Figuring out the impossible-to-figure-out Aggies – Cache Valley Daily

Utah State has chosen the most difficult route when it comes to figuring out exactly who they are. The Aggies have shown flashes of brilliance but also played some of the ugliest football seen since the forgettable 2020 season. Head coach Blake Anderson said it best as he described his team’s performance in its 45-38 loss to James Madison.

“We played some of the worst football I’ve seen played in quite a while followed up by some of the best football I’ve seen played in quite a while,” Anderson said.

The Aggies’ work this season evokes terms like “bipolar” and citations of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It all arises out of an inability to play well in the first quarter of games but then somehow go toe-to-toe with opponents of all levels, including AP Top 25 teams from Power Five conferences.

In the first quarters of games this year, Utah State has been outscored 60-7 and been shut out by FBS opponents 53-0. In the ensuing three quarters, the Aggies hold a 144-76 advantage, borderline double their opponents. Even factoring out the Idaho State game with its 71 post-first quarter points, the advantage is still a clear 73-48. The yardage numbers are just as insane and require a set of tables just to be able to organize them somewhat coherently.

USU 1st Q vs rest of game yards

Opponent 1st Q vs rest of game yards

Net 1st Q vs rest of game yards

There’s one recurring theme with these poor starts. Each game has brought its own flavor, but they share a commonality.

In each of the Iowa, Air Force and James Madison games, the Aggies have given up great field position to the opposing team early on. How they’ve done that has been a bit different each time. Against Iowa it was a long kick return that set the Hawkeyes up on the USU 39-yard line. At Air Force the Aggies gave away two turnovers, one of which set the Falcons up 11 yards from the goal. And against James Madison the Aggies were stuck inside their own 15 on their first two possessions due to poor kick returns with ensuing punts giving the Dukes the ball on the USU 39 and 36 yard lines for two of their early possessions (from which they got a combined 10 points).

Another bit of overlap between the three games, though not quite as ubiquitous, is big plays given up on these opening drives due to mistakes or even bad luck. Iowa got a wide-open 36-yard TD pass when a USU defender fell down and James Madison got a 54-yard touchdown on its first drive. Those plays certainly set a tone in those contests.

Why these things are happening so often, and typically only early on is a plain mystery. Anderson can’t seem to explain the issue.

“I don’t have an answer (right now),” Anderson said. “We’ve always scripted things relatively early in the week to try and give our guys familiarity with what we expect the first drive of the game to be. Taken the same approach in the past and have had seasons where we scored on the first drive 70 percent of the time. Defensively, obviously you’re having to react to what you’re going to see but I don’t know that we’ve been extremely surprised by what we’re seeing. We just haven’t executed to stop it very well.”

Anderson bringing up his previous success in starting games touches on a bit of a mystery with the Aggies’ slow starts in his time in Logan. It’s been a multi-season problem for the Aggies, starting with Anderson’s arrival. It would make sense to call into question Anderson given he’s the common denominator of all these teams (unless you want to toss all the blame on Michael Anyanwu, Hale Motu’apuaka and Stephen Kotsanlee, the only players to be starters on the team all three seasons of Anderson’s tenure) except for the fact that this isn’t a problem that followed Anderson to Logan. Looking back on his seven-year tenure at Arkansas State, slow starts were hardly a problem. If anything, a couple of times his team’s had the opposite problem, starting strong but finishing poorly.

Score Margin after 1st Quarter

For whatever reason, the things Anderson did in his prep worked at Arkansas State to get his teams ready for the game. At Utah State, things just aren’t working.

“We have been doing very similar things for years and had different results than what we’re getting. But we’re clearly not playing well, early,” Anderson said. “We’re putting our heads together as a staff about how to settle this group down and get better execution out of them early in the game so we can win.”

Looking specifically at what worked and didn’t with James Madison, when Anderson and the players were asked after the game what changed in a game where they were down 24 points at two separate moments but later tied the game, the answer seemed to be they just played better.

“Not a thing,” Anderson said when asked what adjustments he made. “We just really challenged them. We’re gonna go back out and call the same stuff we called in the first half and you’re going to decide to do it. You’re going to decide to step up and own the line of scrimmage and out-effort these dudes and wear them down, which is what we did.”

“Nothing schematically changed from the first half,” linebacker Anthony Switzer said. “We just simply executed better.”

For the offense, settling down may have been a big part of being able to execute better. True freshman quarterback McCae Hillstead, who made his first start Saturday, missed multiple early throws and the offensive line did not do him any favors in giving him chances to make throws. Once the Aggies strung some plays together, the offense largely performed well.

Keeping pressure off Hillstead was the key all night. With a clean pocket, he was on target with 60 percent of his passes for 295 yards with four touchdowns (and two picks, but they were the two that were largely not on Hillstead). When under pressure, which he was on 42.3 percent of his dropbacks, Hillstead completed just 47.1 percent of his passes for 104 yards and the one pick that was his most egregious mistake of the night.

The Aggies do seem to have a special offense in their hands if they can just unlock it with more execution and some better pass blocking. Hillstead has shown immense talent and a willingness to make every pass. His best pair of throws came in the third quarter on a drive that brought the score to 38-24.

This throw was ballsy. The window Hillstead wants to send the ball through is blocked by a defender, but Hillstead simply threw it up for Jalen Royals to make a play, which he did. It’s a massive throw on 3rd & 10 where a missed throw might have put the game a little too far out of reach, especially if JMU had gone down and scored after a theoretical stop.

Just one play later, Hillstead again displayed complete disrespect for defensive backs, this time by throwing into double coverage. The key here is that both DBs have their backs partially or completely turned away from Hillstead, so they were in no position to do anything when he slid the ball right past their heads and into the awaiting arms of Terrell Vaughn.

The running game also took off later in the contest. At halftime, Utah State’s kicker, Elliott Nimrod, was the leading rusher on the day with his 18-yard touchdown run on the fake field goal. But by the end of the night, Davon Booth had run for 103 yards, becoming the first player to run for 100 yards against James Madison in the Dukes’ last eight games.

Defensively it’s harder to identify an area they can fix that will unlock a super-talented group. Against James Madison that one thing was essentially “just do your assignment.” In the first half James Madison just kept taking advantage of a defense that gave them lanes to run and pass through, and in the second half, USU closed those lanes so the Dukes gained just 146 yards in the second half (76 of those yards on a single play) as opposed to 360 in the first two quarters.

Case in point, the Aggies gave up most of their yards early on basically three types of plays. The first was giving up cutback lanes. JMU’s running backs found ways to cut back against the grain and gain chunk yards.

This happened six times in the first half, though two of those plays were impacted by penalty. Of the four that didn’t see flags the play went for at least 12 yards every time with a total of 59 (the two plays that were affected by penalties were a 24-yard run called back for an offensive facemask penalty and a 0-yard gain that had 15 yards added on a defensive facemask call).

The other two types of plays were both game-planned by James Madison to take advantage of the same thing with Utah State’s defense. One was to run sideline hitch routes, the other was to simply pass it short to a running back or tight end. The aim was to exploit Utah State’s fear of giving up the deep pass — a justified fear given the Aggies gave up multiple deep pass touchdowns in this game. But with how Utah State was playing in the secondary much of the game, it meant short passes were WIDE open with waaayyy too much room to run afterward.

You can even see Utah State trying to hide this type of coverage as Avante Dickerson shows more of a press man look and sprints back just as the ball is snapped, but McCloud wasn’t fooled and easily reads the play for what it is and finds his open man.

Between just the swing pass and hitch route plays, McCloud completed 13 of 14 passes for 175 yards and a touchdown in the first half. On all other passes he was 5 of 9 for 89 yards, two touchdowns and on interception (with an added reminder that 54 yards and one of those touchdowns came on a single play so excluding that he completed half of his passes with an average of 4.4 yards per attempt).

There wasn’t really an adjustment to any of this in the second half, aside from simply playing up on the wide receivers a little more often and defenders simply doing their job on contain a little more often. When the Aggies were in the right position, they made plays. They forced four turnovers in the second half, five in the game overall. Corners blanketed receivers on several plays, deflecting otherwise on-target passes. Edge rushers contained. The defensive line brought pressure and created plays for loss (and the aforementioned turnovers). When they’re in position, Utah State can play with anyone on its schedule. It’s just that this season, being in the right place seems to be a major problem.

“We’ve got 10 guys doing the right thing and one guy not doing the right thing,” Switzer said. “But one guy not doing the right thing in football, it can mess up the big picture. As far as other sports, somebody can make a play by themselves. But in this, you’ve got to have all 11 guys.”

At this point, we know the Utah State can be good. The Aggies themselves know that. Will they? That’s the golden question. The swing in possibilities is legitimately between 1-11 and 9-3 at this point. Or in Anderson’s words:

“There’s not a team on our schedule that we can’t beat and there’s not a team on our schedule that can’t beat us.”