverage and broke multiple tackles en route to a monster 264-yard, two-touchdown performance.
“For 59 snaps, I thought we played hard, (but) four or five cost us really big,” Herman said. “They played their butts off, but we obviously need to eliminate those four or five mental lapses that cost us those plays”
Though it was far from a flawless performance, the first game of the Herman-led Cougars had far more good than bad by the end, and was a good beginning to the new season.
If the Cougars can smooth out some of their issues before they hit the field against the 0-1 University of Louisville Cardinals this Saturday, they have a good shot to build on an impressive win.
Hopefully no one shows any clips from the latter part of the game because It’ll look like no one was in the stands to watch. Shameful.