It’s Tuesday, so let’s take our final looks back at Saturday’s performance against Mississippi State before we move on tomorrow to look forward to this week’s game hosting Arkansas.
The first of our two look backs is the report card for the offense.
QUARTERBACK
Brady Cook gets an A from me once again this week. He’s looked great since returning from the wrist injury.
He was asked to do a little less last week, 20 passes is season low not counting Alabama or UMass, both games he exited early.
Though even with a season low in attempts for a full game, he produced his highest yardage total with 268 on 75 percent completions, which is his second highest behind only Buffalo (77.8 percent).
The deep pass to Marquis Johnson was perfectly placed in double coverage and he hit 3-of-4 passes deeper than 20 yards downfield. He was also 8-of-9 on short passes and was doing a great job letting his receivers get yards after the catch.
His average depth of target was just 8.1, which is the third lowest of the season, but he was placing passes perfectly to get Luther Burden and Theo Wease room to work.
So he gets an A again.
RUNNING BACKS
Hard to give this group anything but an A, too, after a 209-yard performance.
Nate Noel looked good again, but only averaged 3.8 yards per carry, though he did force four missed tackles and had 45 yards after contact.
Marcus Carroll took advantage of his goal-line attempts for three touchdowns to get to 10 this season, while averaging 4.4 yards per carry with 43 of his 61 coming after contact. On just 14 carries, he ran for four first downs.
Jamal Roberts averaged 5.8 yards per carry on five attempts with a long of 14 yards, which was the longest run of his career.
Just a solid overall day for the group as they did what they needed to to take advantage of a bad run defense.
PASS CATCHERS
I don’t want to seem hyperbolic, but it’s another A.
With 268 total yards and 161 coming after the catch, the receivers were dominating the Mississippi State defense in limited opportunities.
There were no drops, there were four players with at least one catch longer than 25 yards, there were 10 total missed tackles forced and 11 first downs gained.
I’ve got nothing bad to say about the performance.
Burden had his highest-graded game by PFF with a 90.5 overall and 88.1 receiver grade, both much closer to what he looked like last year than through this season.
OFFENSIVE LINE
I’m going to say B here.
The first two series looked pretty rough as the offensive line got dominated and the Tigers moved backward on six plays before punting twice.
After that, great performance.
Somehow, the run blocking wasn’t incredible, I mentioned how many yards after contact the running backs had, that’s because the offensive line wasn’t quite getting the push it needed. That’s why this isn’t an A.
Because the pass blocking after those first two series was great.
There were only two hurries credited against Missouri and they were credited to Marcus Bryant and Jamal Roberts. So everyone else on the line was clean.
Cayden Green had his best-graded performance against an SEC team as he’s continued to get better, Cam’Ron Johnson and Armand Membou were both great again and Drake Heismeyer did another respectable job filling in for Connor Tollison.
Overall, very good, but not quite perfect because of the run blocking and the amount of work the running backs had to do after contact.
OVERALL
Hard to say it’s anything else when the offense scores four touchdowns and gets a field goal, plus a two-point conversion. The 39 points is the most the Tigers have scored this year against a team that isn’t Murray State or UMass and the 32 on offense is the most not against those two or Buffalo.
Great performance.
Head over to the story thread to discuss the offensive performance or the Tiger Walk to talk about so much more.
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