Dropped passes hurt both UCF, Justin Holman in passing game

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Bryce Brimhall / Valencia Voice

D’erren Wilson has caught eight receptions for 118 yards and three touchdowns so far this season.

In the sixth game of the season the UCF Knights could not capitalize on the opportunities that they had and throughout the game they could not execute on offense nor defense.

There were wide open dropped passes, missed blocking assignments, poor getting off the blocks, poorly timed throws, and not being able to make tackles. After four weeks UCF quarterback Justin Holman made his debut after suffering an injury early in the second game of the season against Stanford. He came out of the gate firing on all cylinders completing 9 of 13 on his attempts for 70 yards and his longest being 25 in the first quarter.

However, mental mistakes plagued Holman for the rest of the game. He missed timed his throws on open receivers and made some horrible throws into traffic which the Huskies were able to capitalize on.

Overall Holman finished with 27 on 50 attempts with three interceptions and one touchdown. It wasn’t the ideal comeback that Holman had in mind, but hopefully after shaking off some of the rust he will be able to bounce back and lead the Knights to their first win next week against Temple.

That wasn’t the only problem for the Knights. The team had a hard time sustaining their drives by only completing 2 out of 12 on third downs, and on the opportunities they did have the Knights just could not make the plays. UCF wide receiver D’erren Wilson had a couple costly drops, one that would have resulted in a touchdown and the other that would have given UCF good field position in UConn territory.

Knights’ running back C.J. Jones was running hard and putting together a solid game before getting injured in the middle of the third quarter. The offensive line was up and down when it came to protection and they will have to work on technique moving forward throughout the season.

On the other hand, the defense had its fair share of problems as well. There seemed to be a lot of miscommunication on the field as UConn quarterback Bryant Shirreffs seemed to have his way as he dissected the UCF defense for 256 yards on 16 out of 22 attempts and one score through the air, and another on the ground. The Knights’ defense struggled to get to the quarterback as they could not generate much of a pass rush on Shirreffs.

Furthermore, the defense had a hard time with the basic fundamentals such as staying on top of their man and not being able to follow through with their tackling. Overall this was a game that UCF would like to forget and move on from.

Although there were a lot of mistakes there were also positive notes from the game and the Knights will look to build upon that as they strive for that first win against Temple on Saturday.