After tough loss at Samford, Mercer returns home for crucial SoCon game with Western Carolina

Every football team has good luck and bad luck.

It’s the nature of the game. Each season will bring its fair share of ups and downs. So, then, a 6-0 football team like Mercer, which had trounced many of its foes thus far and soared in national FCS rankings, was perhaps due for some tough bounces.

Bad luck alone could not explain the horrid start the Bears suffered against Samford in Birmingham last week, however, as Mercer came away from the road tilt with its first loss of the season Saturday after going down 28-0 just halfway through the opening quarter.

The score ended up 55-35 at the final whistle after the Bears mounted a valiant comeback effort late, but five turnovers including a pick six ultimately doomed then-No. 7 Mercer to an ugly loss to an unranked conference opponent.

Some early issues — a bad punt after the Bears’ first possession, a fumble from quarterback D.J. Smith on another early sequence and other miscues — could have been bad luck. But a flat offense that tallied -17 yards in its first three drives and gave the ball to the Bulldogs inside the Mercer 30-yardline on their first three sequences certainly seemed avoidable.

So the question loomed large, as it would over any undefeated team’s first loss, and really most losses in general: what went wrong?

Before he fielded a single question at Monday’s press conference, head coach Mike Jacobs began with his own prognoses.

“Obviously, certainly not the result any of us wanted or expected going over to Birmingham last week,” Jacobs told the media. “I think you guys have been around me long enough now that we talk pretty consistently about things that we have to do week in and week out to be successful in a game, and it starts with controlling the line of scrimmage.”

The stat sheet backed Jacobs up, as the Bears struggled to establish any run game early and finished with 39 rushing yards. Granted, they held Samford to only 68 rushing yards, but the Bulldogs’ passing game became so prolific that the run game hardly mattered.

“Some of that is due to the nature of us being behind and having to pass the ball with the deficit we were in,” Jacobs said. “We didn’t handle the line of scrimmage, obviously gave up six sacks, that affected the outcome of the game tremendously.”

The next two bullet points on Jacobs’ list were protecting the football and taking the ball away. In one of these categories, Mercer succeeded — the Bears snagged three interceptions, one of the reasons they stayed in the game for part of the second half.

But Mercer also gave the ball away five times, including two interceptions and three fumbles.

“We had some takeaways, really at some critical times that gave us an opportunity to get back into the game,” Jacobs said. “But then we obviously had five of our own… one is too many, but five is almost insurmountable.

Jacobs then talked about special teams being off-kilter as well, though he acknowledged that special teams were not quite as off as the rest of the team.

At the end of the day, though, the Bears just had a bad game.

“All those things build up to, it’s on me to make sure that we are physically, mentally and emotionally ready to play on game day, and I thought we came out a little bit flat,” Jacobs said. “We don’t want to reinvent the wheel when we’ve still had a tremendous amount of success because you had one poor day. You hope it’s more of an anomaly than something consistent.”

The tough loss certainly put a damper on Mercer’s historically hot start, but the Bears are still 6-1. And the defeat in Birmingham had its positives. After going down 28-0, Mercer fought back and came within two scores at one point in the second half.

“Even with as poorly as we played in pockets of that game, the thing I’m most encouraged by is that there’s a lot of teams that would have shut it down, and that thing could’ve gotten way way out of hand,” Jacobs said. “We challenged our kids at halftime… you saw us playing one play at a time, we started to chip away on it… we played really well in the third quarter, but it’s just not enough in the SoCon.”

Mercer’s offense had a great day in the second half, all things considered. The Bears ended up with 391 total yards. Wide receiver Kelin Parsons had his best day at Mercer so far, finishing with 106 receiving yards.

As far as hammering out the kinks, Jacobs took some advice from a guy plenty of Mercer fans are probably familiar with.

“Very few of these things that hurt us were effort related. There’s a bunch of technical things that need to be cleaned up… Kirby Smart said the other day, ‘Habits are everything.’ The only place you get to work on your habits is in practice,” Jacobs said. “So we’ll work in practice… we’ll get all that stuff squared away, because we know what’s on the line. The beauty of this is, it’s not a fatal flaw. Everything is still in front of us.”

Mercer needs to bounce back quickly, as this weekend’s game is pivotal for the Southern Conference standings. The only undefeated team left in the conference, Western Carolina, visits Macon this week for a game that could eventually be the difference between first and second place.

For every bad bounce that went Mercer’s way against Samford, the Catamounts got a great break in their game Saturday. Western Carolina defeated Furman 52-20 and racked up more than 800 yards of offense along the way. 

Mercer’s secondary, which got burned by Samford in the 55-35 loss, will now have to contend with Catamounts quarterback Cole Gonzales, who finished the game against Furman with a whopping 620 passing yards and five touchdowns.

The Bears clash with Western Carolina at 3:30 p.m. Saturday at Five Star Stadium.