The gameplan

[Big10Ponyfan]

If you win and it's in boring style, fine. I'll take it and so will the rest of you. We were clearly the better team last night.

However, I thought our gameplan was to the right of the Christian Coalition last night and kept UAB in the game.

Martin's hamstring, foot and elbow injuries are making him too tentative to hit the hole and that causes those running plays to dissolve. I wouldn't start him against Houston. I would bring him in and see how he is for a couple of series.

We didn't go deep on occasion to stretch them out. The only moderately deep throw was Willis' pick. Does Zach Sledge play on this team? He's our best possession receiver, a chain-mover.

Too many dinks and dunks. We were not aggressive especially when our first two drives bogged down inside their 40. We were too passive in those possessions. Playcalling was nothing special.

Do we have a QB sneak in this offense? On that 3rd-and-short late in the 4th after we held, Willis should have followed Poynter. He didn't have that far to do. The hand off to Mapps took too long to develop. Glad we punted there.

And another thing on Willis, that's three consecutive games where he's coughed it up running. You take the good with the bad from a redshirt FR. He's just going to have to protect it better. It looked like last night as he was running across, the ball got punched out.

Not in the least sexy. But the bottom line is we got a W. But if we go 6-6, 7-5 or something we'll be back on a mid-week ESPN2 game in 2007.

[SApony]

Play calling was horrible. 2 times in the first half we had the ball in UAB's half of the field and called running plays on 3rd down. It reminded me of Cavan's days. The other thing that pissed me off was that when we did try to run it on 3rd and short, we did an option read. If you are going to run the ball for a first down, put a freaking fullback in there and run it downfield!

[Stallion]

our inability to make short yardage on critical downs is why Phil Bennett decision to punt the ball late in the game was one of the best he has made as an SMU coach.

[FloridaMustang]

Plain and simple.. we cannot go into the game against Houston with the same gamplan we had against Tech. It worked against UTEP, but UTEP isn't that great and we had to slow the game down if Slater was going to have any chance to win. We have to be aggressive, throw the ball downfield (and get off the DAMN line quicker!) and score some freakin points... Even field goals.. but we cannot keep stalling around the 40 yard line. I want to see a SPREAD OFFENSE.. like we saw executed by Romo against UAB last year, for example.

[SMU Football Blog]

Clock management was better in this game than in some past games. That is, unless you count the use of timeouts.