After Utah State’s 32-point loss at Boise State on Saturday, the postgame press conference featuring interim head coach Nate Dreiling, quarterback Spencer Petras and safety Ike Larsen was a mix of trying to identify why the team is where it is while also trying their best to put on a brave face for the media.
The contrast between Petras and Larsen’s comments was pretty apparent, as the offense took one of its biggest steps up on the season with stars performing at the highest level they have all season compared to a defense that allowed the most points any Aggie defense has yielded since 2008.
Petras fielded questions about his own improvement and the offense as a whole.
“We made some improvements just from the last time we were out. The temple game, where I felt like, starting with me, there was just too many miscommunications and just issues,” Petras said. “Some of it just kind of comes with the time I had missed. But some of it, we had to really look at what was going wrong. And I think we improved on a lot of those things.”
Larsen had to play defense yet again for his guys and bolster the perception of the struggling unit, even saying the numerous questions asking about poor performance were “confusing” to him because he feels the defense is in a good spot.
“We’ve gotten better at a lot of spots. Obviously we’re not where we want to be,” Larsen said. “But we’re playing good. Like it comes down to the little things. Like I say, we eliminate explosive plays in the (Boise State) game. The game is different. Every game is different. USC is different. Temple is different.”
Dreiling was as frank as coach speak would allow.
“We need to make sure we come out executing better, especially after a bye week,” Dreiling said. “Defensively we’re just we’re just way too far behind. Our margin for errors is too small right now and we have got some making up to do.”
So, what the heck is with this team? Well, let’s start with the offense to be a little more positive. Petras had easily his best game of the year, and probably the best of his career. That’s easy to say on a surface level because he set or tied career highs in basically everything (a refresher, those totals were a 27 of 41 completion rate, 372 yards and three touchdowns to no interceptions; Petras had never thrown for more than 265 yards before coming to USU and had also only thrown multiple touchdowns with no interceptions three times) but it goes beyond that. The offense worked so much better with him throwing the ball than it had all season. And it was far more consistent, too.
Medium and deep-range passing was a significant problem for Petras in his first couple of appearances. Between his Robert Morris and Temple performances, Petras had an NFL passer rating of 33.1 on attempts where the ball travelled that went at least 10 yards through the air beyond the line of scrimmage (for reference, if you throw a single incomplete pass your passer rating is 39.6). Being new to the offense this year combined with not having played a game since the 2022 calendar year were already working against Petras. Then he missed two-and-a-half games due to injury early in the season. That seemed to snowball into issues that showed up in his tape at the start of the year.
But Petras began to shake off the cobwebs against the Broncos. He completed 6 of 12 passes that went 10+ yards downfield. His passer rating for those 12 attempts was 135.4. Included in that was a pass that was easily one of his best of the year, his 59-yard TD throw to Jalen Royals. It not only displayed accuracy and a willingness to throw deep, but also a great combination of play-calling and making the perfect read.
For context, in the following clip, it’s 3rd & 1 (in the video clip, the score-bug glitched to say 1st & 32) with Rahsul Faison having just run for eight yards on 2nd & 9. Keep that in mind.
The defense was very likely expecting another run and Kyle Cefalo dialed up a play-action. Boise’s corners were also probably anticipating short routes. You can see that Broncos safety Ty Benefield, the man who was tasked with taking on Royals, may have been lined up seven yards back, but he didn’t backpedal to prepare to chase him. Instead he tried to jam Royals expecting to be fighting for leverage against a hitch or other short route. Instead, Royals bursts through and goes deep. Compounding this issue for BSU was how hard both safeties bit on the play-action. That meant four DBs were covering Kyrese White with only Benefield chasing the increasingly distant heels of Royals. The throw was dang near flawless, Royals caught it in stride and he trotted into the end zone.
After the game, Petras talked about being more on the same page with these kind of passes, especially how that 59-yarder opened things up for him.
“It’s of one of those things I was talking about from the temple game where I was just on — it was my own fault — but on a different page from a lot of our receivers on some of our vertical passing game,” Petras said. “It was my fault, it’s not theirs at all. And I think that (the 59-yard touchdown pass) was a confidence builder. Like it finally clicked just for me personally on our system.”
An interesting note to that first long TD to Royals is that it was the first deep pass attempt of the game for Petras. He’d thrown 11 passes prior to that with half of them targeting receivers behind the line of scrimmage. What makes that interesting is that if you look at the game as a whole, Petras’ trends of distribution based off distance the ball is thrown, it fell very much in line with the rest of the season where he threw about 12 percent of his passes 20-plus yards downfield and 21 percent between 10-19 yards (on Saturday those percentages were 10.5 and 21.1, respectively). But excluding the first quarter that distribution is way off, much more skewed toward more aggressive passing.
Petras threw 10 of his 11 first-quarter throws within seven yards of the line of scrimmage, or 90.9 percent. That percentage dropped to 59.3 the rest of the game. The effect of this on Petras and the offense as a whole was drastic. Petras himself went from averaging 2.5 yards per attempt in the first quarter to 11.5 the rest of the way. The offense similarly saw a massive increase, jumping from 3.2 yards per play on the first four drives to 7.8 in the rest of the game (and going from scoring three points in the first quarter to 27 in the final three).
So that’s a lot of numbers condensed into a single paragraph, but the point of all that is to show just how more efficient the offense because with Petras not only throwing the ball deeper and more often, when he finally got out of his own way, the Aggies were able to move the ball well. Was it perfect? No. Two drives ended far too soon, one on a fumble and another one on downs, both had a lot of promise as those two drives combined to gain 81 net yards before shorting out.
The other thing that really needs to be pointed out with this offense is what the O-line is doing. Boise State had terrorized every team’s linemen and totaled 20 sacks on the season. But Petras went down just once all game. Here’s the clip, and as you’ll see (and by his own admission) the sack was Petras’ fault. He hesitated on a throw that was open, and he should’ve thrown it, and then he walks right into a lineman who had been well contained by Wyatt Bowles and Cole Motes.
That was the first play of the game on offense. And despite the Aggies getting more aggressive and being in obvious passing situations and having to pass the ball more and more, Petras was sacked zero times in the rest of the 59:50 of the game. The only other times defenses impacted his throw directly was two times he was hit as he threw in his remaining 43 dropbacks for the game. Those are stats that deserve some note, especially against a Broncos defense that had averaged 5.0 sacks per game with zero games having less than four sacks before Saturday. Simply remarkable.
Now let’s delve into the defense and look at some key numbers. One of the bigger problems in the loss against Boise State was how efficiently the Broncos moved the ball through the air. Maddux Madsen had been OK prior to Saturday but not stellar. He’d completed 29 of 61 passes for 332 yards in the two games against Oregon and Washington State.
Put simply, Boise State was much more willing to rely on the legs of Jeanty than the arm of Madsen.
Against Utah State, they were almost more willing to throw than to run.
Sure, Jeanty ran for 186 yards in one half of play, but 138 of those yards were on two carries. The remaining 11 went for just 48, a much more human 4.4 yards per carry. The Aggies (kind of, sort of, if you squint a bit and ignore two carries) had a handle on Jeanty in the run game. Madsen threw the ball 25 times, which when accounting for the fact he didn’t play most of the second half, was his second-highest work load of the season behind the 40 attempts he had in the team’s loss to Oregon. Madsen completed 21 of those passes to set what is his best single-game completion percentage (excluding a game where he only attempted three passes) and had his first three touchdown game against an FBS team to pair with 256 yards, his third-best career total (again, a reminder that he didn’t play about one-third of the game and still put up that total).
Dreiling chalked up the weakness in the pass game to selling out on the run.
“Our game plan was very simple, make sure (Jeanty) doesn’t beat us,” Dreiling said. “If they wanted to throw the ball for 400 yards, then that was a risk we had been willing to take (Jeanty) out of the game. I thought we would have held up a little bit better. We did not on some plays and ultimately that cost. But we just couldn’t do good enough a job versus the run to make them one-dimensional.”
This makes logical sense, but it doesn’t jive with what’s happened the last few games as well. Temple, Utah and USC diced up the Aggies’ secondary as well, and in similar ways. Temple quarterback Evan Simon completed 16 of his last 19 passes against USU and threw five TD passes. Utes true freshman QB Isaac Wilson completed 60.6 percent of his passes against the Aggies in his first-ever start for 239 yards and three touchdowns (and after facing USU he’s completed 53.6 percent of his passes and thrown four interceptions to just two TDs). Miller Moss
Point is, this wasn’t a Boise State issue. Madsen, decent as he is, isn’t an elite QB. Nether were Simon or Wilson and they both looked like higher-end starters against the Aggies. Why? Because they’re throwing into absolutely wide-open spaces in the Aggie defense. Here’s a rough compilation of the 14 times, by my own tracking, that Madsen attempted a pass where the intended receiver was at least five yards away from the nearest Aggie defender.
Add up the stats and Madsen went 13 of 14 for 197 yards and a touchdown, the lone incompletion only happening because it was one of a few times the USU pass rush got to Madsen early enough to make an impact. On all other passes, Madsen was 8 of 11 for 59 yards (and two TDs). The fact Madsen had more than half of his passes be wide-open looks is one thing, but seeing the dramatic difference in efficiency is another. The completion percentages aren’t took drastic, but the yards per attempt are. On the one hand, 14.1 yards per throw to those too-often wide-open guys. On the other, a mere 5.4, a much more respectable number for a defense to give up.
This pass defense is a multi-faceted problem. The secondary isn’t doing its job incredibly well but the defensive line isn’t helping. Sometimes they get home, or create pressure to cause problems but not often enough. Health is a huge factor in that at this point. The Aggies entered the season with a decent crew of defensive linemen but the room is now dangerously thin with only one of the four Week 1 starters still out on the field. Defensive ends Blaine Spires and Enoka Migao plus defensive tackle Miguel Jackson (all three were starters in Week 1) are all out. Jackson, along with key rotation DT Taz Williams are done for the season. Gabe Peterson, who subbed in to start in place of Migao, is also out. They tried to send him back in for snaps against Boise State, but he couldn’t work through the injury to stay out there.
Utah State’s starters at this point at defensive end are Cian Slone and Lawrence Falatea, the former being a third-stringer in fall camp and the latter a backup (albeit an expected regular rotator at that position). Bo Maile, who also began the year as a reserve, started his first game of the season against Boise State. But the issue for the Aggies, though, probably isn’t going to be who is starting. Slone, Falatea, Maile and Gabriel Iniguez isn’t an All-Mountain West unit, but it’s a solid unit. What’s killing USU now is that nobody behind them is ready for volume snaps. You can tell how desperate the team was for players who could perform on the field because Seni Tuiaki, who medically retired this past fall due to his own injuries, returned to the field, playing a handful of snaps.
We were told, and believed, all offseason that this secondary is a veteran group and would be the strength of the team. And yet they’re a walking slice of Swiss cheese on the back end. Any QB with a good pair of eyes is finding open receivers and just dinking and dunking the offense down the field for points. Every FBS team Utah State has faced (I keep specifying FBS because we’re not including the Robert Morris game in the sample size, it’s just an outlier that should be thrown out) has scored at least 38 points. Three of USU’s opponents have set a season-high in points against the Aggies. The other two are Robert Morris, the FCS matchup, and Utah, who’s only game with more points was when it played an FCS team.
There’s not really a way to sugar-coat this. The defense is broken and the only question left to ask is whether the players are broken too. And I don’t mean physically, at least in terms of injuries. Mentally, is the team still on its toes? Larsen certainly kept things positive after the game. One can only hope the rest of the team is with him because that’s the only chance they really have to turn this into a respectable unit. They need to get healthy and stick with it. If they do, there’s still hope for a bowl game or at least some path to salvaging a bit of pride. But for now, the team has to pick up the remaining shards of its dignity and try to put on its best performance of the year when UNLV comes to town for homecoming.