The Memphis Tigers have given up a combined total of 87 points in their last two games.
The Memphis Tigers are 2-0 in their last two games.
Coach Justin Fuente’s team, which won the 2014 Miami Beach Bowl by a 55-48 score over BYU, is picking up where it left off last December. This isn’t a perfect team. It’s frankly a half-a-loaf team. Yet, it is now winning consistently. Memphis is that tennis player who commits 45 unforced errors in a match, with a necessarily go-for-broke style… but hits 75 crowd-pleasing winners to more than compensate for the rough edges. Memphis is the volume shooter who might not have a clean shooting stroke in the first three quarters of a basketball game, but who regularly brings it in the fourth quarter when he has to.
It’s not clean. It’s not mistake-free. However, it’s usually enough. The good outweighs the bad.
Memphis is essentially a reminder that sporting competitions aren’t decided by the mere absence or presence of errors. The games we watch each week (or day) are more precisely decided by the ability to maximize strengths beyond the extent of one’s weaknesses, especially in relationship to the opponent on the other side.
Thursday night inside the Liberty Bowl stadium, the excellence of the Memphis offense was more pronounced than the weakness of the Memphis defense. The margin was slight, but it was enough. It was also helped by a very questionable overturn of a Tiger fumble inside the last three minutes of regulation, one which would have given Cincinnati a drive start in Memphis’s third of the field. Nevertheless, the Tigers should not apologize for that mistake — the AAC officiating crew and replay booth made enough mistakes for a whole year, and both teams got the short end of the stick on multiple occasions.
The unfortunate reality for Cincinnati is that it received the LAST really bad call of this game. Many people thought that the team with the ball last would win. It turned out that the team to benefit from the last bad call walked off the field with a crucial conference victory.
Cincinnati fans have a right to lament what befell them and their team on Thursday. Meanwhile, Memphis fans should accept this win without any reservations or second thoughts. After all, a Cincinnati fumble midway through the game was not given to Memphis, as it should have been. The Tigers labored under the awful (officiating-based) circumstances just as much as the Bearcats were. When the circumstances gave Memphis a(nother) chance to break a 46-46 tie, Paxton Lynch — who dazzled on this night — rose above the moment.
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This game was a showcase for both quarterbacks: Lynch and Cincinnati backup Hayden Moore, who relieved an injured Gunner Kiel in the first quarter. Both men threw plenty of passes into tight spots all night long. Moore threw more deep balls for huge plays, but Lynch was by far the better runner, and he generally made more sound decisions than his less experienced counterpart. One thing Lynch did in particular was that when he was hit by Cincinnati defenders, his body balance enabled him to fall forward and gain crucial extra yards. He gained first downs when many other quarterbacks would have been tackled short of the marker, bringing up a third and one. Lynch constantly made down-and-distance situations more manageable for his offense, and that’s just one of many reasons the playbook remained fully open for Memphis.
What Cincinnati and Moore did was nearly as spectacular, and Moore certainly gets added credit for doing this in a relief capacity (and in an abrupt, sudden-switch manner as well). Yet, when asked to win this game for his team, Lynch answered the call. He and his offense certainly can’t be expected to win every game by scoring 44 or more points, but it’s good enough for now. Memphis did not lose ground to Houston or Navy in the AAC West.
Speaking of AAC divisions, the biggest result of this outcome is that Temple now has — in essence — a three-game lead over Cincinnati in the AAC East. It’s hard to see any other team in that division making a serious charge at Temple. If the division is going to tighten up, it will be due to the Owls falling back to the pack, not anyone rising to Temple’s level.
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The final word on Cincinnati-Memphis is nothing you haven’t heard before in relationship to a football season: You won’t win championships in September, but you certainly can lose them. Memphis definitely improved its situation with a victory, but in terms of a larger divisional story in the American Athletic Conference, the biggest news is that Cincinnati, before the month of October, is already on life support in the AAC East.
