Had a chance to review this game.
When the game ended, I did not feel very good about it, but I came around on second review and I feel fine about it.
If Xavier doesn’t have an all-time bad day, we probably put them away earlier, crazy how he alone changed the flow of that game - unlikely to happen again with him. Refs really fucked us, you’re not going to see me complain about refs often because that tends to go both ways but this was bad - Overshown penalty was absurd, props to Dugan for goading the donkey in stripes into calling that one. Defense overall was above the board, not great but they forced fumbles and tackled well. Still not getting enough QB pressure. Casey’s performance much better than stat line suggests, he’s good about feeling pocket pressure and sliding without bailing on play. OLine played good but could’ve been great, TCU’s DLine isn’t great but they got their shit together after that SMU loss and played disciplined, but got beat up. Bijan made them look better than they played, but they’re clearly improving and doing it quickly. Very few glaring errors where as prior weeks it was errors/drive ratio. Bijan is just not of this planet, probably could’ve won the game without him but not had been up with about 3 chances to truly seal the game without his performance. 37 touches no fumbles no dropped passes no bonehead plays. Elite.
All in all, we missed some great chances to put them away and it began to feel like a Herman style collapse, but the fact that we played that bad and won on the road against a team who game plans more for us than anyone in conference play and all that is good, couldn’t tell you the last time we were definitively more physical than TCU but it happened both sides of the ball. On a better day we win that one 45-27.
Lack of consistent or even common QB pressure makes me nervous in this conference, but PK dialed up some stuff that worked. We were the better team and it showed, we had a lot of self-inflicted wounds. The kind of stuff you learn from.