SicEm365’s Jack Mackenzie answers the questions posed by Grayson Grundhoefer in the “Keys to the Game” for Baylor’s matchup against Arizona State.
1. Can Baylor put together a dominant and complete performance?
No, the Bears were unable to put together a complete performance against Oklahoma State. And shame on you for thinking they could! I joke … mostly. The defense was frustrating in the first half, allowing an Oklahoma State offense that had scored two touchdowns in the last 11 quarters to score a pair in the first half, along with a couple of field goals. That's a score on four out of seven drives for the Pokes. Oklahoma State also put up 349 yards on 6.7 yards per play in the first 30 minutes. Not good from Baylor’s perspective.
Then in the third quarter, when the Baylor defense locked in to force three straight punts to open the half (and a total of -5 yards for OSU), the Bears’ offense practically refused to take advantage. The Kobe Prentice 73-yard touchdown was great, but the subsequent fumble, punt and turnover on downs drives were possibly more frustrating than the defense’s first-half struggles. This is supposed to be the “good” unit. Convert any one of those drives and Baylor is up 42-20. Convert two and it’s 49-20. Convert all three, and it’s 56-20. The reason this performance didn’t feel dominant in the end was that the offense didn’t pull away when it needed to. A personal rule of thumb I have is “if the defense holds the opponent under 30, then the Bears should win the game.” In other words, if you expect dominance to come from the defense, you will only disappoint yourself.
Yes, that moved the goal posts from where Grayson set them, but we are different people, and I didn’t set them there. My prediction was 49-17 for the record, so I did expect better from the defense.
2. Will the Bears get back to running the football and then running it some more?
Yes and no. Baylor ran for 219 yards and 5.6 yards per carry on Saturday in Stillwater. The Bears ran for 343 yards and 9.0 yards per carry on them last season. The math works out to about the same number of attempts in the 2024 matchup as the 2025 matchup, so it's a flat-out worse performance against a worse team.
There are multiple reasons why this is the case, but at the end of the day, the offensive line is not generating enough push. Both the line and the running back room are dealing with injuries. Bryson Washington went to the locker room multiple times during the third quarter, in fact. But if the offensive line, regardless of the five guys playing across it, was generating enough movement, then Caden Knighten and Michael Turner would have been able to carry the load just fine to hit the gaudy numbers of 2024. The numbers were good, don’t get me wrong (Knighten had 5 carries, 81 yards, 16.2 average; Turner had 13 carries, 47 yards, 3.6 average), but the bigger picture remains. Oklahoma State is not a good team, and Baylor did not dominate that poor defense the way you want to see from a conference title hopeful. This was not an imposition of will, and therefore, the Bears also did not even get to the “running it some more” part.
3. Can the defense prove last week was not a fluke?
Last week’s performance against Arizona State looks like a fluke right now. Those with more hope will point to the third quarter, where the Bears gave up just 55 yards on 14 plays and a touchdown. The yards look good, but extrapolate the points across four quarters and you’re left with 28. Now, if you offered me 12 games of exactly 28 points allowed each game, I’d take it in a heartbeat with the talent on Baylor’s offense — see my rule of thumb in answer No. 1. But that is the key here. There is no promise of this, and one week after holding what metrics show is a very good offense to 27 points, the Bears gave up the same mark to an incredibly worse offense statistically. Again, the hopeful will focus on how Doug Meacham threw the kitchen sink and maybe some other appliances at the Bears in terms of play calling, but Baylor was supposed to have the talent advantage to make the scheme negligible.
4. Can Sawyer Robertson get the deep passing game back on track?
Heading into the Oklahoma State game, Sawyer Robertson was 28-for-64 on intermediate or deep pass attempts. With his 11-for-18 performance in Stillwater, his season-long completion percentage went up from 43.8% to 47.6%. Plus, all four of Robertson’s touchdown passes were of intermediate or deep length.
So, Robertson is on track to get back to the level he was at last year on these throws, which was 51% completion on 140 attempts, and 19 touchdowns to five interceptions. The touchdown and interception numbers this year are 13 TDs and three picks through five games.
Robertson has every chance to get in a zone and top the numbers he put up last year, but he needed a game like Oklahoma State to at least get right, and he did.
Not to go unmentioned, the official game book lists nine deep attempts by Robertson. There were three completions, and three of the six incompletions were penalties on the defense. Note that the game book and PFF are rarely in perfect alignment on stats.
So my verdict is that the deep passing game is back on track.
