Bowling Green Falcons Elevate Tennessee Vols Profile With Blowout Win over Maryland Terps

The Bowling Green Falcons football team made the Tennessee Volunteers look really good Saturday by blowing out the Maryland Terrapins. The Terps lost 48-27.


Remember before the lightning delay last week when Bowling Green would not go away in their battle with the Tennessee Vols in Nashville?

Vol fans kept getting frustrated because they could not stop Matt Johnson and the Falcons passing attack.

Well, perhaps they validated that in College Park, Md. this week.

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On the road against another Power Five opponent, the Falcons won 48-27 after outscoring the Terps 28-7 in the fourth quarter.

In this game, Matt Johnson threw for 491 yards and six touchdowns with only one interception, completing 36 of 55 passes. Fred Coppet had 15 carries for 109 yards, and Travis Greene had 18 carries for 65 yards and a touchdown.

As a whole, the Bowling Green racked up 692 total yards and held Maryland to 341 yards. The Falcons also should have had two more touchdowns.

So now it just looks like the Vols played a very good team last week in Nashville. Johnson was deadly accurate and consistently hit receivers in stride on go-routes once again.

This all of a sudden makes Tennessee look a lot better than we thought considering they actually held the Falcons to 30 last week, and remember that they were without a true strong safety.

To be fair, this Maryland team is going through a rebuilding year on both sides of the ball after losing so many starters last year. They will be lucky to win five games this year.

But this is still a Power Five team that went bowling last year. And they still have some talent, particularly with Will Likely at cornerback, who is as good as or better than Cameron Sutton.

And Bowling Green just torched that secondary, racking up the vast majority of those stats in a quarter and a half.

The Falcons are clearly an elite team and have another tough, non-conference mid-major game against Memphis. But then they play Purdue, a Big Ten bottom-feeder. And if Johnson stays healthy, don’t be surprised if they run the table in the MAC.

Going 11-1 is a real possibility for this team. And that would make Tennessee look really good. So do not panic about how the secondary struggled last week against the Falcons.

With Johnson at quarterback and Dino Babers at coach, they will do that to a lot of people.

The Vols were fortunately good enough to withstand it.

Next: Tennessee vs. Oklahoma: Last-Minute Predictions

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