The Colonels football team continues to struggle to stop opponents from utilizing rushing attacks to control the game.
In the first three games of the season, Nicholls has given up an average of 395 yards per game and opposing offenses are averaging a staggering 8.1 yards a rush.
In the opening game of the season against the Oregon Ducks, Nicholls gave up 500 rushing and seven touchdowns on the ground. Two weeks ago against the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, the Ragin’ Cajuns complied 436 yards on the ground while picking up eight rushing touchdowns on their way to a 70-7 victory over the Colonels. The Colonels gave up 231 and 132 rushing yards in their wins against Western Michigan and Langston, respectively.
“It’s tremendous any time your team can run the football. It puts a bind on you. You start getting extra hats in the box and smaller bodies tackling bigger bodies. So obviously, that’ll be a wear-and-tear on guys. We need to do a better job up in the front seven getting the run stopped,” Nicholls defensive coordinator Jeremy Atwell said. “Teams that run the ball, it makes it easy for them. There’s that old cliché, when a team throws the ball three things can happen to them, and two of them are bad for the offense. So teams want to run the football, and right now we are giving up tons of running yards. It’s the second time I’ve been asked that question, and I’m not too concerned about it. As long as we can win games, help our team and contribute to helping our team win, that’s what we want to do.”
According to Atwell, injuries and the lack of gap integrity are the reasons for the high rushing numbers.
In football, gaps are the spaces between the offensive linemen. The offense looks to use these spaces as an aiming point for run plays while the defense attempts to fill them and get into the backfield. When the defense does not fill the gaps, they lose “gap integrity,” which opens running lanes for the offense.
Many teams rely on their defensive line first to fill those gaps.
“What the defensive line can do is play their technique, do what they are coached to do every day in practice and maintain better containment on their gaps,” defensive line coach Brandon Washington said. “Right now, we’ve had a couple bad games with gap integrity, had some pretty big offensive lines that we had to play and sometimes we got lost in there, peaking in different gaps and creating lanes [which] leads to a lot of rushing yards.”
The Colonels also believe that the talent of their first three opponents, who are members of the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Division I Football Bowl Subdivision, played a role in their difficulty stopping the run.
“If we wouldn’t play the number two team in the country, if we wouldn’t play another two-time bowl champion. They put up yards against everyone. You know, Oregon puts up 60 points against everyone they played this year. That or increase the amount of scholarships we got here. That would help out. Guys are doing what they are supposed to do. They keep fighting. They fought to end last Saturday, but it didn’t go our way,” Atwell said.
The Colonels will play their final non-conference game of the season against the Arkansas Tech Wonderboys (2-1) on Sept. 28 in Thibodaux for Homecoming.