Molnar said "nothing was off the table" after Saturday's loss to Vanderbilt.
Michael Cox gets tackled during Saturday's loss to Vanderbilt.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Maybe it’s unfair to be frustrated.
Against a team (Vanderbilt) from a conference (the SEC) where defense is king, maybe it’s unreasonable to judge the offense of the University of Massachusetts football team — even if it did get smoked 49-7.
After all, they’re just a team in transition, struggling to keep their head above the water in the newfound deep end that is the Football Bowl Subdivision.
But then again, maybe it’s not. We should expect progress from game to game. We saw it for the first five weeks of the season, especially from redshirt freshman quarterback Mike Wegzyn. You could see, without the use of any sort of fancy electron microscope, that the Minutemen were getting better.
It was easy to get behind them, then. It’s not so easy now, especially with a defense that has kept them in their last two games for a half despite zero offensive production either week.
One person is definitely frustrated, and that’s coach Charley Molnar.
Billed as an offensive guru imported from Notre Dame, purveyor of high-powered systems that brought Central Michigan and Cincinnati to unprecedented heights, Molnar has watched his offense sputter — especially since the calendar flipped to October.
You can’t question Molnar’s energy, but for the first time this year, he seemed to be legitimately frustrated with the lack of punch from his unit, and especially Wegzyn.
For the second week in a row, he yanked Wegzyn from the game after a third-quarter interception that turned into six points for the opponent. Asked if leaving games on such a note would leave a bad taste in his young quarterback’s mouth, Molnar responded with the most bite we’ve seen from him all season.
“Let me say this, the bigger detriment is me finishing the game with a bad taste in my mouth,” he said. “He had plenty of opportunities to make plays throughout the game. We had open guys, had protection, didn’t make enough plays.”
Whether it’s completely Wegzyn’s fault is up for debate, but what’s not are his numbers: 36-for-71, 273 yards, zero touchdowns, and three interceptions in his last three games.
To be fair, his backup, when called upon, hasn’t been a world beater. True freshman A.J. Doyle is 17-for-33 with four interceptions. He threw his first career touchdown Saturday night, in what Molnar said was his best game of the season.
“Even in spite of some of the errors that A.J. made today, he played better football than he’s played in a game,” Molnar said. “A.J. missed an opportunity for a wide open throw for probably a touchdown. They both missed things. If I could just tell you how scaled back the offense was, and has been, nothing has advanced much beyond spring practice. It’s just bread and butter, nuts and bolts type stuff right now.”
Clock management at the end of the first half potentially cost UMass points.
Trailing 21-0 with less than a minute to go in the first half, UMass was driving into Vanderbilt territory with one timeout remaining when Wegzyn rushed for two yards to the Commodores 44-yard line. As the seconds ticked away, Molnar made no motion for a timeout, instead allowing 15 valuable seconds to run off.
That paled in comparison, though, to what would happen next. After a Vanderbilt penalty set UMass up at the Commodores 34-yard line, the Minutemen called a screen with less than 13 seconds on the clock. With eight seconds left, Michael Cox was tackled.
The eight seconds ran off the clock. No timeout was called.
“We ran the play, there was a quick discussion,” Molnar said. “I’ll take the blame on that. I just didn’t call it fast enough.”
Another thing keeping production down Saturday was penalties, which seem to have been a constant all season long. The Minutemen were flagged for 12 men on the field Saturday, along with too many men in the back field, procedural penalties that shouldn’t occur in week one, let alone week nine.
“I thought it was more of us stopping ourselves,” Wegzyn said. “I think that’s been something that’s happening too much.”
The 12 men on the field call came on a mental error by a player Molnar didn’t want to identify, but said has made repeated errors that haven’t been corrected.
“I know that I see the errors that he makes. He’s a try-hard kid, he’s a good football player, and he’s one of the best we have at his particular position, so we’ll play through him, and try to minimize the mistakes,” Molnar said. “That one just happened to catch us. He just froze.”
Nine weeks in, this team is still “just freezing.”
Right now it looks completely frozen. Molnar said it was too early to tell, but wasn’t willing to rule out anything — including a quarterback change — to get it to thaw.
“That would be way, way premature to even think about that,” he said. “I’ve got to see where Mike’s performance was. Sometimes you’re the victim of circumstances, and sometimes you create your own. I’m not in a hurry to make a change at that position, but certainly everything is on table. When you’re 0-for, everything is on the table.”
Everything better be, because if this offense doesn’t improve, the Minutemen could find themselves “0-for” at the end of it all.