DENTON, Texas – A 3rd-and-45 is hard to produce in a video game. Yet there was real-life SMU, facing one from the North Texas 46-yard line in the second quarter.
A play that gains 15 to 20 yards to set up a field goal try seems like the common sense call. But Matt Davis spun away from a rusher to heave a pass to the end zone, a Hail Mary in a non-Hail Mary situation. Improbably, it landed in the arms of Courtland Sutton, who reached over three Mean Green defensive backs to haul in the touchdown.
“There’s not many [plays] on your sheet when that happens,” SMU head coach Chad Morris said. “Throw it to your All-American is what you do.”
The unusual touchdown was one of only 13 completions for SMU quarterbacks in Saturday’s 34-21 win at North Texas. SMU used 243 first-quarter yards and two takeaways to built a 17-0 lead. Davis and running back Xavier Jones combined for 206 of SMU’s 272 rushing yards, but neither finished the game. Davis left after he was hit on a scramble in the third quarter. Jones exited after he sustained a non-contact injury on a 34-yard run that he would have otherwise taken for a touchdown.
Morris did not have any updates on Davis’ status, but said Jones sustained a cramp in his hamstring and should be fine.
Ben Hicks replaced Davis for the rest of the game. Hicks didn’t come in cold, though: he initially entered on SMU’s fourth offensive series in a planned substitution for Davis. On his second pass, he threw an 88-yard touchdown to Sutton, the first of Sutton’s three scores.
“We don’t know the situations that will arise throughout the course of the season,” Morris said. “We want to have a quarterback with some game experience when there’s a game on the line, not out of reach.”
After replacing Davis for good, Hicks went 4-for-7 for 57 yards. Those are the injury situations that Morris wants to be ready for by playing his backup earlier in games. He said it wouldn’t have been as easy a transition after Davis’ injury had Hicks not made the scheduled first-half appearance.
“I thought it helped him a lot,” Morris said. “He made a back-shoulder throw that looked like a veteran throw to Courtland Sutton. Could he have made that if it had been his first series, I don’t know. But it helped settle him down a little bit.”
Although SMU quarterbacks completed only 48 percent of their passes, they passed for 300 yards. Three plays accounted for 186 of them.
Saturday’s win snapped a couple disparaging streaks. SMU had not won a season opener since 2009, when it beat FCS Stephen F. Austin. The victory gives the Mustangs a winning record for the first time since December 2012, when they had a 7-6 record after beating Fresno State in the Hawaii Bowl. Saturday’s victory was the first time SMU has won a road season opener since 1986, when Chad Morris was a senior in high school.
“With this being one of the firsts for SMU, we’re going to celebrate this,” Morris said. “Our goal eventually is that this is the standard we set, that every game we step on the field, we expect to win. We do, but we need to gain the respect. That’s part of our ‘take back our respect’ tour that we’re on.”
