Defense????????

[Gtj007]

Really. The defense gives up 3 TDs to IWU in just a quarter and a half????? They better get it figured out before conference.

[coachacola]

Agree. Good thing they have a week off before conference play.

[NorthoftheBorder]

The defense and the O-line has not impressed, although the defense has improved in the second half. Bevil just had a botch 3 and out drive.

[LU1991]

The defense is going to have a looooong season.

[Bearkat 41]

I was surprised when I saw the final score and looked at the box score. Not surprised at all that LU won obviously, I expected that. Just didn't think Incarnate Word would have gotten the yards and point they did.

Seriously though, a win is a win and everything else can be fixed/worked on as the season progresses.

[geezer]

I sure hope we learn to make simple adjustments. IW kicker never kicked the ball past the 30 on the kickoffs and we kept lining our deep returners at the ten. That is not good coaching. Also we had to call at least two timeouts because we couldn't get the right people on the field for punt returns. This team still needs to develop a lot of discipline and get their heads in the game.

[05BigRed]

D line and o line very disappointing! Secondary seems like they were standing around. O line can u really not open up a hole against a d2 school? Atleast the qbs did decent considering o line struggled. Bevil seems to have a lot more awareness besides that one botched INT. JJ has a ways to go. Don't blame coach starting Bevil. Just needs to stick with him now.

[BigRedTrack]

After tonight's defensive performance, we will have to score 60 points to win a conference game. Now I know why we were picked last, we belong there.

Special teams wasn't much better. Only punting & placekicking looked okay. We don't tackle well & we don't hit hard. South Alabama must have been nice to us to only score 30.

One other thing - we were thoroughly out coached - from preparation to game calling - by a Div 2 staff - totally unacceptable. We played so bad, you can not even gripe about the officiating.

[bigred360]

The run defense sucks. There is no way around it. I mean a DII school ran the ball down our throat and we couldn't do a thing about it.

I noticed a lot of blaming the O-line but IMHO a lot of that had to do with play calling. Jeremy Johnson played well, threw a TD and made some nice runs.

Looks like Bevil has learned to throw the ball away sometimes when nothing is there. He played well except the one bad pass that was intercepted.

The special teams are terrible. Kick coverage gives up WAY TOO MANY YARDS and the return team is a joke. If we played someone better we would have lost this game!!!

Now, please Coach Woodard take some of the blame and it's okay to say the team didn't play well. Don't tell me IWU was a great team that was motivated to beat us.

[Vroo]

The D was horrendous tonight. Don't know how we expect to win games playing like that. Bevil had a much better game. We didn't commit as many stupid penalties which was a nice improvement. But our D got gashed for big gains several times and if we would have played someone with even an average D we would have gotten our butts handed to us. It is a win but conference play is just around the corner and we are gonna have to tighten up or we're going to be the door mat for the entire southland.

[BigRed98]

How did Bevil look on anything other than the long ball?

[bigred360]

He made some nice passes to the freshman TE Payden McVeyon on check downs. He is going to be really good by the time he is a senior. Bevil also dumped the ball off to the RB's a couple times.

Bevil was 12-16 for 226 yards so he was not the problem tonight.

[LU1991]

Special teams didn't help the defense any. How many times are we going to let them receive the ball at the 40 yd line after kicking the ball out of bounds? The punts did improve towards the end of the game and we had a decent field goal but kick coverage stunk it up all night.

[coachacola]

IWU ran the first kickoff to LU's 45 yard line and that led to a score. Then in the 3rd LU fumbled a kickoff which led to a IWU touchdown. That's two big mistakes right there. IWU also had over 200 yards passing, completing 21 of 29, and they also rushed for over 100 yards. Maybe having co-defensive coordinators isn't such a great idea and they are missing Roger Hinshaw more than what they thought they would.

[Bruce]

An ugly, ugly game. Some of the fans I was sitting with were actually entertained by the game because of the back-and-forth action, but when they asked me why I was basically shaking my head the whole game, I replied with the fact that a team like this shouldn't be getting 35 yards of offense on us, much less 35 points. I consider any win by less than 5 touchdowns against this level of competition to be a disappointment if we think we're going to do anything in conference.

To see our defensive line dominated by this kind of team is incredibly disappointing. We had one sack. One sack. Against a team like this, I expect to see at least one guy in their backfield every single play--we should *never* be losing the LOS against this kind of team.

I thought the offense played reasonably well. Bevil looked pretty good, especially if I give him some credit for the fact that Jackson was out and Garrett got hurt. I love Johnson's athleticism, but he scares me when he throws the ball at this point--I thought that he threw two passes yesterday (for completions!) that even a marginal corner would have picked and taken to the house. But IW's CBs were junk and he got away with it. I have to go with Bevil at this point, but if the season goes in the tank, let's get Johnson his on-the-job training.

One thing I find perhaps the most disappointing is the special teams. Other than Stout's placekicking and the punting, I would grade them a "G" on a scale of A through F. How can we still be giving teams possession on the 40 yard line every time? How can we not adjust to their awful kicker who couldn't get the ball past the 20--yet our deep men are still standing on the 5 every time, allowing upmen to have to handle the kicks--or worse yet, letting the kickoff bounce and losing possession? Our kickoff teams were horrible last year, and they're not better this year. I thought Sanchez was kicking off--did he get injured (or am I wrong?). Stout's kickoffs just weren't good at all.

I won't hit the panic button. I thought this team accomplished everything that could have been expected last year for a first-year program, so there's no way I'm going to throw the coach under the bus because of last night. These last two games have been disappointing, but, in the end, the Coach knows that his performance is going to really be judged by what he does in conference--not what he does against Incarnate Word or even South Alabama. I'm hoping he's been running vanilla offenses and shuffling in players more than usual to keep people fresh and see what talent he's got. The real season starts in two weeks. What I have to say is that if we play the way we did last night, we won't win a conference game--I mean, even Nicholls hung around with ULL (who had two return touchdowns) last night, and I really felt that they and Northwestern were by far the two best opportunities we had to get Southland wins this year.