LSU: ONE forced punt!!! And that punt was due to back-to-back penalties that negated long plays. Our defense was truly terrible. Our offense never crossed mid-field, but our defense might actually have been worse than our offense. Some luck and a conservative game plan kept the score relatively low, but LSU should have scored 50+.

Wisconsin: two punts, both in garbage time. Wisconsin moved the ball at will, even with their 6th and 7th string RBs running up the gut for most of the second half. As bad as the LSU game was defensively, this game was worse. If Wisconsin kept its foot on the gas, they score 80+.

BSU: three forced punts, albeit, we forced two turnover-on-downs deep in our own territory.

MSU: three forced punts, two of them in garbage time.

ECU: three forced punts, two of them in garbage time.

So an average of less than 2 1/2 forced punts per game and very few turnovers. They were five TERRIBLE TERRIBLE games for our defense.

Then I started thinking about the Utah and USU games:

Utah: I thought our defense played well against Utah, but I went back and counted, and it looks like Utah had six penalties that erased first downs that then led directly to a punt within two plays. Does the defense get credit for all of Utah's drive-killing penalties? Our defense did not force a single punt without a drive-killing penalty.

USU: it's hard to tell how good our defense was because they gave up so many points on short fields. Look at USU's scoring drives: 9 plays - 75 yards; 2 plays - 43 yards; 4 plays to get into FG range before half expired; 4 plays - 9 yards for FG; 5 plays - 41 yards. So yard-wise, our defense had a decent game against USU, but who is to say USU wouldn't have driven the length of the field had they been forced to, because our defense sure didn't stop them on short fields.