Boy, it sure feels good to have football back. Saturday night’s game was great, and not just because the outcome, because we all knew who was going to win. I saw several very good things throughout the course of the first 60 minutes of the season. As we should all know by now the final was 69-17 in favor of Tech. Here are the main things that I saw, and some things to keep your eye on for next week’s test. I am going to preface this article by saying yes, I’m aware that pounding SFA isn’t anything to brag about, but hear me out.

Pat Mahomes looks pretty dominant

30-43, 483 yards. 4 throwing touchdowns, and 2 rushing touchdowns. I’ll take those stats all day. Mahomes was running a little more than he needed to be, or than I wanted him to. Good news is he never took a big hit. Last thing we want to do is pull a Romo. We were getting a lot of pressure from the outside of our offensive line throughout the game. Which forced Mahomes to take off scrambling almost as soon as he caught the snap on numerous occasions, which scares me a little bit. However, he did a good job showing his ability to step up into the pocket and deliver a strike. Also, if there was any doubt about Mahomes arm strength (I don’t know why there would be) he definitely silenced that early on. Several times during the game it seemed like all he had to do was flick the ball off his back foot and the pigskin would soar 60 yards, not to mention we connected on quite a few of them as well! Needless to say, Mahomes looked really good last night!

Our Defense Was Smothering

Again, I understand that we were playing SFA, but for anyone who knows how bad our defense was, one thing is very clear. Our run defense has improved dramatically. SFA had -5 yards of rushing at halftime. We were wrapping up well, delivering some big hits, and just simply playing good fundamental defense. For the most part, that carried over to our secondary, which was my biggest question mark coming into this season. To some extent, that question hasn’t really been answered, because again, it was just SFA. Our first real test will come next Saturday night. As far as I could tell, in the first half, before we started really blowing things apart, our secondary performed well. First contact was made almost immediately after the catch, and there wasn’t a whole lot of yards after the catch. Our secondary also got a lot of help from our pass rush, we had pressure on the QB for most of the night. Not so much with sacks, and knock downs, but with making him rush the throw, and getting in his face prior to him releasing the ball.

All and all, I was very pleased with the game Saturday night. I would have liked to have held then to only one touchdown, but I was loving the fact that we were pushing 70. I’m excited to see what transpires next weekend, but as for now, I am pleasantly surprised with our defense. We expected great things from our offense, but our defense is leaps and bounds better than that last 2 years. Off to Tempe we go.