Owls enter bye week on hot streak
BOCA RATON — After playing six straight weeks and dealing with Hurricane Irma along the way, Lane Kiffin and the Florida Atlantic Owls (3-3, 2-0 in Conference USA) should be celebrating their lone bye week of the season.
During his weekly news conference Monday, Kiffin acknowledged he wasn’t too happy about going into the bye with a two-game winning streak and the team holding serious momentum.
“Everybody just assumes, ‘Well, you have a bye week, you’re gonna play really well after a bye week,’” Kiffin said. “Well, the team we just played had a bye week.”
Kiffin was referring to Old Dominion, a team that entered Saturday’s matchup against the Owls fully rested after losing its previous two games. FAU led 17-7 after the first quarter and scored a program record 58 points, in large part thanks to eight rushing touchdowns.
It’s neither paranoia nor personal experience that has the first-year head coach frustrated, Kiffin explained, but research he’d come across.
“At one point, I don’t remember what year it was, there was a stat that actually, after the bye — I think this was in the NFL — that teams had lost more than they had won,” Kiffin said. “When you’re playing really well, it would be good to stay in rhythm.”
Kiffin was potentially referencing a 2012 research piece from Grantland’s Bill Barnwell, which explained that teams who had early bye weeks (specifically Weeks 3 and 4; the NFL removed Week 3 byes in 2006) had better winning percentages than all other weeks from 1994-98 and 2002-11, the latter period being after the Houston Texans entered the league.
From Weeks 5-9, the average winning percentage was 49.1 percent compared to 51.65 in Weeks 3 and 4. FAU has lost each of its past two post-bye week games, including the worst home defeat in program history last year, a 52-3 throttling by Western Kentucky on Oct. 29.
As part of the team’s byeweek plan, Kiffin and his assistant coaches will devote little to no time to their Oct. 21 game against North Texas, but they will meet with players and explore the possibility of giving role players more snaps in the coming weeks.
“We’ll embrace it instead of just sitting here, talking about what good we’ve done or winning two games in a row,” Kiffin said.
Kiffin mixed on Driskel: The good news for FAU quarterback Jason Driskel, who moved to 2-1 as the starter this year with Saturday’s win, is that he tied a program record with four rushing touchdowns.
The bad news for Driskel, however, was that Kiffin was far from pleased with FAU’s passing game.
“Not very good, you know, but I don’t really look at is as just (Driskel); I look at it as everybody,” Kiffin said. “We got pushed in the pocket which is a big deal . ... We’re gonna need to be able to step up.”
Driskel finished Saturday’s win completing 13 of 22 passes for 97 yards and an interception, the first time since the aforementioned loss to WKU that Driskel finished below 100 passing yards in a start. The Owls’ next game, a 42-25 win at Rice, saw Daniel Parr (Dwyer) make his first career start before Driskel threw 317 yards and two scores in relief.
Several of Driskel’s throws went incomplete on a wet, sloppy Foreman Field, though Kiffin explained the issue went beyond bad passes.
“We didn’t help him,” Kiffin said. “Too many times (problems come from) miscommunication on routes or guys not doing the right thing. It takes everybody in the passing game (to succeed) like it takes receivers and quarterbacks in the run game. It’s no different.”
Driskel, Parr, and the currently injured De’Andre Johnson — who remains out indefinitely following surgery last month on his arm for blood clots — battled through the summer for the starting quarterback job.