WIU vs Northern Arizona (9/10/2016)

[sealhall74]

Speed kills. Whichever team wins those one-on-one battles will win this war. A sample size of only one game under an entirely new coaching staff is hard to work but here goes:

WIU 31
NAU 28

[rocki]

C'mon fellas, Dave gave you a bunch of goodies on the Jacks. Even gave you his take on what you might want to consider in shutting down our O. I'm surprised he didn't tell you about the guys that we're getting off the DL this week.

We've heard nothing but your disdain for conflicting threads, tunnel vs pipeline, and sequencing messages in the thread. It's Friday now, and the gameplan is locked in, give us some things that we as NAU fans might want to look for with WIU...

Road trips are tough but I'm going with 38 - 28 NAU. I think WIU will need to drain the clock. If NAU jumps out to a quick lead it may be tough on the home team.

OK, we're so used to it being just us on this thread we tend to digress.

Seriously, though, with this being the first year under our new coach and a new style offense, it's hard to give you a bunch of insights. What we did last year isn't going to be the same as what we do this year. Last year we basically had no diversity in our running game - Nikko was it. He bulldozed his way into yardage. I know Coach Fisher wants to open up the run game, but other than last week's great performance by Steve McShane, we haven't seen a whole lot of it or the other RBs.

In the past, Lenoir and Borsellino have been big threats (particularly when Norvell was quarterbacking - he locked on them almost exclusively, McGuire got some additional targets that were good when those two were heavily covered). Fisher is interested in using the tight ends more - that was pretty much non-existent when Nielsen was here.

As we've said, the defensive secondary needs work. To be fair, they are pretty young so hopefully that will improve with game experience. If we can't shut down the NAU offense from throwing and catching the long ball, it's gonna be a long game for us.

LN57 and YokedNeck can give you more insights, I'm sure. LN57 is a football alum who is heavily involved with the program, and YokedNeck has a son on the team.

[letsgonecks]

C'mon fellas, Dave gave you a bunch of goodies on the Jacks. Even gave you his take on what you might want to consider in shutting down our O. I'm surprised he didn't tell you about the guys that we're getting off the DL this week.

We've heard nothing but your disdain for conflicting threads, tunnel vs pipeline, and sequencing messages in the thread. It's Friday now, and the gameplan is locked in, give us some things that we as NAU fans might want to look for with WIU...

Road trips are tough but I'm going with 38 - 28 NAU. I think WIU will need to drain the clock. If NAU jumps out to a quick lead it may be tough on the home team.

NAUfan, there were two letdowns last week and that would be our passing game and pass defense. Those should actually be our key areas this season as we have lots of experience and talent.

The passing game returns 7 WR's with solid experience, 1 being Lenoir who is #1 in the record books (sat out first half last week). Our second receiver Borsellino will likely finish the season #2 all-time in receptions and yards and close in TD's. The QB is a Sophomore with 5 career starts, who beat out a 3 year starter who is #2 in the record books for most passing categories. Throw in a 6-4 Pitt transfer at TE and a 6-6 soph with potential and we should be explosive passing the ball........just weren't last week. Could be because it was the first game, first time running the offense, faced a good pass D or simply it was just shit week and we need to get better!!!!

We will continue to try and establish the run, but you'll have to watch out for the play action and focus will have to be on Lenoir. As you're familiar with Butler, this will leave others open.

We have new starters across the front DL, but they're still experienced. After that, the LB's are solid and experienced. Finally, we returned all our starters at DB last year and most of the rotation. Graduated a backup DB and a safety with a few career starts is out for the year. Otherwise, we're supposed to pretty solid back there and weren't horrible in my eyes last week, but allowed a few big chunk plays and 2 home runs. These big plays last week mixed with your talent at QB and WR makes it an issue this week.

We have a playmaker at LB in Brett Taylor. You'll see and hear from him a lot making tackles and forcing turnovers as he's got a nack for that. Upfront we have a very athletic tackle in Khalen (sounds like Colin) Saunders. Dude goes about 300lbs, hauled the rock HS and still does back-flips, so expect him to make some plays. A DT transfer who is rotating now and may end up starting in Steve Mercado. He had a good first game and could be a playmaker. Again, we have depth at DB, but might not be the fastest group of DB's out there, so that might be your window for success.

Last year I would have told you special teams is where you'd hit pay-dirt, but going off last week that thankfully shouldn't be the case. Last year we gave up too many big returns, led the nation in kicks being block and that led to a lot of extra points against us.

If we were in AZ, I'd think about giving you the edge. Since we're staying home, coming off 10 days to rest and prepare, and the fact that we had plenty of room for improvement after beating a good team: I'm going WIU 38 NAU 28.

[ST_Lawson]

C'mon fellas, Dave gave you a bunch of goodies on the Jacks. Even gave you his take on what you might want to consider in shutting down our O. I'm surprised he didn't tell you about the guys that we're getting off the DL this week.

We've heard nothing but your disdain for conflicting threads, tunnel vs pipeline, and sequencing messages in the thread. It's Friday now, and the gameplan is locked in, give us some things that we as NAU fans might want to look for with WIU...

Road trips are tough but I'm going with 38 - 28 NAU. I think WIU will need to drain the clock. If NAU jumps out to a quick lead it may be tough on the home team.

Sorry, should have warned you...our threads can drift quite a bit sometimes. I tend to take a pretty hands-off approach to thread moderation usually.

Most of my thoughts about the game I put into my first post back at the beginning of the week. We've started to get some idea of what our team can do, but it's kinda hard when you've only played one game so far (and especially hard when the opposing team has only played a P5 FBS team).

EDIT - As I finish typing this whole thing up and go back through the thread, I realize that a few other people have already chimed in with much of what I said...but you're welcome to read my "take" on it too if you like.

I'm still fairly confident about our ability to move the ball against the NAU defense. The running "focus" of the first game was really just the team getting used to the new offensive system that Coach Fisher has put into place and not wanting to push things with high-risk passes when we were already leading. We still have what's generally regarded as one of, if not THE most explosive 2-WR combos in the FCS with Lance Lenoir and Joey Borsellino. In the Western record books, Lenoir through his Junior year holds just about every season and career receiving record we have. Borsellino, if he was our primary receiver, would still likely be one of the best we've had in a long time (currently #3 for career receptions, #7 for career receiving yards, and #10 for 100+ yard games). Jake Wieneke (at SDSU) and occasionally Anthony Warrum at IL State get most of the WR press in the conference, but last year Lenoir and Borsellino in terms of receptions per game were #1 and #4 in the conference, and for receiving yards per game, were #3 and #5 in the conference. That means that Borsellino...our #2 receiver...had more receiving yards and receptions per game than any of the receivers at UNI, NDSU, IN State, USD, YSU, or MSU.
If we start working passing back into our gameplan tomorrow, they'll find ways to exploit the NAU DBs (a "weakness" that NAUDave mentioned).

As Dave mentioned, our QB can move around pretty well (likely one of the reasons that McGuire won the starting job over Norvell this season), running for a TD himself in the first game. All of our TDs were on running plays except for one short TD pass to a TE (which actually matched our TE TD total from last year). Considering my one "worry" about the offense going into this year was our running game (since Nikko "The Bowling Ball" Watson graduated)...my fears seem to be somewhat unfounded at this point. 207 net rushing yards and 2 TDs by a sophomore...4 total rushing TDs for the team...in the game at EIU.

We had some pretty serious special teams issues last year, but it looks like, at least so far, they've worked most of those out. Our kickers both played did pretty darn well at EIU and the blocking for them seems to be much improved.

Our defense (especially our LBs, Taylor and Brott) are VERY good at forcing turnovers, so if Cookus has any passes that are a bit low, you can bet they're going to get knocked down and possibly snagged. We have a true freshman playing at DB in Mike Viti. Viti is an exceptional talent from Pennsylvania who had an offer from Maryland until a coaching change there and they decided to pull his offer...at which point, we were able to snag him. The only "downside" to him at this point is that this will be only his second college game. Going against the NAU receivers should be a real "welcome to the big leagues" kinda moment for him...but I think he's up for it.

Overall, I think that my earlier prediction of something around a 38-28 WIU victory is about what I expect.

[letsgonecks]

Here's Matt Becker's take over at STATS.

http://www.fcs.football/cfb/story.asp?i ... m=&src=FCS

[ST_Lawson]

Bison Media has a video blog preview of all the Big Sky vs MVFC games this week: https://www.bisonmediazone.com/video-bl ... d-big-sky/

[ST_Lawson]

I also wanted to toss out a reminder to anyone that can't be at the game that we have our Live Chat Center here: http://www.leathernecknation.net/forum/app.php/chat for anyone who wants to chat while the game is in progress (it will also post notifications when people reply/respond in forum posts as well).

And, I'll set up another Game Day Thread (GDT) if you want to use that to talk about the game on Saturday.

[NAUFan]

Wow! Great stuff guys! Thanks for taking the time. Gives us NAU fans a little better idea of what to look for from your Leathernecks. Seems like we will have our hands full on Saturday. Hopefully we get off to a good start on the road and keep it competitive.

NAU folks have much respect for WIU's program and this game may mean a lot come Playoff selection time.

Thought you might enjoy this. The weekly Lumberjack Live show hosted by our Radio/TV broadcaster Mitch Strohman. A lot of talk of WIU. Mitch is awesome! Love listening to NAU Dave too. Keeps me in touch with the team from California.



Good Luck guys! Go Jacks!

[ST_Lawson]

"...right up your....address..."

Great video NAUFan. Cookus sounds like a great kid...lots of personality.

[ST_Lawson]

An article from the local AZ media (AZ Daily Sun): http://azdailysun.com/sports/local/nau- ... 262e8.html

Also, a photo from the article....they've got some really nice looking road uniforms. Can't wait to check them out in person tomorrow afternoon.