The Monday After: A major red flag

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In two years as South Dakota State head coach, Jimmy Rogers lost three games by a combined 35 points. The bulk of that came in last year’s season opener, when the FCS Jackrabbits traveled to Oklahoma State and lost by 24.

On Saturday, Rogers got on a plane back to Pullman wearing a 49-point beatdown at the hands of … North Texas?

Not Washington, Mississippi, or Virginia – all of whom are coming up on the schedule.

North.

Texas.

One of the reasons why I like writing this for Mondays is that it gives me a little bit of time and space away from the emotion of gameday to reflect on the Cougs’ performance. In the wake of losses, I often find myself landing in a more optimistic place than I was in the immediate aftermath.

I can’t say that this time. In fact, the more I think about Saturday, the more concerned I become.

The catalyst for the result was, without a doubt, the six first half turnovers – three interceptions, two fumbles, and one blocked punt where the result was functionally akin to an intercepted pass. If you’ve been reading me for any length of time, you know how I feel about turnovers and their somewhat random nature. While turnovers are indeed the direct result of mistakes by the offense, not every ball that gets put on the ground ends up in the hands of the other team, not every ball that could be intercepted is actually caught by a defender, and not every bad snap on a punt leads to a block. On Saturday, every mistake ended with the bad outcome. That’s unlucky. 

As a result, North Texas had starting field position at WSU’s 30-yard line or better five – FIVE!!! – times. All in the first half! That was always going to end very badly.

Typically, I’d walk away from such a game believing the Cougs were both bad and unfortunate, that if the game was played 50 times, this sort of thing happens once, and because of that, better days are inevitably ahead. Flush it and move on.

I’m having a hard time flushing this one, though.

Rogers is clearly a defense-forward coach, preaching toughness and game management as cornerstones to his philosophy. When the cornerstones of your philosophy are literally nowhere to be seen in a game, that’s a massive red flag. 

The team found itself in a vicious cycle where each mistake begat another, more egregious mistake. Rogers chose Jaxon Potter as his starting QB precisely because he took care of the ball the best and sustained the fewest negative plays while stretching the field with his arm. All of that was absent, leading to his benching.

The defense, meanwhile, became more and more porous with each successive drive. Is there a unit in the country that could survive such terrible field position without giving up a bunch of points? Probably not. But a tough team would at least make the opponent work for it, and WSU did not: On those five drives, the Mean Green needed just 13 plays to score five touchdowns. Only one of those five short-field drives required more than three plays to find the end zone.

The entire team was shook. And Rogers’ inability to both prepare his team for this game and right the ship while the team was spiraling is the sort of thing that makes me doubt the entire enterprise after just this one result.

It’s obviously not uncommon for teams to struggle during coaching transitions, but in this transfer portal era, some of that should be mitigated. Rogers brought a whole bunch of players from South Dakota State – particularly on defense. Look at all these experienced transfers on the two deep, the majority of whom came from SDSU:

This strategy was always going to put us in a questionable spot athletically, but the experience level of these players ostensibly should have raised the floor with execution and discipline. It looked that way through the first two games, but on Saturday, the Cougs were both athletically outmatched – again, by NORTH TEXAS – and clueless. 

We went down this road last men’s basketball season with a coach stepping up in competition and bringing a whole bunch of his guys with him, have it look pretty good early on, only to have it blow up in our faces. The jury is obviously still out on that one, just as it is here. But the college sports landscape is littered with coaches who were extremely successful at one level and then quite unsuccessful at a different, higher level. There are myriad reasons for that, but the bottom line is that higher levels require a different mix of talent and coaching, and not everyone is able to adapt to that.

However: One would at least expect – at a bare minimum – that all the guys the coach brought with him would do the things they’re supposed to be able to do, even with whatever physical limitations they have. When things got tough on Saturday, they could not clear the lowest of bars.

The Cougs could not maintain their composure and could not avoid getting obliterated by a team in the American Athletic Conference. I know we are in a different reality now than we were two years ago, but we should not be in a “seven touchdowns worse than an AAC team” reality under any circumstances.

Perhaps this will prove to be a one-off. Maybe this ends up being the flukiest of flukes that we’re able to hand wave away by the end of the season.

I’m skeptical. And with Washington and the Apple Cup looming, it could hardly have come at a worse time.