The Bobcat Nation

Finally a nice day weather wise-although we could all do without the wind. It seemed like every flag in and around the stadium was pointing a different direction.

Got to meet Kmax at the Bobcatnation tailgate. We're practically neighbors-we'll I have relatives that live all around him-sorry about that Kmax!

Great crowd-bigger than last week, with much fewer fans from the opponents side-though ISU did bring a lot of support with them-just not as many as NDSU the week before. Tailgating was huge today. I took a picture of it all from the top of the stands. There was quite a mass of humanity down there-I'll see if I can post the picture later this week.

The Cats got off to another great start. I thought we were going to walk away with this one. But ISU stuck to their plan-and got the ground game going, and capitalized on a slight Lulay overthrow for the INT.

The defense really stepped up in the fourth quarter. It helped that ISU had to throw the ball more-that's definitely not their forte this year. They were plagued my some catastrophic drops-we Bobcat fans can surely identify from seasons past.

I see our wide receivers lineup-Gatewood, Murray, Guinn, and Miller. I don't think MSU has ever had-and maybe never will again-have such an awesome amount of talent going out for a pass. So why are we doing all this dinking and dunking for 5,6,10 yards? Unleash the hounds Kramer-let's go deep. The one time we did on the first drive Gatewood had his man beat. We didn't see it again until the fourth quarter. I suppose we were trying to hold on to the lead and not gamble, and keep their offense off the field, and the wind was really tricky, but geez I know our receivers can take these guys anytime they want.

Too many critical penalties to bail out ISU. Got to clean that up.

Nick Marudas sure showed up in the second half. He was absolutely everywhere. On a couple of those sacks he looked like Mark Fellows from the '84 team!

Great game from Domineck. Way to not put it on the ground! Tell me I'm not the only one hold his/her breath everytime he carried it.

I'm glad we're done with ISU-that's a darn good team. Everybody in the league is going to have their hands full with the Bengals.

Attendance today 14,127! And a lot fewer no shows than last week. The place was pretty dang full!

The tailgate scene was impressive. I've been to a few nationwide and yours has the right feel to it. Too many have gotten too corporate, but MSU's is pretty down home and has a lot of character.
Cats were both fortunate to win and unfortunate to not have blown ISU out. Seems like they are right there, but penalties and brainfarts got in the way. Kwiatkowski deserves props for his halftime adjustments.

Good recap Belgrade.

It is becoming apparent that someone with a above average/good run offense and an average QB/WR combo is going to score on us. I'm becomming less and less of a fan of the react defense we seem to be playing. Sure we don't give up the "big" play, but we give up plenty of big plays in my mind. Letting them throw for a first down on 3rd and 10+ should just not happen. It happened today, and it happened last week vs NDSU. When we know they are going to pass, we drop 7-8 guys and only rush 3-4. We give the QB all day, and the WRs will eventually find a hole in the zone defense and the QB will hit him.

That being said, major props to our coaching staff for making the adjustments needed in the 2nd half. They only amassed 88 yards of total offense in the 2nd half. I really think we should have beaten this team by more than we did. They had a hard time stopping our offense. But stupid penalties let them hang around longer than they should have. We need to cut the personal fouls, regardless of whether or not we think it is the refs fault or our own. We shouldn't even be in a position for the ref to make a bad call.

Positives - Didn't lose the turnover battle (no fumbles!), receivers caught just about everything, Lulay had plenty of time, we ran JD over 20 times and he had 96 yards, we made adjustments in the 2nd half, and we won the special teams battle, made a few sacks for once

Negatives - Ran all over us in the first half (158 yards on the ground), secondary plays too passively, still no big threat from our running backs (though solid), stupid penalties

We haven't faced a pass-heavy team yet, and we could be seeing a lot of balls flying next week at Weber. They aren't a pass heavy team, but they threw quite well against a pretty good Griz secondary. I am more worried about this Weber game than I was a few weeks ago. We need to thwart the run right off the bad, get a big lead (like we did against ISU, they stuck to their gameplan, props to them) and force them out of their gameplan. I am a little concerned about our secondary, teams are able to throw right over the middle on us pretty easily (if their QB has plenty of time, which they do often).

Grades -
QB - A
RB - B+
OL - A
WR - A+

DL - C+
LB - B
CB - B-
S - B-

Special Teams - A- (because of kickoffs)

Overall about a B performance. We did some things well, we need improvements in other areas.

We progressed offensively since NDSU, but we seem to have taken a step backwards in our run defense, although the 2nd half was a different story.