The Saturday night loss to Hawaii hit Utah State like a gut-punch. A team coming off a bye, hungry for the opportunity to prove itself more fully in Mountain West play went out and played arguably its worst game of the season. The Aggies have a lot more to figure out about themselves than perhaps previously thought. And they won’t have long before the next opponent comes calling on Friday.
In a previous edition of the Monday Cooldown, a comparison was drawn between Utah State’s defense in 2025 vs the woeful 2024 unit and how worryingly close they were. Sadly, for the Aggie faithful, that comparison was solidified by the result of Saturday’s game when the Warriors put up 44 points, becoming the third team in six games to put up at least 40 on the Aggies. The result is perhaps even worse when considering the fact that the 2024 USU defense held Hawaii to 10 points.
We’ll get to the defense more in a minute, but a returning issue for the Aggies was its pass protection. This was a pretty big topic of discussion in the first two weeks (and had its own sections in two even earlier editions of the Monday Cooldown, one after UTEP and the other after Texas A&M), but after a few decent weeks of pass protection against Air Force, McNeese and Vanderbilt, the issue seemed mostly to have been put to bed. The Aggies weren’t elite pass protectors in those games by any stretch, allowing seven sacks, but Bryson Barnes wasn’t running for his life most of the time.
Barnes was running for his life most of the Hawaii game.
On 35 dropbacks, Barnes was pressured 16 times and kept clean 19. It’s difficult to express how hard it can be for a quarterback when you could flip a coin pre-snap to determine whether he’d have to dodge defenders on that particular play. And Barnes isn’t exactly a maestro when facing pressure. This season, Barnes has completed just 17 of 50 pass attempts on dropbacks where he was pressured by the pass rush with a passer rating of 67.7 on those throws. For context, Barnes, owns a 130.7 passer rating on all other throws.
Making matters somehow even worse, when Barnes utilized his gifts as a runner, the blocking found another way to interfere by committing five holding penalties. Four of those five were on scrambles by the QB and they eliminated 42 rushing yards and three potential first downs which had been achieved by the quarterback scramble. All of that lost even before accounting for the 26 yards in negative yards enforced by the penalties.
There’s not really any other way to slice it, but Utah State has to protect their quarterback at a significantly higher rate. If not for the healthy and safety of Barnes, then for the sake of the offense having a chance to move the ball. It’s not just about sacks, it’s about being able to establish a rhythm in the pass game where timing routes aren’t constantly disrupted or longer pass routes are unable to even be attempted because the QB doesn’t have the time to sit in the pocket to wait for longer routes to get open.
A few factors have played into Utah State’s pass protection. For one, it’s a fairly inexperienced unit when it comes to playing on the field. Two of the Week 1 starters, left tackle Jake Eichorn and center Jimmy Liston, had basically zero snaps at the FBS level and the rest of the starters — Trey Andersen, George Maile and Tavo Motu’apuaka — each had less than a season’s worth of starts, if even that much, prior to 2025. Add on top of that the fact Andersen and Eichorn have been in and out of games due to injury. Andersen missed three games and Eichorn is now out after an injury against Vanderbilt. This has pressed Jr Sia into more consistent snaps, with the redshirt sophomore having to start at both right and left tackle in the last couple of weeks.
This is not a fully-fledged offensive line yet, and perhaps being forged in the fire that has been these first six games will produce a tougher pass protection unit down the line. Though Mendenhall and his staff are working as quickly as possible to fix it now.
“We’re working to be more firm. We’re working to get our identifications right,” Mendenhall said. “We’d worked quite a bit [on] pass under pressure during the bye week and so looking to solidify that. So we’re targeting it. We’re improving it as fast as we can.”
Mendenhall later added that while those on the outside may not see it this way, but he feels the offensive line is “significantly improved while still in the work in progress category.”
On the flip side of Utah State’s pass protection is its ability to get to the opposing quarterback. The best way to stop a pass attack is to pressure the quarterback. It’s why edge rushers are the second-highest paid position in the NFL, just behind the quarterbacks they’re paid to stop. You don’t shut down great passing games just by having elite cover guys, partly because few DBs can cover long enough to make up for a bad pass rush, and even if they could you’d need four or five of them. And that ain’t happening for anyone.
Aggies defensive coordinator, Nick Howell, has brought a blitz-heavy philosophy to mitigate opposing team’s pass attacks. According to Pro Football Focus data, USU has blitzed opposing quarterbacks on 59.3% of dropbacks. That, compared to USU’s opponents blitzing its QBs on just 36.7% of dropbacks. What’s discouraging is that despite this pass-heavy approach, Utah State’s pressure rate on opposing quarterbacks stands at just 26.7%, good for 127th in FBS.
That abysmal pressure rate had to change against Hawaii and Howell absolutely knew that thanks to first-hand experience going against Hawaii quarterback Micah Alejado. Last year, when Howell was the DC at New Mexico, Alejado ripped the Lobos’ defense to shreds for 469 yards and five touchdowns. New Mexico pressured Alejado on just 11 of his 63 dropbacks and didn’t sack him a single time which played a massive factor in that historic performance.
Utah State’s pressure rate against Alejado this year was far improved from that mark, though not enough across the entire span of the game. Per PFF, the Aggies pressured Alejado on 31.7% of his dropbacks, up from the 17.4% managed by Howell’s Lobos defense a year ago. USU was also able to sack Alejado five times, but it ultimately wasn’t enough.
The crucial point to generating pressure was highlighted by head coach Bronco Mendenhall in his Monday press conference. Overall Mendenhall seemed pleased with the performance of his defense for most of the game, feeling they were able to get results they wanted against Alejado.
“I thought we played better longer in terms of managing the game the way that we saw fit in relation to the quarterback,” Mendenhall said, “The amount we hit him the amount we affected his throws the number of errant throws.”
The exception to that sentiment was a pair of sequences.
“The drive before halftime and the finish of the game in the fourth is when we didn’t play really to the level I would have hoped for,” Mendenhall said.
Isolating those sections of the game Mendenhall mentioned — the end-of-first half drive and the entire fourth quarter — we can see where some of the issues. There are four drives within these spans and Hawaii scored 24 points. Alejado dropped back to pass 19 times on these drives, was pressured just four times and sacked only once. He completed 14 of 20 passes for 154 yards. Only two of those incompletions were truly forced by the Aggie defense, one throwaway and another being a pass breakup from Noah Avinger. Anything beyond that was Hawaii largely beating itself.
And, go figure, the one time the Aggies seemed to stand up for itself was when they managed some genuine pressure. When Hawaii got a goal-line look with just under nine minutes left in the fourth quarter (setting aside that the Warriors were there in the first place and how they did it), Utah State had two successful pass defense plays. On the first, John Miller was running straight at Alejado who then overthrew his man on a slant route into the end zone.
Perhaps Alejado would have overthrown this anyway, seeing as he threw it confidently and would have known he had the RB there to block the defender, but he not only hear, but see the footsteps and it may have sped up the throw.
And then, there’s the sack that straight-up ended the drive then and there, leading to the field goal that meant Utah State still mostly had a chance. It was more of a coverage sack than pure pressure generated by the pass rush, but it counts nonetheless.
It’s not as though Utah State was shutting down Alejado the rest of the game, but Hawaii’s points per drive in the time span set by Mendenhall was 6.0, basically a touchdown per drive save for one field goal. Outside of that the Warriors averaged 2.0 points per drive. And you can see some correlation in those numbers with Utah State’s pressure rate on Alejado in those two spans. In the end-of-second-quarter/fourth-quarter span, the Aggies pressured the QB on 21% of dropbacks compared to 36% the rest of the game.
Imagine the result if the Aggies had maintained their better aspects of defense throughout the fourth quarter and end-of-first-half series. And this may very well be the one big key for Utah State the rest of the year. Hawaii didn’t rip apart the Aggies by forcing missed tackles. Its receivers averaged 3.3 yards after catch per reception and, with the exception of one explosive run in the fourth quarter, only 2.8 yards after contact, per rush. Utah State tackles well and swarms to the ball. But it can’t seem to enforce its will against quarterbacks when they’re in the pocket. Against pass-heavy teams, that’s a recipe for disaster, and that’s exactly what happened in Hawaii on Saturday.
