The Navy football team was on a roll after crucial American Athletic Conference victories over Houston and Memphis. That roll came to an end on Friday night, as the Mids fell to the USF Bulls, 52-45.

Strangely, the game was a statistical dead heat. Both teams had over 600 yards of offense. Will Worth set a school record for total yards in a game. Navy even had more first downs than USF, although that will happen when the latter is scoring on one- and two-play drives. Regardless, it wasn’t a terrible day for the Navy offense. If you were told before the game that the Mids would score 45 points, you’d probably have felt pretty good about the team’s chances.

The problem is that all those numbers were back-loaded for Navy and front-loaded for USF. The Bulls had 253 yards in the first quarter alone and raced to a 28-0 lead. That’s what happens when you average 18 yards per play, I suppose. It was too deep of a hole for the Mids to climb out from, although they certainly put forth considerable effort in the attempt.

With the first quarter being the disaster that it was, I’m going to take a different approach to this week’s debrief. I’ll focus on how the game got out of hand so quickly by looking at the gameplans on both sides of the ball, and how that led to a 28-0 deficit.