Entering Saturday’s meeting with Northern Arizona, it seemed that the season could not get much worse for Portland State football—then the Vikings suffered a jaw-dropping 62-14 loss to the Lumberjacks.
Northern Arizona boasted a ferocious defense, so it wasn’t expected that the anemic Viking offense would put up many points. The Viking defense, lousy through the past four games, wouldn’t be expected to contain the Lumberjack offense, but the Lumberjack offense has often struggled within itself this season.
Saturday’s loss—the largest point differential the Viks have experienced all season in conference play—closes their season at 2-9 overall and 1- 7 in conference play. This matches their dismal record from last year when they tallied their worst record in 27 years.
The win for the Lumberjacks helped them out of the red, and closes their season with a 6-5 overall record and 4-4 in the Big Sky.
The PSU offense—which hasn’t seemed able to find its footing since junior quarterback Connor Kavanaugh went out with an injury against Eastern Washington three weeks ago—could get nothing going through the first three quarters on Saturday. They scored two touchdowns in the fourth quarter, but the Lumberjacks answered those points with 14 of their own.
The Viks were only able to get 15 first downs throughout the entire game. Junior running back Cory McCaffrey has been a bright spot for the Viks in an otherwise dreary season. However, an injury to McCaffrey in the beginning of the game left them with a huge hole to fill.
Without their key rusher, Portland State’s running game sputtered. The Viking average of 2.5 yards per rush was its lowest of the season against a conference opponent. In four of their last six losses, the Viks have had yards per rush averages of at least 5.4 yards.
The Lumberjack running game, however, found some serious legs. They had four rushing touchdowns with three of those coming on long runs of 49, 75 and 82 yards. They had 394 rushing yards with 219 of those coming from one Lumberjack running back, Giovannie Dixon. The Lumberjacks garnered a whopping 10.9 yards per rush average.
While the Viking defensive front was dismal against the Lumberjack running game, the Viking secondary wasn’t able to hold up against the Lumberjack’s passing game. NAU quarterback Michael Herrick is a good passer by any measure, but he had a phenomenal day.
Herrick was very accurate, going 18 of 22 for 261 yards with four touchdowns and no interceptions. In the end, the Lumberjacks had 655 yards of total offense compared to the Vikings’ 296 yards.
Senior quarterback Tygue Howland, who is in his sixth season with the Viks, started his third game of the season. He finished the game completing 16 of 31 attempts for 192 yards. He also kept the ball and ran seven times but netted only 12 yards. Harland sustained four sacks from an aggressive Lumberjack defensive front.
The Lumberjacks only had to punt the ball four times over the course of the game.
It would be easy to blame the loss on mistakes. The Vikings had four of them, three fumbles and an interception by senior quarterback Tygue Howland, and lost three of those. The Lumberjacks turned all of those mistakes into points. Coming off of four turnovers in a row, three of them in the second half, the Lumberjacks went into halftime with a 35-point lead.
However, the Lumberjacks committed plenty of mistakes of their own. They too had four turnovers and they lost them all. It was just an ineffective Viking offense that could not turn them into points. Three of the fumbles came in succession during the third and fourth quarter giving the Viks field position in opponent territory, but the Viks could only turn one of them into points.
This was the last game of the season for the Viks and the Lumberjacks. This can’t be the ideal way to end the season and there is no doubt this loss will linger. It will be nine long months until Viking fans will get a glimpse of what head coach Nigel Burton has done to fix the deficiencies of this team. There is no doubt he can do it; there is real talent on this team, but he’s going to need some time, as evidenced by this season. ?