Utah State’s 20-point win over Colorado State on Saturday is as close as the Aggies have gotten to a complete game this season. It wasn’t all that close to a perfect game, but with so many poor starts, most resulting in losses, the fact the Aggies were able to rally quicker and eventually win by so many points, things are far more encouraging.
“You saw a more seasoned group. A group that stayed together,” Anderson said. “We still had to come from behind, but it’s a good football team. I felt like it was going to be a battle. I really did. I love the fact that as the game just continued, we got tougher. We got faster. More physical than they were.”
In last week’s Monday Cooldown, I put forth the argument that winning at UConn wasn’t necessarily a sign of good things to come for Utah State. The team managed to stumble its way to victory despite another horrid start and poor defense late. One of those two things was true this week and even this week’s awful start didn’t end up being nearly as catastrophic, primarily since at least one of USU’s units, its defense, performed at a high level even during the rough start.
Colorado State entered Saturday as the third-best passing offense in the country, boasting the top wide receiver (by yards per game) in Tory Horton along with one of the top receiving tight ends in Dallin Holker. Quarterback Brayden Fowler-Nicolosi had thrown for at least 300 yards in three straight games and posted 208 yards in a partial game played against Washington State. That elite passing offense was essentially shut down as Fowler-Nicolosi threw for just 225 yards on 57 pass attempts and had zero touchdowns and three interceptions.
That the Aggies were as great against the pass defense is, by some definitions, a minor miracle considering it ranked a below-average 90th in passing yards allowed per game, having given up 284.5 passing yards per game (excluding the Air Force game). Part of this has been youth in the secondary, part of it being a lack of a consistent pass rush. But against the Rams, Utah State kicked things up with great performances across the board from its defense.
“It wasn’t one thing,” Anderson said. “We did get pressure. We did cover well. We disguised looks. We changed up things for the quarterback. It takes all of those to be successful up against a team that is as talented as Colorado State is. Between protection and quarterback’s ability to throw the ball and the wide-outs and the tight end matchups that we had.”
Utah State consistently pressured Fowler-Nicolosi, forcing him to make rushed throws and leave the pocket. It didn’t result in an increased number of sacks (just one all night) but that’s just one possible great result to a drop-back for the defense. Incompletions and interceptions are two other results of pressure and the Aggies forced plenty of those. Fowler-Nicolosi, who completed more than 70 percent of his passes prior to Saturday, completed just 45.6 percent of his passes against USU and had the three aforementioned interceptions. Ike Larsen, who had two of those picks, gave due credit to the efforts of the defensive linemen.
“At the end of the day, our interceptions, 99 percent of them come from pressure from the d-line or linebacker,” Larsen said after the game Saturday. “With them pressuring and them doing their job, it helps us. It makes our jobs easier so when a quarterback throws a ball like that, it’s easy to get. Props to the d-line, Hale Motu’apuaka and everybody else, our linebackers, putting pressure to make that happen.”
Motu’apuaka actually had a hand in one of Larsen’s two interceptions and it displays how USU’s pressure forced Fowler-Nicolosi into bad throws. It was Larsen’s second pick of the day, coming in the mid-second quarter. Motu’apuaka gets a bit of delayed pressure up the middle and forces the QB off his spot which results in the desperate throw that Larsen reels in instead of Holker.
The pass rush is still very much a work in progress. It needs to generate more consistent pressure and get to their mark quicker. The Aggies have a young defensive line and it needs to continue development. But we’re seeing that development in real time.
“I just see a lot of us players getting better every week,” Motu’apuaka said. “We’re process-driven. And sometimes you look at it, we haven’t have the best games productivity-wise but I know that as each game goes on we’re getting better and better, both on the edge and the interior.”
The area where Utah State needed a real turnaround was on offense. Yet again it started slow, gaining just four net yards on the first three drives of the game. It took until the 6:54 mark of the first quarter for the Aggies to get just a first down. But after those fruitless opening drives, the Aggies went on to total a season-high 639 total yards.
Emblematic of the in-game improvement has to be Cooper Legas’ turnaround. He started the game off 2-for-9 passing for 21 yards and two interceptions — worse numbers (and with similar mistakes) than the ones that got him benched against Air Force — but he stuck with it. Looking specifically at those interceptions, both were essentially the same issue, one we’ve seen from Legas before. He underthrew his receivers a little too much on multiple occasions. The most egregious being his first pick thrown in the first quarter.
The second interception was much the same as the first although not quite as bad. He tried to lead Colby Bowman up the sideline but Dom Jones was close enough to Bowman, had a play on the ball, and was able to snag it out of the air.
Legas’ explanation for both of those picks was he tried to put the ball in spots where he didn’t think Colorado State could get them.
“Watching film, I expected there to be enough separation to just try to put it right on the receiver and so that’s what I was trying to do at the start,” Legas said. “The DBs made two really good plays that I haven’t seen them make all year on film. Two really good plays and I was the one who paid for it.”
That’s not the greatest excuse in the world (albeit not the worst either) seeing as he’s going up against FBS-caliber players who are probably going to be able to get to a ball put within their reach. Anderson wasn’t really having any of it either as he labeled these plays as “mistakes that you can’t make.” So what did Legas do after making these seemingly unforgivable errors? He drastically improved on the same exact looks he was bungling earlier. Here’s a throw to Micah Davis on a sideline go route that’s essentially the same as his previous interceptions. The difference is that he puts the ball on a dime in a place only Davis was ever going to get it.
Later on that same drive, Legas goes to his left and lets Jalen Royals make a play. Again, the ball is in a place where only a USU player can get it and it’s still a very catchable pass.
“I was really proud of how (Legas) responded,” Anderson said. “He got coached extremally hard on the sideline on mistakes that he made early and he came back to some of the exact same plays throughout the game and made big plays. So you’ve got to give him a lot of credit to sticking with it and not giving up on it.”
This turnaround presents a tough question that Anderson will need to answer for him to make his decision on whether Legas stays as starter or McCae Hillstead returns to the starting role: Has Legas truly shaken off his tendency to make these potentially game-changing errors? These issues with turnovers have cropped up in every start Legas has made this year against an FBS opponent. And yet, aside from those two bad passes, Legas has completed 30 of 40 passes for 591 yards — a whopping 75.0 completion percentage and 14.8 yards per attempt — for seven touchdowns (and no additional interceptions).
It’s hard to ignore those errors, and Anderson is far from doing so, but it’s also hard to ignore just how effective Legas has been aside from those errors. Even with the interceptions, Legas is putting up elite numbers his last two outings. Part of what Hillstead’s ascension to the starting role was meant to do was give the Aggies the best chance to win by taking full advantage of a talented wide receiver group and get the passing game going in a way it wasn’t against Iowa, Idaho State and the first quarter or so of the Air Force game. And as Anderson explained after the game, Legas has the ability to run this offense at a high level, even after making poor mistakes.
“I think the one thing that he’s doing really well right now is just continuing the process. When things don’t go well he doesn’t go in the tank on me. He takes a good butt-chewing and responds and then goes out and does what I’m asking him to do. I think we’ve got the people, if he can do that consistently. We’ve got the people to help him. He doesn’t have to carry the load.”
With Anderson all but saying Hillstead won’t play due to his lingering symptoms with his concussion sustained against UConn, Legas is going to have another big shot at taking back the starting job he lost. Last week he got away with making mistakes because he played three of the most dominant quarters of his life. This week he’ll have to play four quarters.
