Owls looking for better offensive execution
The FAU Owls may have been down several players in their 20-9 loss to Marshall Saturday, but they aren’t making excuses.
Especially since the game further displayed a troubling trend of poor offensive execution early in the season and costly penalties.
“When you’re playing a ranked team like Marshall, you have to be disciplined,” FAU coach Willie Taggart said. “To me, the difference in the game was the penalties and explosive plays. Offensively, we didn’t sustain drives and didn’t execute well at all.”
The Owls over camea slow start in their win versus Charlotte on Oct. 3 but didn’t have the same success against the Thundering Herd.
FAU only scored three points in the second half against Marshall, with the Owls gaining 39 yards on 19 plays intheir final four drives of the game. They averaged 3.5 yards per play for the entire game.
The Owls’ struggles were only worsened by their penalty struggles (11 for 126 yards) and the offense having to take a couple of timeouts in both halves to avoid delay of game penalties.
“We had a couple of communication errors ,” said starting quarter back Nick T ron ti, who finished 18 of 30 for 148 yards and an interception. He was also sacked five times for a loss of 44 yards. “Normally that happens once a
game, but [Saturday] it happened a couple of more times. We’ll have towork on that thisweek.”
The Owls, who had a COVID19 outbreak over two weeks ago and had 43 players who began
fall camp with the team not make the trip (28 COVID-19 related) for Saturday’s game, had several players not rejoin the group for practice from isolation/quarantine until late lastweek.
But they entered Saturday’s game feeling they could compete against a Marshall team that was ranked No. 19 in college football’s AP poll on Sunday.
“This is the year of adversity,” linebacker Ahman Ross said. “We can’t make excuses. We have games and practices where we’re missing guys, but at the end of the day ifwe feel as a team that ifwe have enough to play we have enough to compete.”
And Taggart wouldn’t blame the team’s struggles on the lack of practice.
“Practice time would’ve helped, but a lot of it is guys not locked in with whatt hey’re supposed to do,” Taggart said. “That’s what was frustrating. I attribute that to guys overthinking things. Wehave todo a better job as coaches to make sure our guys are right and as players, make sure they know our assignment.”
As for how FAU plans to address its offensive shortcomings, Taggart said the Owls will need to make things easier for Tronti so he can feel more comfortable in his role.
“We got to make sure we simplify things so he’s not thinking a lot,” Taggart said. “We need to make sure he has some consistency from the receiver position so they can all be on the same page.”