Offense rolling after slow start

By: Juan López

Tuesday, November 3, 2009 - 1:31 AM

Nevada quarterback Colin Kaepernick celebrates with teammates after a touchdown during Nevada’s 31-21 victory. Photo by Brian Bolton/The Nevada Sagebrush

Nevada football head coach Chris Ault has a saying for his offensive group.

“Defenses are allowed to stop us,” he tells them.

But as of late, not many of the Wolf Pack’s opponents have been following Ault’s statement.

In the past five games, all wins, Nevada has scored 236 points (47 per contest on average) and has rolled up 2,013 rushing yards (402.6 per game). While these are numbers that make the Wolf Pack one of the top offenses in the country, Nevada’s offense isn’t too far removed from being proclaimed a dud by many football followers.

In game one of the 2009 season, the Wolf Pack battled Notre Dame.

While few expected Nevada to come out with a win, even fewer prophesized the Wolf Pack’s offense would stall. But it did and Nevada was shut out for just the second time since 1981.

“I don’t think it was really that they did anything,” Nevada running back Vai Taua said after the loss on Sept. 5. “I think we did it to ourselves a lot of the time. We played very well and then got down by the goal line and just got first-game jitters, it seemed like.”

But after that game, the struggles continued.

Nevada scored just 41 points in its next two games, which left many of the team’s players disgruntled.

“We weren’t angry, just frustrated that we were moving the ball and not scoring points,” Nevada tight end Virgil Green said. “We knew what we were doing wrong and it just took us some time to fix it.”

A couple of major factors in the Wolf Pack’s struggles were the team’s inability to hold onto the ball and the rushing offense not being on par with the passing offense and vice versa.

TURNING OVER A NEW LEAF

Through the first three games, Nevada turned the ball over 10 times.

Then came the Oct. 3 game against the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

In a 63-point outburst, the Wolf Pack rushed for 559 yards, but still turned the ball over four times.

“The turnovers were a very hard thing to limit,” Nevada offensive coordinator Chris Klenakis said. “We were moving the ball against some pretty good teams, but when you can’t score and are turning the ball over, it doesn’t matter. The UNLV game was an anomaly when you think that we turned the ball over four times and got a lot of points, but we told ourselves that was not going to be acceptable from that point on.”

And Klenakis and his offensive unit have held true to their word.

In the last four games, Nevada is 4-0 and has turned the ball over just three times. This is a vast difference from the first four games, in which the Wolf Pack turned the ball over 14 times and went 1-3.

“The biggest thing I can think of as to why we’re doing so much better is (fewer) turnovers,” Klenakis said. “We’re doing a lot of drills in practice which emphasize ball security and they’re working.”

COMPLIMENTARY RUN AND PASS GAMES

Although the Wolf Pack’s rushing offense (best in the nation) gets much of the attention, Nevada players and coaches are quick to stress that it wouldn’t be anywhere near the level it’s at without the passing offense to balance it out.

“I think that’s another big thing which has improved,” Klenakis said. “The passing offense was sub-par early in the year, but that phase has gotten a lot better. It meshes well with the offense we have because we can run play-action passes off of our running game to keep defenses honest.”

While the passing completion percentage hasn’t changed much from the first three games to the last five (58.5 to 59.8), the yards per completion have jumped from 10 to 14.5.

“The passing game and running game coincide with each other,” Nevada senior tackle Alonzo Durham said. “It’s only natural that we started doing well once both of those areas started playing better.”

Juan López can be reached at jlopez@nevadasagebrush.com.