Box Score EMOJICAP: USF 42, San Jose State 22

The Charlie Strong era for USF football started off on the right foot as the Bulls opened their 2017 campaign with a 42-22 victory at San Jose State on Saturday.

After a sloppy start in the first quarter that gave several USF fans PTSD flashbacks to McNeese State, the USF offense rattled of 42 points over the next three quarters while the defense came away with three timely interceptions to leave CEFCU Stadium with their first victory of the season.

Like last year, we'll parse through the final box score to see what stood out and assign it a proper emoji. Let's get into it.

The USF offense kept it quite literally 100 as they hit 100 plays for the first time in school history. Their 101 offensive plays on Saturday broke the previous record of 97 set vs. Pittsburgh in 2001.

It makes sense considering that Sterlin Gilbert's quick snap offenses are designed to get off a lot of plays in a short period of time. Averaging a decent-but-not-exceptional 5.4 yards per play against the Spartans, we'll see if they can manage more explosive plays that was a staple of Willie Taggart's Gulf Coast Offense last season.

Side note: It was only the first game, but 3-19 on third downs (15%) won't cut it moving forward. They have to be able to move the chains and keep drives alive, especially for an offense that converted 44% of their third down attempts last year.

Several of USF's early problems came from their abysmal special teams play in the first quarter, which gets the garbage emoji.

Going through field positioning, the average USF drive in the first began on their own 18 with three starting on their own 20, two of which starting on the -3 and -7 respectively.

Meanwhile, SJSU benefited greatly from USF’s special teams blunders, with the Spartans average first quarter possessions beginning around midfield. All three of their early scores resulted from drives that began in Bull territory.

USF's four touchdown drives in the second quarter came on possessions that began at least on their own 31, so it shows that if the offense isn't playing in the shadow of their own end zone and has room to work with, they're going to cook.

Clapping emoji goes to Brian Jean-Mary's defense who in one game, came away with more interceptions than the 2012 defense for the entire season. <—(Make sure to follow @TDS_Stats on Twitter).

From the time the Spartans took an early 16-0 lead, here's how every one of their drives fared against the Bulls' defense until their next score in the fourth quarter:

Turnover on Downs

Interception

Interception

Punt

Punt

Punt

Punt

Punt

Punt

Interception

Punt

Punt

Pair that with coming away with 5 TFLs, a sack, and only 4.4 yards per play, that's a pretty good day for a defense that ranked 110th in defensive S&P+ last season.

Sure SJSU isn't a top quality offense to measure yourselves against, but still a pretty solid effort to open the season.

This game officially clocked in at 4 hours and 3 minutes. Holy crap did this thing drag out.

With a weak schedule, we're most likely not going to get an idea of how good this team truly is until about a month into the season when conference play really starts revving up. But wins are wins and from Game 1, the positives certainly outweighed the negatives.