This was a dominating performance from both Baylor lines.
It’s pretty easy to talk about the excellence of skill players, but let’s throw some appreciation to the big guys up front. On the defensive side, they helped shut down a guy who was gunning for Boise State’s single season rushing record. The offensive line paved the way for Terence Williams to have a 100 yard game.
KD Cannon was absolutely brilliant.
There’s not much to say about Cannon besides to give you his stats:
14 catches, 226 yards, 2 touchdowns.
That, my friends, is what we call dominant.
Pollack raised some questions about the run/pass option, a major component of Baylor’s offense.
Late in the first half, a Baylor offensive lineman was called for being too far downfield on a pass play. Pollack went in on it a tad, going so far as to ask how in the world you defend a play like that.
On a base level, this makes sense, but by definition, the offense is supposed to fool the defense. The run/pass option is simply getting this level of attention because it’s new, it hasn’t been perfectly figured out yet. The play-action was once something that defensive coordinators had to reckon with.
Football, like any other sport, evolves. It morphs into whatever will beat the opposition, and if the linemen stay close to the line of scrimmage, it’s not an illegal play, and certainly not something worth spending a lot of effort complaining about. What we should be complaining about is the prevalence of deep rub routes that have been popularized by Air Raid philosophies, because those are generally textbook examples of pass interference that rarely get called.
Motivation is a strange thing.
Most everyone came into this one counting Baylor out. They were roadkill already, left for dead by anyone with a brain in football.
This is the part where I pat myself on the back for a correct prediction, while also telling you that I predicted a Bear win in a close game, not a stomping like this one.
This motivation manifested itself on the defensive side of the ball, and it came in the form of a Baylor defense that played inspired for the first time in months. They were flying around and playing physical, it wasn’t so much an X’s and O’s thing as it was merely a motivation thing. Boise played like they had already won the game. Baylor didn’t. End of story.
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