Tech may have led a disappointing effort Saturday in Mobile, but the Bulldog's next opponent suffered quite a bit more over Labor Day Weekend. Three nights ago, Southern was on the wrong side of a 55-7 beatdown by TCU. Granted, Southern was a middle of the pack FCS school competing against the sixteenth ranked team in FBS. So a 48 point Horned Frog victory was not exactly the most surprising thing to happen in the first full week of college football.
In search for SU's "Secret Weapon", first we're going to look at the running game. But at a glance, it doesn't look good. It doesn't help that the Jaguars seem to take this whole "team sport" thing a bit too literally, as nine Jaguars registered a rushing attempt Saturday night. You'd think that one would stand out, but no player had more than seven attempts or 25 yards on the ground.
John Lampley (the QB) had the Jaguar's longest rush of the night, a 16 yarder in the second quarter, but finished the night with a total of 15 yards on the ground. Yeah, it was that kind of night for the Jaguars.
Passing was the opposite problem for SU: only three receivers got a pass. But, you know, to be fair, there were only five completions in the entire game.
Yeah. Five.
Lampley did also throw two interceptions, so 28.6% of the time a pass landed in a player's hands, those hands belonged to a member of the wrong team.
On defense, things didn't look much better. Which I guess should be expected when a team gives up 55. The team did not register a single sack. There were only two tackles for loss in the entire game.
Those are both things good defenses do.
The bad play from the entire team makes finding this diamond in the rough pretty difficult. I'd normally look to last year's stats, but ESPN only kept track of Southern's kicking stats over the years for some reason, and Southern's own official stats page hasn't been updated since two weeks into last season.
Using the few games of stats we do have, only a few players stand out on this Jaguar roster, and all of them on defense. Demario Houston led the team in tackles Saturday night, but didn't look too impressive in the six games last season I can find stats for him. Timothy Thompson registered two pass deflections in the season opener (as many as Tech as a team did against South Alabama), but the only other game (that stats were available for) where he made a meaningful contribution was in 2016 against ULM.
Montavius Gaines, on the other hand, did make an impact last year. In just the five games I could find stats for, Gaines recorded five tackles and two interceptions. In 2016, Gaines logged six tackles and an interception in three games.
Saturday night, Gaines added two more tackles to his career stat line.
Montavius entered the college landscape as a relative unknown out of Pembroke, Georgia, but he has definitely made his mark in Baton Rouge.
With only one game in the books for the 2018 Jaguars, it's still hard to tell who will make the biggest contributions this season. Southern's secret weapon may simply not hit its target this week. On the other hand, maybe we'll see something like this:
Nathan is also a contributor to gtpdd.dog, a lighthearted Louisiana Tech blog. Be sure to follow @gotechplsdntdie on Twitter.
