Bethune-Cookman Preview

This is the home opener for the CANES. The opponent is a familiar one in Bethune-Cookman. When they last met, the CANES had to work hard for a 45-14 victory over the Wildcats last year at Sun Life Stadium. 

Looking at Bethune-Cookman, this is a team that doesn't give up. They have a pretty good QB in Jackie Wilson from Fort Lauderdale. However, the Wildcats have had slow starts to their first two games, so hopefully, that trend will continue and the CANES start out much faster than they have the first two games, both times falling behind 14-0. 

When you look at last year's game, we started slowly in the 1st half, leading just 14-7, but pulled away in the 2nd half with 42 unanswered points to win comfortably. We know tomorrow, we can't have that happen again. The Defense must come out fast and make a statement for 4 quarters and get the taste of the loss in Manhattan, KS out of their mouths. The D cannot allow 422 yards like it did last year against the Wildcats, because that's going to be really asking for trouble. They held the ball for just about 39 minutes (38:59 to be exact). We have got to win the time of possession battle and we must win the turnover battle. 

We need a big game out of Duke, but I need to see a bigger game from the Defense tomorrow. I think we'll see that. This unit has to come out and make a statement in this game. 

In the end, I think we'll get big games from Duke, the D and on Special Teams. 

Prediction: CANES 42 Bethune-Cookman 14

Report Card for game @K-State

What could you say about yesterday? We were terrible in all three phases. 

Once again we fell behind 14-0, but this time, there would be no comeback. A couple of plays really turned the mo against us. 

At 7-0 in the 1st and on 3rd and 1, Eduardo gets the 1st down, but loses the ball and Brown recovers the fumble for them. and five plays later, its 14-0 K-State. 14 point swing on that fumble. Later at 17-3, first play of our next drive, Duke drops a sure TD pass that would have cut the K-State to 7 at 17-10. Instead, its a 3 and out series, that's another 14 point swing of momentum in their favor, because instead of 17-10, its 24-3 K-State. The one that really told how timid we were yesterday was the last drive at the end of the 1st half. At 24-3 down, we have a chance to get momentum our way with 7, instead we settle for 3 and instead of 24-10 down, we're down 24-6. Coming out of the locker room, we couldn't seize the mo and we had to punt, and K-State scores on that drive, 31-6, game over. They would add 21 more after that in the 4th. 

Once again yesterday, I didn't like the fact that we didn't have a pass rush at all, it was non-existent. I also didn't like the fact that we had 4 penalties for 30 yards, while K-State had 2 penalties for 12 yards. 

Time for the report card:

Offense: D- The reason for that is that of the four penalties yesterday, 3 were on the offense. We could not get the running game going. The sobering numbers: 29 carries, 40 yards (1.4 ypc). We had just 262 total offense yesterday, after having 415 last week up in BC. They handcuffed Duke by holding him to just 19 yards in just 6 carries. Credit K-State's D for doing a great job keying on Duke. Mike James wasn't much better either. Just 27 yards on 9 carries. The O-Line allowed Morris to be sacked 5 times, and fumbles twice, losing the ball both times. The one bright spot here was Clive Walford having 61 yards on 3 receptions, and 1 TD (near the end when K-State had the game well in hand). Very poor game all-around yesterday.

Defense: F  Once again, we allowed too many big plays and the biggest concern to me was no pass rush. We allow Colin Klein to have a big game. 71 yards rushing and 3 TDs. The pass defense was a little better, allowing just 210 yards passing, however, we allowed 498 yards total offense, and of those yards, 288 of those were on the ground, which included 106 yards by John Hubert alone. This unit could not get off the field on 3rd downs. When we needed a stop, it wasn't there. They were 72% on 3rd down conversions (8-11), and all of those were with less than 5 yards to go, the 3rd downs were short yardage situations. -2 in turnover margin will not win you games, and especially against a very good team like Kansas State is. 

Special Teams: D  Jake had two field goals. However, the return game was non-existent. The fact that K-State didn't punt until the near the end of the game was very disheartening. The bright spot is that Duke had 141 yards in Kick returns on 5 touches. When you give a team like K-State short fields to work with, they take advantage, especially when you have a running game like they do. They started drives from an average of their own 41, while we started our drives from an average of our own 28. That's not going to get it done. 

Its time to forget this game, but learn from it and fix the mistakes we made for next game on Saturday vs Bethune-Cookman in the home opener. GO CANES!