After bye week and intense practices, Mercer to host Wofford

Mercer head football coach Mike Jacobs said practice last week was a little different for his players.

The Bears donned full pads at practice for the first time in a while — an unsurprising development given Mercer’s somewhat shocking loss to Presbyterian College at the end of August, but a calculated move by Jacobs nonetheless.

“They have to respond. I want to see who’s willing to put their face on people and who loves football,” the head coach said. “I want to see who’s gonna gripe and complain, and who’s gonna go out there and get to work.”

It was a direct approach after Jacobs and the Bears lost 15-10 on Aug. 30 to a Presbyterian team that plays without scholarships in the Pioneer Football League conference of the FCS. 

The head coach said he probably took the loss harder than he should have. That sentiment was felt by most of the team and its staff.

“Nobody’s satisfied with how we coached, how we played, how we executed,” Jacobs said. “When you lose a game that you feel like you should’ve played better in, you look at everything you’re doing. It starts with us as a coaching staff. It’s our job to make sure that our players are physically, mentally and emotionally ready. There weren’t any indicators, I thought we had a good week of practice before the game.

“But carrying it over into game day, what we’re seeing is we had a number of mistakes made. We’re playing with great effort, but we’re missing a few things.”

One of those missing pieces, it seems, is offensive consistency. Quarterback DJ Smith, who started seven games for Mercer last year before an injury sidelined him for the stretch run of the Bears’ program-defining season, has not lit up the stat sheet the way he did in those games.

Mercer’s sluggish performance against the Blue Hose, though, was less because of one larger problem and more a result of several mistakes and smaller shortcomings, Jacobs explained. The Bears struggled specifically on third and fourth downs, for instance, while allowing Presbyterian to succeed on those downs.

“We’ve been anemic on offense and we have to get it going. The best way I can describe it is we’re a bit out of rhythm, it’s like me dancing at a wedding,” Jacobs said. “We’re not on schedule on early downs, which has presented a lot of third-down-and-long situations for us.”

Unexpected though the defeat was, Mercer still has plenty of time to improve. The Southern Conference schedule still looms ahead.

“We’re not chicken little, the sky is not falling. There’s a bunch of football left to play. We still have great players, we have good kids that really care,” Jacobs said. “We understand no one’s happy. The fans certainly have that right and it means we have high expectations.”

Jacobs said the team’s bye week over Labor Day weekend was a perfect chaser for a rather unexpected loss. The difficult practices come with the goal of putting the Bears’ squad into more game-like situations. The roster is made up of much younger, less experienced players than last year’s team.

The top two tacklers in Mercer history, linebackers Isaac Dowling and Ken Standley, both departed. The Bears’ starting quarterback for the second half of last season, freshman Whit Newbauer, transferred to Oklahoma. Star running back Dwayne McGee graduated.

“Last year we had a group of individuals who were probably functioning at a masters or even a doctoral level. Right now we’re at Math 100,” Jacobs said. “Right now we have to make sure we’re using practice to put them in as many stressful situations as we can.”  

Presbyterian going out and beating another Southern Conference opponent — this time it was Furman, which the Blue Hose defeated 39-38 in overtime last week — may have also soothed the sting of Mercer’s loss.

Jacobs is optimistic with the Wofford Terriers coming to Macon this week for the Bears’ first Southern Conference game. The head coach sees a lot of his own team when looking at Wofford.

“Wofford’s been a bit of the same way,” Jacobs said. “They’ve played really good defense, but they’ve not produced a ton on offense yet. They’re certainly more than capable. We’ll have quite a challenge coming in. As you see kind of throughout the country and certainly throughout the conference, I think everyone’s going through some growing pains.”

The Terriers are 0-2 after losses to two highly-touted FCS teams, South Carolina State and Richmond. Wofford nearly won the former of the two games in zany fashion — they had only 135 yards of total offense but got touchdowns from a kick return, a blocked punt and a safety before giving up the go-ahead touchdown to the Bulldogs with 1:29 left to play.

The Richmond game was not much better. The Terriers managed 158 yards of offense and failed again to score an offensive touchdown, instead finding the end zone thanks to a 72-yard pick six by safety C.J. Coombes.

Coombes was awarded the SoCon Defensive Player of the Week award for his efforts. 

The defensive and special teams play from Wofford so far, along with the struggles of both offenses, could foreshadow a defensive stalemate between the Terriers and Bears this weekend.

“They got a lot of veterans back on defense. The defensive line is doing a nice job, they move around quite a bit,” Jacobs said. “I think they have one of the better safeties in the country … you’re seeing them make it very tough on people to gain yardage, their games have been close.”

Mercer is set to take on Wofford at 6 p.m. at Five Star Stadium in Macon on Saturday.