LSU wins 45-10 over Mocs
BATON ROUGE, La. — For a drive, everything looked good for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga football team.
The Mocs executed. They converted. In just that first possession, they were more effective against LSU than its previous opponent, BYU, was in an entire game. UTC reached Tigers territory, something the Cougars did not do a week earlier.
The Mocs put points on the board and held the lead.
Then the Tigers got the ball. LSU was explosive in the ground game, and when the Tigers caught the Mocs out of position they hit the visitors with long, deep passes to tall, talented receivers. The LSU defense figured things out as the game went on and the final outcome was a 45-10 victory in front of 97,289 at Tiger Stadium in Ed Orgeron’s home opener as the official head coach.
The Mocs (0-2) get their first home game of the season next, hosting UT-Martin at 6 this Saturday at Finley Stadium.
“We showed a lot of improvement from week one to week two,” UTC coach Tom Arth said. “What we talk about with the team is understanding that we’re a very good football team when we execute, when we know our job and when we do our job.
“We also learned we’re not a good team when we do, and that’s going to be the most important thing for us, to improve our consistency and how we execute. What we have to do every single day is put ourselves in game-like
situations where we’re challenged to be our best every single play. If we do that, if we take the right approach with that in practice, we’re going to see more improvement going into week three.”
Arth’s team did all the right things the first time it had the ball, pushingit downfield on a 65-yard, 14-play drive that ate up 6:08 in game time. The Mocs converted a third down and a fourth down into firsts in advancing to the LSU 5-yard line. It was there the drive stalled, and Victor Ulmo kicked a 22-yard field goal.
“That was great for us,” quarterback Nick Tiano said. “Everybody came out ready to go. We’ve got tough guys. They played hard and we executed on that first drive until we got into the red zone. Those are things we have to get better on; when we execute and play well we move the ball, so we’ve got to keep getting better every week.”
LSU responded with 42 consecutive points. Derrius Guice and Darrel Williams each had a pair of touchdown runs set up by deep throws down the field, and Drake Davis hauled in a 36-yard touchdown pass from Danny Etling.
DJ Chark had a 65-yard punt return for a score and another punt return for a score that was called back due to a penalty.
Guice had 102 yards rushing in the game, while Etling threw for 227 yards and a touchdown. Chark had 103 yards on three catches.
Darrell Bridges had 88 yards rushing for the Mocs, including a fourth-quarter touchdown. Tiano completed 15 of his 32 passes for 174 yards but was picked off twice and sacked five times.
Tae Davis had 13 tackles with a sack to lead the UTC defense, while Lucas Webb had 11 tackles.
“These games are good fur us, with a new scheme and so many new guys,” Webb said. “We’ve played two really good teams to start the season, and they’ve exposed some things we need to work on, but that’s going to be good in the long run. I really think it’ll help us grow, because we’ve played two games back to back where we feel like we’re better than we played, but it’s something we can come back from with confidence.
“We’ve been here; we’ve played two really good teams. We know we have to work on ourself, but we know we can compete.”
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress. com. Follow him on Twitter @genehenleytfp.