Last week, ACU walked away from Lubbock with a moral victory, which in sports usually doesn’t mean much, but after the lethargic start the Wildcats had against Lamar in the season opener, it felt like something we all needed to see.

Coming into Saturday, expectations were sky-high against what has become a football rivalry of sorts. ACU had won 10 in a row at home and had beaten SFA in Abilene just last year. But the Lumberjacks took down ACU in Nacogdoches in the second round of the FCS Playoffs. The stakes were high, fans were excited, and ACU even rolled out a new uniform for the game, a full blackout.

But, to put it mildly, they fell flat on their faces.

The first quarter was pretty boring.

Three punts, a turnover on downs, and a fumble. (Oh my!) The fumble was John David Black’s, on an 11-yard scramble, and SFA took over at the ACU 47 and did nothing with it.

Then the Wildcats got the ball with 6:05 left in the first at their own 9-yard line, went the length of the field, and took the first lead of the game at 7-0 on a 6-yard pass from Black to tight end Itty Henry. Things really looked good at this point. The defense had played an excellent game so far, and now the offense looked in rhythm.

Then the second quarter started, and everything fell apart.

It took SFA 41 seconds to erase all of it. Three plays, 75 yards, finished by a 69-yard touchdown from Gavin Rutherford to Bugs Mortimer. From there, it was a 13-yard touchdown to Gerard Edimo, then field goals of 26 and 51 from Carlos Alvarado, and a 7-0 lead had become a 20-7 halftime deficit.

The Lumberjacks scored 26 unanswered on the night, 20 of them in that quarter. After the 91-yard drive, ACU punted six times over the final three quarters. The offense wasn’t just bad; it was putrid. Any momentum built over the last five quarters, from Lubbock to Abilene, was gone.

Here’s how head coach Keith Patterson opened his press conference: “We’re still trying to find an identity on both sides of the football. We don’t do anything really, really well.”

Now, there is some context. Alex Broome was held out. Patterson said Broome suited up and wanted to play, and that he told him no. “He had a strange injury. I don’t want to elaborate on it. He’s a tough kid; he wanted to play, but I said no.”

Makenzie McGill rolled his ankle on his first carry, and after that it was Deonte Dean and not much else. “Then McKenzie rolled his ankle the first carry that he had, and so it got pretty thin in a hurry.” Patterson had this to say about Dean, ACU’s third-string back. “I thought DeeDee ran the ball hard. You could tell he’s a little bit green, but I did think he ran the ball hard.”

The quarterback

John David Black went 21 of 38 for 267 yards with a touchdown and an interception. Those numbers look fine. He did not play well.

He looked outmatched and out of sorts against the SFA defense all night, and he turned it over twice.

The first was the fumble, on a big hit while he was running, which Patterson described about as well as I could: “He pulls the ball down, makes a nice run, and he’s carrying the ball in one hand. Good grief. You’ve got to understand that when people are pursuing you, now I’ve got to put two hands and cover the ball up, and now I become a running back.”

The second was a pick into double coverage that is inexcusable.

And when Patterson got around to the protection problems in the second half of his press conference, he ended up somewhere interesting: “JDB, he’s got to learn to step up into the pocket instead of trying to run around on the outside. With a first-year quarterback, you’re going to have some of those growing pains.”

That’s the head coach diagnosing the same thing the rest of us watched. If Patterson is not considering a quarterback battle going forward, I would not expect this offense to get better. Right now I do not think JDB is the answer to ACU’s quarterback problems. The redshirt sophomore looks like he needs more development, and ACU needs to look down the depth chart.

So where does that leave them?

Tucker Parks started the opener at Lamar and threw two picks in eight pass attempts, which is how Black got the job in the first place. Behind him is Marcos Davila, and I’ll be honest, there is no stat sheet argument here. He is in his third year of college football without ever starting a game. He redshirted at Purdue, where Graham Harrell was his quarterbacks coach until the staff was let go four games into 2024. That’s a short window, but it’s more than anyone else on this staff has with him.

I don’t know that Davila is the answer. Nobody does, and that’s exactly the point. Three games in, the unknown is worth more than what we’ve seen.

The discipline

The other thing that has to be said about the offense has nothing to do with who’s playing quarterback.

With 9:12 left in the third, Dean broke a 22-yard run to the left side and into the end zone. It came back on a holding call on redshirt sophomore receiver Keondre Henry, and the ball went from the SFA 13 back to the 23. Two seconds of game clock later, Brandon Perez missed a 40-yard field goal. Fifteen seconds, a touchdown, and nothing on the scoreboard.

Henry was probably trying to make a block that had to be made. That’s the kind of penalty you can live with once. But ACU hadn’t scored since the first quarter, and the Wildcats wouldn’t get closer the rest of the night.

Patterson brought that sequence up himself, unprompted, in his opening statement: “We don’t play with great discipline. We had a touchdown called back. We’re not executing. We miss a field goal. We kick game-winning field goals every single day at the end of practice. That field goal could have made it a two-score game.”

Then he gave SFA its due, and it was the most direct thing he said all night: “They dominated the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball. It’s really that simple.”

Which is important because the group he’s describing on his side is the one with the most experience on the roster. He said that part too: “Our most experienced players are on the offensive line, and so we’ve just got to get that figured out.”

Now for the defense

For a quarter and a half, this was the best unit on the field. SFA came into Saturday averaging 41 points a game. Through the first 15 minutes, the Lumberjacks had three punts and a turnover on downs, and after Black’s fumble gave them the ball at the ACU 47, the defense went out and handed it right back. If you had told me at the end of the first that ACU was going to win this game 17-13, I might have believed you.

Then the second quarter happened, and by the end of the night SFA had 459 yards and had run it 35 times for 216, which is 6.2 yards a carry. ACU got one sack and four tackles for loss.

Here’s an important piece to the puzzle: Keith Patterson has been calling defenses since 2006. Tulsa, Pitt, West Virginia, Arizona State, Utah State, Texas Tech. It’s the thing he does, and it’s a lot of why he got this job. This is the first season he isn’t the one doing it. Sam Bennett came over from UIW in February and has the headset now.

And this is how Patterson described his own defense Saturday night: “There were people running free all night long. I don’t understand that at all.”

He came back to it later: “Every time I looked up there was somebody wide open in the secondary, and sometimes they found him, and sometimes they didn’t.” He called it “one of the most uncharacteristic football games I think I’ve ever experienced in my tenure here.”

I’m not going to sit here and tell you I know it’s the scheme. I couldn’t see the calls. But I know what it looked like from where I was sitting, which was that every time SFA dropped back, it felt like a completion was coming. And I know the guy who has run this side of the ball his entire career just watched it happen and couldn’t explain it.

The pieces are still there. SFA didn’t score in the third, and when the Lumberjacks put the ball on the ground, ACU recovered and took over at its own 28. The offense punted. That’s the whole night in one sequence. Freshman Hudson Page has been in the backfield every week he’s played, and Patterson said Saturday he’s willing to put more young guys out there.

The uniform

ACU is 0-3 for the first time under Patterson, and he isn’t asking anybody to pretend otherwise. “We’re not very good right now. I’m just being honest. We’re not. We’ve got to improve. And I’m not afraid to say it.”

But the line that stuck with me was the one about the jerseys. ACU had been building toward Saturday night for weeks: the blackout, the rivalry, a top-25 matchup at home. And here is what the head coach said he told his players about it afterward: “I said, if you guys would have got as excited to play as you were to wear the black uniform.”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to.

Next up is Idaho at the Kibbie Dome on Saturday.

Saturday is a must-win game, no dancing around it. With the FCS playoff format, all ACU has to do is win its conference and it’s in. It is an uphill climb, but not one I would put past the two-time defending UAC champs.

Two weeks ago in Lubbock, Patterson promised this wouldn’t be the same team three weeks out. Now, one of those weeks is gone.