Third down woes for Troy

By Drew Champlin

Published: November 4, 2008

TROY — Troy coaches and players roll their eyes when the topic of third down comes up.

They probably do the same now when the “3” shows up on the down marker.

The Trojans (5-3, 4-1 Sun Belt) couldn’t stop Louisiana-Monroe on third down much last week, nor could they advance much on third down in a 31-30 loss. Troy hosts Western Kentucky (2-7) Saturday at 2:30 p.m.

Troy is just 28-of-102 (27.45 percent) this year on third down conversions offensively.

That number ranks second-to-last in the country, something even Troy players weren’t aware of.

“I knew it was awful, but I didn’t know it was that awful,” quarterback Levi Brown said. “That’s bad. I don’t know why, but that’s bad. That makes a huge difference in the game, obviously. If we can’t convert on third downs, we can’t keep drives going.”

The Trojans went 3-of-10 on third downs against ULM. That’s coming off a 4-of-12 performance in a 45-17 win over North Texas, 0-of-11 in a 33-23 win over Florida International and 3-of-15 in a 30-17 win at Florida Atlantic.

“I didn’t know, but I know we hadn’t been converting,” left tackle Chris Jamison said. “I don’t know what the problem is, but I can say we’ve been working at it. We know we’ve got to get better so we can stay on the field more.”

Offensive coordinator Neal Brown looks at it another way. In the third quarter, Troy faced a 3rd and 1 at the ULM 45, but he called a pass play. When that was incomplete, he chose to go for it on fourth down and DuJuan Harris scored on a 45-yard run.
On fourth down, Troy is 11-of-14 this year, good for fourth in the country.

“Stats don’t lie,” Neal Brown said. “We haven’t been very good on third down, but that didn’t hurt us on Saturday.

“I don’t necessarily look at third down. I look at the last play of a series. We’re 11-of-14 on fourth down, so we’re really good on fourth down. When you look at third and fourth down, we’re at 30 to 40 percent, that’s where we were last year. It’s decent, not great. Would I like to be better? Sure, but it’s not why we’ve lost the games.”

Neal Brown pointed to Troy’s second quarter, where three possessions that started with great field position and should have ended with 21 points ended with just 10. One series ended on a controversial fumble call when officials ruled Troy’s Justin Bray lost the ball. It was reviewed, but coaches weren’t sure if the ball came out before Bray hit the ground, as it was called on the field and confirmed by the replay officials.

“The bottom line is the kid’s got to hold on to the ball, but it didn’t look like a fumble,” Neal Brown said. “What happens in the Sun Belt is that the video replay cameras are so bad that nobody gets a good shot of it.

“Our video does not have a great shot of it. You see the ball going down, and you can’t see it going out, and again the kid’s got to hold onto the ball, but it didn’t look like a fumble.”

Third down wasn’t kind to the defense either, as ULM converted 9-of-19 third downs and were on the field for nearly 40 minutes. The Trojans are 74th nationally there, stopping the opposition 40.15 percent of the time.

ULM converted a third-and-long on its first touchdown drive, four on a drive that put the Warhawks up 22-17 in the third quarter and two more on its go-ahead touchdown drive.

“It seemed like we couldn’t get a stop,” cornerback Jorrick Calvin said. “It seemed like everything we did, everything they did, they made plays and it wasn’t enough.

“I couldn’t really tell you why, but they just were executing. We had a lot of missed assignments and it didn’t go our way.”