The Pullman Effect

SMU Collapses Late At Washington State

DALLAS – The Mustangs dropped an ugly one in overtime Saturday, 30-27, to a foundering Washington State club that appeared for three quarters to be begging to be stomped.

Probably no one, including the Mustangs with a cozy 24-7 lead, saw it coming - at least not until the end of the third quarter when a Bo Levi Mitchell pass was returned 52 yards for a touchdown followed by a 67-yarder for six more eight minutes later.

Mitchell - who piled up a gaudy 424 passing yards and a school-record tying 40 completions - staggered to the finish with two more picks, the last on SMU’s lone offensive play in overtime.

Though he fought an intestinal infection last week, Mitchell said Monday that fatigue was not a factor in the interceptions. “Not at all,” he said. “It’s just my mind got lazy. You get ahead like that …. The feeling has to be, ‘OK let’s go get more. Let’s fight and get more. Let’s keep getting more points.’”

But Mitchell admitted he wasn’t feeling well at WSU and battling. “My mentality is, ‘I’m not coming out,’” he said. “I’m going to play the whole game. I felt like [deleted], but that’s fine. That’s not an excuse for anything. I just kept fighting through it and kept telling the guys, ‘Let’s go. Ya’ll take over right now. This is ya’lls.’”

“You have to fight through whatever it is,” Jones said later, by phone. “Sometimes you’re not feeling good, you’ve got a sore leg, a sore shoulder. It doesn’t matter, you’ve got to play.”

Jones said at this point he can’t envision any scenario where Mitchell would not be the starter, barring injury, and he doesn’t think the team has lost any confidence in Mitchell.

“The bottom line is, how long has it been since this school played for 3-0?” Jones said.

When asked, Jones said Mitchell is better at this point in this career than Timmy Chang, the NCAA all-time career yardage leader Jones coached at Hawaii.

Mitchell said Jones had positive comments for him after Saturday’s game. “He just came up to me and said, ‘You played a great game. You made all the throws. You made some throws that we haven’t even seen before.’ So, that’s the good things, but at the same time he said, ‘You’re going to grow a lot from this game, being your first overtime game.’”

“I think I made one bad read the entire game,” Mitchell said. “I’ve got to take that read out of the way and the game’s over.”

Mitchell said he still has the team’s confidence. “Oh, yeah, definitely. They know what’s going on. They see me at practice every day working my ass off. They know how this offense is going to work. They know that I’m the guy that’s out there that’s going to lead them to where we need to go.”

“I tell them that all the time, ‘I’m going to take ya’ll where you want to go. Follow me.’”

“The main thing is everybody’s got to realize that things are going to happen and we’ve got to face adversity. We’ve got to face it straight on, head on, and just kind of fight back.”

Second-guessers

Besides questioning Jones’ sticking with Mitchell after the second pick-six on Saturday, certain erudite Ponyfans.com posters have pondered why Shawnbrey McNeal, who closed out the last two wins with touchdown runs, wasn’t given a shot from WSU’s 18-yard-line with five minutes left and a seven-point lead? “Because,” Jones said, “if we threw an accurate pass we would have ended the game right there.”

Emmanuel Sanders, who set a new SMU career receiving yardage mark (2,844) on Saturday with 18 catches and 178 yards, said he’s ready to move on after WSU. “I slept on it, thought about it,” he said. “Now I’m past it. Now I’ve just got to pick my teammates up … and get everybody back healthy, get in the weight room, try and get stronger this week and get started preparing for TCU.”

“Bo’s going to bounce back versus TCU,” Sanders said. “I think he’s going to have a great performance. He knows what he has to do.”

Terrance Wilkerson had a breakout game at WSU with two touchdown catches and career-highs in yardage (113) and catches (7). Cole Beasley tied his career-high with eight catches.

“We can still improve,” Wilkerson said of the receivers. “We made some big plays, but some other plays got away from us.”

“Some of the times we ran the wrong route for Bo and he kind of didn’t know what to do with the ball just because we were messing up. In this offense, everybody has to be on the same page. … We’ve got to be in sync.”

Wilkerson said losing a game you dominated for three quarters is the worst way to lose.

“It’s real tough,” he said. “Going into that game everybody on the sidelines felt like we were going to win. Some unfortunate things happened.”

He added the team would rather play this week than sit, “just to get the taste out of our mouth.”

Reinebold’s Take

Receivers Coach Jeff Reinebold said the team itself will control the loss’s impact.

“It will affect us how we allow it to affect us,” he said. “If we choose to feel sorry for ourselves and lick our wounds, it can become divisive. It’s the same thing for any football team that loses a football game. Ours is not different.”

“We lost a very tough game on the road against a good team that would have given us an opportunity to be 3-0, but we’re not. We’re 2-1 and we have to live and build on that, and live in the reality of what we are, and not start pointing fingers and saying, ‘Poor me,’ and all the other things that can happen. And that has to start, number one, with the staff.”

“The kids will be and do what we allow or demand that they be and do. That never changes. What they see in us is what they’ll embody. I think that’s one of the reasons why June’s had so much success. He doesn’t change. Big win, big loss, it’s all the same. He’s going to be who he is and we’re going to do things our way.”

Is there ever concern the team could focus too much on goals such as winning one of three road games or a minimum six games for a bowl and perhaps shoot for that?

“No, I don’t think so,” Reinebold said. “We don’t limit ourselves and say, ‘OK, if we win one of three that’s good enough.’ We want to win every time we go out and play the game. To quote [former NFL coach] Herman Edwards, ‘You play to win the game.’ The bottom line is that every time we compete, every down we compete, every rep in practice we compete, we’re competing to win.”

Notes:

*Interceptions by linebacker Chase Kennemer and Robert Mojica brought SMU’s total for the season to 11. The Mustangs lead the nation with 14 turnovers gained.

*Cornerback Bryan McCann had a team-high 9 tackles, tying his career-high.

*Kicker Matt Szymanski hit field goals of 29 and 45 yards and is a perfect 3-3 on the year. He’s also made 12-12 PATs.

*Emmanuel Sanders and Terrance Wilkerson are SMU’s first two 100-yard receivers in a game since last September’s 34-27 loss at Tulane, when Sanders and Aldrick Robinson combined for the mark.

*Sanders, this week’s Conference USA’s Offensive Player of the Week, had a long visit with a Baltimore Ravens scout Monday after conditioning drills. (NFL scouts are frequent visitors of Sanders these days.)

*SMU’s previous leader in career receiving yards was Emanuel Tolbert (1976-79) with 2,784.

*The Mustangs’ next game is Saturday, October 3, at TCU at 7 p.m. The Horned Frogs play at Clemson this week while the Mustangs sit.