clock menu more-arrow no yes mobile

Filed under:

USF-Nevada Review: All The Good Stuff That Happened

Sam Barrington's worth was measured in points on Saturday.
Sam Barrington's worth was measured in points on Saturday.

We haven't gone back and talked about all the good things that USF did in Saturday's win over Nevada, so let's take care of that now.

  • Andre Davis. You could tell last year he was going to end up being a good receiver at USF, but that was a big-time breakout game. He broke two school records with 12 catches for 191 yards. He added two touchdowns, including the game-winner with 38 seconds left. B.J. Daniels targeted him 16 times, and he could have had something like 15 catches for 220 yards because two or three of the misses were bad throws.
  • The offensive line. How's this for a stat. USF ran 75 plays for 572 yards. Take out the play where Daniels forgot to throw the ball away before running out of bounds (an unforced error that Albert Rosette was given credit for), and Nevada had zero tackles for loss. Every single called run, that is, all the times someone other than Daniels carried the ball, gained yardage except for one. Even facing a pedestrian defense like the Wolf Pack, that's quite an accomplishment.
  • Justin Brockhaus-Kann. No other player on the USF team takes more criticism from our site than JBK does. But he really did have a good day punting the ball. He averaged 41.3 yards per punt, and half of them (four out of eight) were downed inside the 20. But he made the special teams play of the day when he got a hand on a high snap during his first punt attempt. The ball bounced to the ground, but he picked it up, found a window to kick out of, and somehow got rid of the ball. It was only a 30-yard punt, but that could have been a complete disaster.
  • Sam Barrington. Eight tackles, two crucial forced fumbles when Nevada was threatening to score, and a big sack of Cody Fajardo (both the size of the hit and the timing of the play) on third down that forced the Wolf Pack to settle for a field goal in the fourth quarter. Those three plays saved USF somewhere between 10-18 points.
  • B.J. Daniels' deep passes. This is posting while I'm flying back from Reno, but tomorrow I'll have another post that is just about Daniels' deep throws. The play-by-play says he threw nine of them. Two were caught for touchdowns. Another one drew a pass interference. A fourth was caught by Terrence Mitchell, but he stepped out of bounds before making the grab. A fifth skipped off Chris Dunkley's hands. That's impressive accuracy on the deep ball, and important because the Nevada defense mostly took away all of the short and intermediate passes between the numbers.

Help us out -- there may be more. You all saw the game on TV while we were trying to keep up from the stands. Anything we missed?