Sports - Colleges

Monday, Nov. 02, 2009

Fedora focuses on special teams miscues

HATTIESBURG — Southern Miss’ 50-43 loss at nationally-ranked Houston featured breakdowns on both sides of the football.

But the biggest reason for a loss, one that left the Golden Eagles at 5-4 overall and 3-2 in Conference USA, occurred among the special teams.

Speaking Monday during his weekly press conference at the Athletic Center, Southern Miss coach Larry Fedora pointed to a seven-point swing thanks to the Golden Eagles misfiring in the kicking game.

The Cougars blocked two extra point attempts, and Daniel Hrapmann missed a third-quarter field goal with Southern Miss trailing 30-22 after the offense held the ball for nearly eight minutes to open the second half.

The remaining two points came when the Cougars returned a missed extra point attempt by Hrapmann for two points.

“Both (extra points) were low kicks,’’ Fedora said. “There was no penetration on either one of them. They just jumped up on the other side of the ball and blocked it. When you go out there, you’ve got to put the ball through the uprights. That’s the job.

“It’s a whole different ball game… You don’t know what’s going to happen or what the dynamics of the ball game are going to be if you just take care of those little things. You can’t miss extra points. Those will always come back to bite you.’’

Despite the kicking game blues, Fedora saw several good things as the Golden Eagles enter their bye week.

First, Southern Miss bounced back from a 40-22 fourth-quarter deficit to tie the game at 43-43 with under a minute left.

The offense saw Martevious Young throw for 334 yards and three touchdowns and Damion Fletcher of Biloxi rushed for 136 yards en route to 608 total yards.

The bad?

Houston only needed 57 seconds to score the game-winning touchdown.

The Cougars finished with 750 yards of total offense, with quarterback Case Keenum throwing for 559 yards and five touchdowns.

“Anytime you play a really good football team, you’ve got to get on all cylinders in all the areas and we didn’t do that,” Fedora said.

“On offense, obviously there were some drives we would have liked to have finished off. I would’ve liked to have seen what would’ve happened if we hadn’t turned that ball over right before the half. We’ve got some things that we have to work on. We ran the ball like we thought we would be able to and thought we did a pretty good job of taking care of the football.

“Defensively, I thought we played well in the first half considering who we were playing. In the third quarter we held them to three punts. (In the) fourth quarter, we gave up something like 218 yards on eight plays. So, we pretty much fell apart in the fourth quarter. That was the game.’’

Following the bye week, Southern Miss travels to Marshall next Saturday before coming home to face Tulsa. The season-finale is at East Carolina on Nov. 28.

Currently, East Carolina leads the East Division at 4-1 followed by Southern Miss, Marshall, Central Florida and UAB — all at 3-2.

“Every game is a playoff game now,’’ Fedora said. “We’ve got to take care of business and it all starts with Marshall. The great thing about it, there is only one team in the East that only has one loss and we still have to play them. In a sense, we control our own destiny and maybe end up playing Houston for the conference championship.”