Week 5 Re-Cap

Well another week has gone by.  And there are some truths this week out of college football.  Truth one, Michigan had a bye week. Truth two, I wish the NHL wasn't locked out. 

-I watched the Penn State game at a Penn State bar here.  The Penn State defense looks solid enough.  They had no problem locking down Nathan Scheelhaase. Mike Mauti is the best defender in the B1G. He is a game changing line backer, able to stop the run, track down scrambling quarterbacks, and cover receivers.  Along with that, Allen Robinson is the type of receiver every B1G team wishes they had.  He can get up and grab the ball in the air - once he has it, Robinson has no problem making defenders miss in the open.  I have watched a lot of Penn State this year they look solid. 

-For the Wisconsin/Nebraska game, I was not really sure what to make of that.  Montee Ball had 90 yards and 3 touchdowns but it took 32 carries to achieve that.  The defense as a whole for Wisconsin looked really poor.  Does that mean that the Nebraska offense is really potent?  They are no slouches that's for sure.  Martinez out rushed Ball and Burkhead had 86 yards on only 18 carries.

-Finally, MSU vs. OSU.  There were some positives to take away from this game.  The first is that the defense played really, they got some takeaways from a very good team.  They were hold Ohio State to long spurts with little offense.  The passing game made some strides as well.  Lippett did not look totally lost, Maxwell did not turn the ball over and Kings could be developing into a stud receiver. Of course there were some real negatives as well.  The running game was non existent.  With that, the offensive line looks really weak as well.  Travis Jackson broke his leg and will miss the remaining of the season.   Coupled with the fact that Fou Fonoti is also gone for what should be most or all of the year and suddenly the offensive line is our weakest part of the team. With the pass game making some strides, they also continued to drop really easy passes.  Fowler is not getting it done, the drops appear to be in his head.

I was a bit disappointed that we lost this game.  There was no reason to lose it. As my preview pinted out, we just need to score points. 16 wont win you a lot of games.  Of course there was also the Miller fumble that looked like a sure fumble recovery to touchdown. Instead of getting 7 points, we settled for 3.  What a game changer that was.

I know a lot of people think my previous post was over reacting but when you take our season so far, you can't really count any game at this point as a sure win.  Even if our two losses were against ranked teams.  More on that tomorrow.