The Texas A&M University-Commerce Lions (7-2, 6-1) mauled the McMurry WarHawks (2-6, 1-6) 91-13 en route to grabbing their first Lone Star Conference title in 24 years outright and earning the No. 1 seed in the upcoming conference playoffs, ensuring two more home contests.
The Lions dominated all phases of the game, and despite making ample use of their backups, managed to score at least 21 points in every quarter. The A&M-Commerce scoring already led the NCAA heading into the night, but bolstered it’s season average to 54.2 points per game. Not only that, no other team in any NCAA Division has scored 90 or more points this season, and the Lions have now done it twice.
As well as the Lions offense played, defensive lineman Tre’von Taylor stole the show for a Lions defense that managed to hold the Warhawks to a mere 18 net rushing yards. Taylor delivered five tackles for loss, four of which were sacks, accounting for 40 negative yards of offense for McMurry. To cap that off, Taylor picked off an errant Cy Ward pass early in the second quarter, which he ran back for a 21-yard score. To compliment Taylor’s heroics, the Lions defense totaled 8 sacks, 13 tackles for loss, and 2 total interceptions. The Lion entered play averaging 10.5 tackles for loss for second in the NCAA.
The Lions running game produced a whopping seven rushing touchdowns, spread out among four players. Deric Davis accounted for two in short yardage situations in the first half, and Joe Bergeron chipped in one of his own in the second quarter to cap off a nine carry, 88-yard night (9.6 YPC). Late in the game long after things were decided, Theo Wofford and Ovie Urevbu handled the duties, scoring two touchdowns a piece and combining for 128 yards on 16 carries.
As a team, the Lions churned out 263 yards on the ground compared to just the 18 for the Warhawks. All told, A&M-Commerce averaged 6.7 yards per rush in the game.
Quarterback Tyrik Rollison had mixed results in an overall successful outing, completing 7 of 10 passes for 203 yards and three touchdowns, but also tossing two interceptions, the first of which was on the first pass of the game. Rollison’s first score came just over eight minutes into the first quarter, when he hooked up with Seth Smith, who caught the ball in traffic for the easy score. Rollison’s second and third touchdowns came by connecting twice with Hayden Marsh, whose only two grabs of the game resulted in points on the board for the Lions.
The two quarterbacks combined to throw for 319 yards with 11 completions on 14 pass attempts for a whopping 22.8 yards per attempt and 29.0 per completion.
Rollison continues to build on what was already and impressive season. With his 203 yards Saturday, he needs just 238 more yards through the air to break the A&M-Commerce single-season school record total passing yards. With three more touchdown passes, Rollison will also surpass the single-season mark for touchdown passes. He is also on pass to shatter the average passing yards per game mark at A&M-Commerce. His current mark of 328.0 would shatter the old record of 286.1 per game. As a team, the Lions have already thrown for over 3,000 yards one time prior to 2014, the 1991 team passed for 3,123 yards. The 2014 edition of the Lions has already smashed that mark. Led by Rollison and Davis, A&M-Commerce has slung the football for a staggering 3,330 yards.
After half, Rollison was given the rest of the night off, and Deric Davis took things over for the majority of the second half. Davis added upon his first half rushing scores by connecting with Vernon Johnson early in the third quarter on a 43-yard catch and run down the sideline. Johnson finished the night with only three catches, but racked up 118 yards to go with his touchdown score. Davis got involved again by throwing Smith his second touchdown of the night eleven minutes later. Davis finished a perfect 4-for-4 with 116 yards through the air and two scores.
Prior to Saturday’s kickoff A&M-Commerce honored its 2014 senior class many of which have been instrumental in the about-face of the program.