Sam Houston State’s offense, one that gained 584 yards per game, operated with reckless abandon. It methodically eviscerated any team it played and, when the games ended, opposing coaches often spoke in awed incredulity of the attack that just manhandled their team.
“They had a lot to do with it, they really did,” Cowboys head coach Lance Guidry said three weeks ago, minutes after McNeese State’s 56-43 loss to the Bearkats. “They’ve been doing that to everybody this year; they ended up doing it to us.”
Sam Houston State ran 78 plays. The Cowboys permitted 630 yards — 8.1 yards per play — and allowed eventual Southland Player of the Year Jeremiah Briscoe to throw six touchdowns.
McNeese gave the Bearkats, who finished the regular season as unbeaten SLC champions and the No. 5 seed in the Football Championship Subdivision Playoffs, the closest game of any opponent. It was within six with less than 6 minutes left in the fourth quarter.
Briscoe needed four plays to move the Bearkats 81 yards for its eighth touchdown, one that all but sealed the game.
“I know they’re good and all that,” Guidry said last week, “but you don’t give up 50-something points in a big game, especially when you have kids coming back that played well against them in the prior two years. I’ve got high expectations for defense. I don’t give in to someone being so (darn) good on offense to where you give up 50 points.”
Guidry presents the performance as a microcosm for the Cowboys’ season-long defensive inadequacy, a shortcoming of his first team that continues to irk him. The former defensive coordinator is unapologetically prideful of the unit, one he anchored as a player and coached to national prominence before his promotion to head coach this season.
Maligned at the beginning of the season with poor safety alignment and veteran Dominique Hill’s six-game suspension, the defense was susceptible to “chunk plays” all season. It allowed 25 passes of 30 yards or longer throughout 11 games. Eight of those were 50-yard throws or longer.
The secondary permitted 260 passing yards per game — the most by a McNeese defense since at least 2002.
The closest any defense comes to that mark was 2013, Guidry’s first season as defensive coordinator, when teams threw for 242.9 yards per game against the Cowboys.
“There were some weaknesses for us at the beginning of the year, but even midway through we weren’t playing as good as we needed to, either,” Guidry said. “We’ll take some steps forward and evaluate what we did. We’ll go from there. I know how to correct it. It’s what I do, I’m a defensive guy. I’ve got my eyes on some things and what we need to do to go forward and just implement those things, and get back to the things that we did well in the past.”
Guidry’s predecessor warned him of overloading his job. Though he had an offensive coordinator, former McNeese coach Matt Viator made the offensive game plan and called plays throughout his tenure.
In a conversation before he departed for Louisiana-Monroe, Viator told Guidry balancing the play calling and administrative tasks of being a head coach was “the hardest thing for him to do.”
That conversation, Guidry said, is why he “went in the direction I did,” hiring defensive coordinator Tommy Restivo.
“I don’t think it’s as much about Tommy as it is about our defense,” Guidry said. “(Restivo) was still trying to come in and learn what we did, and that’s hard on a guy, too. If I need to, I’ll get more involved at this point to try to tide us over of what we need to do. Because we’ve got to play better defense.”
That happened in the Sam Houston State game. Guidry and Restivo split the defensive game planning. Guidry watched the Bearkats’ 10 personnel and Restivo dissected the 11 personnel.
Guidry said he’s “got a plan” to correct the shortcomings. The details are uncertain, but it’s predicated upon ensuring the group returns to its renowned days of old.
“Our defensive guys and Tommy, too, they’re not satisfied with the outcome,” Guidry said. “We’ll get better defensively.”
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