Blake - Horrible first half.  I think that goes without saying.  He turned it around in the second half.  There were throws that he shouldn't have made, but they didn't turn in to interceptions so whatever on those.  Say what you want about the TD throws, they weren't pretty but the result was the same.  Hurns made some great moves coming back to and fighting for balls.  You can tell that Blake has a lot to work on.  I'm OK with that.  The first TD throw he threw it 40 yards in the air on a rollout without his feet set.  That's pretty damn hard.  Second one was a ball he put up for Hurns to get and he did.  I'm not going to bash him on those.

 

Denard - Mannnn I got worried when he went out in the first quarter.  He's been the brightest spot on our offense the past few weeks and he keeps getting better.  If he hadn't slipped on that one 16 yard run who knows how long it would have gone.  He good and I hope he gets better.

 

Hurns - Holy crap man.  What a game for this guy.  Marquise who??? 

 

Defense - Dline did a good job most of the game of containing the run until Hill busted one.  Cyp took a bad angle and couldn't recover.  The secondary getting more banged up isn't going to help much and George went out pretty early.  He was playing well when he was in there too.  JT Thomas had another interception which set up Denard's TD run, nice heads up play.  They certainly didn't play as well as they did the past 4 weeks, but the injuries are starting to pile up.

 

Special teams - Holy crap.  Two blocked punts.  Honestly I'm not going to worry about Scobee kicking OOB.  Yes that sucked, but it's going to happen every once in a while when you're being told to kick to the corner.  The blocking on all fronts in the kicking game sucks, and Anger is taking too long to get the ball off.  Even the 25 yard FG Sobee hit early in the game was inches from being blocked.  They need to get this figured out.  If you don't have a kicking game then you can't be reliable in the field position game.

 

 

Overall - this was a game we were "supposed" to lose.  At one point we had it within 3 points until Hill broke a lucky run.  I'm OK with it.  Gus seemed to learn from past games and didn't throw out stupid challenge flags.  Blake showed better game management without having to burn through timeouts.  Honestly IMO this is a team that needs to have all three phases work well to get a win, and that doesn't surprise me with how young these guys are.  I don't care if you think it's an excuse, because it's a valid point of emphasis.  I'm glad they were able to make a game of it in the second half and I'm glad to see some of the rookies develop further.  I do think they were holding Blake back in the first half though.  It looked like they were trying to call plays to minimize his mistakes.  That's what you do with rookie QB's.

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