COLUMN: Section F
With basketball officially in the rear-view mirror, it’s time to look ahead to football season. This football season arguably holds more promise and reasonably high expectations as any season this decade. Utah State returns a total of 17 starters from a season ago in which the Aggies finished the season on a strong note, relative to USU’s recent football track record. Even more encouraging is that just about every player who was key to the success USU had in 2008 is returning for 2009 – with many of them being here for 2010 and 2011 as well. While 3-9 is not a record that most teams would write home about, I feel like it has been plenty overlooked that the 2008 Aggies were a grand total of three plays away from a tie for second place in the Western Athletic Conference with what could have been a 5-3 conference record.
Take away Fresno State’s miracle 58-yard field goal as time expired as well as the two interception returns for touchdowns by Louisiana Tech and the Aggies would have been coming off a five-win season and a tie for second place in the WAC. Obviously things didn’t go that way, and the silver lining to that is that the USU head coaching position is now occupied by Gary Andersen instead of Brent Guy.
But the past is the past. The Aggies lost those games that they could easily have won and now we are stuck with a head coach who just finished a season where he led the defense of the only undefeated team in the country.
While last season was loaded with highlights of quarterback Diondre Borel and runningback Robert Turbin, I feel like the real reason to be excited for this coming season, and you can go ahead and call me old-fashioned, is the Aggies offensive line. With five games to go last season, a complete overhaul of the starting offensive line was done and a quartet of freshmen, along with one sophomore, took over the majority playing time in the trenches. The result was a record of 2-3 in the final five games which included the aforementioned miracle field-goal by Fresno State and the duo of interception returns for touchdowns by Louisiana Tech that kept the Aggies from finishing the season 4-1. That other loss was on the road to the eventual WAC Champion Boise State Broncos, and while USU was thoroughly blown out in that game, they did manage to score more points on the infamous “Smurf Turf” than any other visiting opponent did in the 2008 season.
The success of the overhauled offensive line was demonstrated seemingly very clearly in the the yards per game production of USU’s offense over the year’s final five games. Through the first seven games of the 2008 season, Utah State gained an average of 308 yards and scored an average 18.7 points per game. In the final five games of the year the Aggies put up averages of 370 yards and 31.4 points per game. Did I mention that almost all of these guys were freshmen?
To be fair, there were other players who started during the final five-game stretch of the season, which means that had to have beaten out the previous starter in practice that week. Conventional wisdom suggests that this will keep players pushing and trying to out-work each other for playing time, which ultimately benefits the team as a whole.
If football games are really won and lost on the lines, and they are, USU has got something pretty excellent going for them with their front five on the offensive side of the ball. Oh, and don’t forget Borel and Turbin.