Too many points given up in the first half, not enough plays made by the offense and a game-tying field goal that sailed wide of the uprights.
That was the recipe for disaster for San Diego State Saturday evening at Qualcomm Stadium, where the Aztecs (4-3, 1-2 Mountain West Conference) dropped a close one, 30-27, to Wyoming.
“We didn’t make enough plays to win the game,” head coach Rocky Long said. “It wasn’t the defense’s terrible performance in the first half. It wasn’t the offense’s poor performance in the second quarter. It wasn’t us missing field goals or extra points. When you lose, it’s a total team problem.”
With 1:55 left in the game and SDSU down by three, senior kicker Abelardo Perez lined up to attempt a game-tying, 27-yard field goal. Perez kicked it wide left, and with that went the Aztecs’ chance at forcing overtime.
This came just minutes after Perez missed a 39-yarder that also would have tied the score.
After the game, there were no words exchanged, no reassuring pats on the back, no “you’ll get ‘em next time” for the senior placekicker.
“It’s better not to say anything to a kicker after that kind of problem,” Long said.
“We’ll rally around him, and that’s what we should do,” senior quarterback Ryan Lindley added, who tossed 247 yards, two touchdowns and an interception. “Like I said, he’s our teammate, first and foremost, and regardless of whether he was five-for-five or oh-for-five, he’s an Aztec at the end of the day.”
In the first half, the SDSU defense, which had 16 days off to prepare for the Cowboys, could not do anything to stop true freshman quarterback Brett Smith. Smith piled up 287 passing yards, tossed two touchdowns to wide receiver Chris McNeil, and added a couple of rushing touchdowns as well in a Tim Tebow-esque performance, all before halftime.
“It was all just the defense not playing as we should have,” senior linebacker Miles Burris said. “It wasn’t any one person, but we came out in the first half and really put ourselves in a hole. We didn’t execute, we were making mental errors, that’s not going to win you football games. That’s all on us; it has nothing to do with them.”
But it was a whole other story in the second half, when the Aztec defense held Wyoming scoreless and to only 104 yards of total offense.
“They started executing the coverage that we had to prevent screens, which we didn’t execute in the first half,” Long said. “Once we had a little success they started playing at their regular speed and instead of playing like they were afraid to make a play, they started making plays.”
Sophomore running back Ronnie Hillman had 305 total yards and three touchdowns in the loss.
Where do the Aztecs go from here?
“Go play New Mexico (next week),” Lindley said. “That’s all you can do. You play who’s up next, and we do the same thing we do every week … everything’s a learning experience. You’ve got to improve. We have to be better next week than we were this week, that’s for sure.”
