UNIVERSITY PARK, Texas — Brandon Crossley waited nearly ten months to play in front of his family in Dallas. He thought the opportunity would come earlier, and look a bit different, but Saturday night’s 50-7 win over Stephen F. Austin would suffice.
The Colorado State transfer’s interception — a play in which he ran through a ball that was kicked up off the ground by an unsuspecting Larry Jones III — served as the highlight of SMU’s final tune-up before conference play.
And even if Saturday’s victory will go down as a rather mundane one by SMU’s standards, for Crossley tonight’s celebration might be a little sweeter. Maybe even too sweet, as SMU’s entire bench received an “excessive celebration” penalty after the play.
“I mean he is like a receiver playing corner. It is not everyday that corners have that skill set. He plays with a lot of confidence,” SMU head coach Sonny Dykes said after the game. “When the ball is in the air he has a chance to make a play on it. That is just what he brings to us.”
The interception, too, emphasized the right parts of the game for SMU. The defense was the most dominant unit despite the 50-point outing.
The Mustangs compiled four sacks, 12 quarterback hurries and three forced fumbles. SFA would have been held scoreless barring a Trae Self leaping touchdown late in the third quarter.
The rest of the team, however, was pedestrian on this night.
The offense raced out to 29 unanswered points in the first 20 minutes of the game and then stalled out. Shane Buechele finished with 141 yards through the air, a career-low since coming to SMU. The receiving corp, with Rashee Rice and Tommy McIntyre, dropped a season-high five passes.
“I thought we played poorly offensively, especially in the third and fourth quarter. I felt like we didn’t execute at all even though our defense was lights out,” Dykes said.
SMU’s best offense remained large chunk plays — a defining characteristic of the 2020 offense thus far.
Ulysses Bentley IV opened the scoring with a 33-yard touchdown run on a lateral pass. Later on, Danny Gray found the end zone for the second time in as many games with another broken coverage on a screen play. Despite that, Gray finished with just two catches for 27 yards.
Even if Dykes wants to see more consistency from drive to drive, the speed of SMU’s offense overwhelmed its Southland Conference foe.
The question remains, however, as to whether SMU will have such ease on offense as it heads into the likes of a ranked Memphis and Cincinnati over the coming weeks. The speed and athleticism that SMU has banked on over the first month of the season will eventually level out.
“I think that is what we have to work on most as we go into some big teams,” Bentley said of the offense’s consistency.
The most reliable part of SMU’s game, which showed through again in the home-opener, was the rushing attack. The duo of Bentley IV and T.J. McDaniel combined for over 100 yards for the third consecutive week, this time completing the task by the end of the first half.
Both Bentley and McDaniel tallied 104 yards of offense. Bentley did so on six carries and with two touchdowns, keeping the pace of at least two scores in each outing this season. Through three games, he has tied the record set by Xavier Jones last season with seven touchdowns through the first three games of the season.
“I don’t really think about the numbers too much. I will say I have never averaged 17 yards a carry though,” Bentley said with a laugh.
The one thing that might be the most reliable to take into conference games, though, is not football related at all. With its first home game being played on Sept. 26, SMU feels as though the rhymum of the season has begun to settle in, even if it is unlike anything college football has seen.
With Memphis next, a team that has only played one game due to the coronavirus, that could be the most impactful measurement of the 3-0 start for SMU.
“I hate the term ‘new normal,’” Dykes said. “But I think with young men we can adapt really well. The first game just felt different. Tonight I think it did start to feel normal.”
