Tag: Mark Perry

Meet our Colorado Buffaloes Player of the Week

The Colorado Buffaloes couldn’t beat USC. But, Mark Perry posted a season-high in tackles.

The Colorado Buffaloes lost to the USC Trojans for their fourth straight loss on a frustrating day in Boulder. Head coach Karl Dorrell made headlines for the camera incident, and the Buffs’ hopes of upsetting the Trojans once and for all were silenced for another year.

Nonetheless, there were a couple of positives from the game against USC. Buffs quarterback Brendon Lewis played decent, finishing the day with a 10-for-17 line with 162 yards, a touchdown and an interception.

But our Player of the Week belongs to Mark Perry as the safety finished the day with 10 tackles against a talented USC offense. Perry also had the fumble recovery after Keaontay Ingram dropped the ball.

Perry led the way for the defense despite the Trojans putting up 37 points. Drake London absolutely went to town on Saturday—as he has all season—and torched the Buffs the entire game.

Perry was everywhere on Saturday, and he needed to be. In turn, he posted a season-high in tackles. In fact, Perry had more tackles on Saturday than he did in the entire 2020 season. Other than that, it wasn’t too encouraging for the Buffs and they will have two weeks to focus on their next game against winless Arizona.

The Buffs’ lone victory was against Northern Colorado in the opening week, and since a somewhat encouraging loss against Texas A&M, they have struggled.

A bye week is in the folds now, and up next is a perfect opportunity for Dorrell and his team to get back on track with a matchup against the Arizona Wildcats.

Colorado’s atrocious first half ends on a high note

Deion Smith scored his second touchdown of the season.

For about the first 26 minutes of the first half, Colorado was playing some of its worst football of the season, and that is saying something. We saw the same uninspired offense combined with a secondary that simply couldn’t keep up with USC’s receivers, mainly Drake London.

Something finally went Colorado’s way when Guy Thomas forced USC running back Keaontay Ingram to fumble around midfield. Mark Perry was alert and picked up the fumble to give Colorado its best field position of the game at USC’s 48-yard line.

The momentum garnered stayed with the offense as Brendon Lewis immediately found Dimitri Stanley for a 7-yard gain. Jarek Broussard broke loose on the next play as well for a 19-yard rush, his longest of the game.

Tight end Brady Russell got into the act too with a gutsy 13-yard gain.

With the Buffaloes just over one yard outside of the end zone, Deion Smith punched it home for his second touchdown of the year. The TD and extra point would bring the game to its halftime score of USC 20, Colorado 7.

Karl Dorrell’s postgame opening statement following loss to ASU

READ: Karl Dorrell shares his thoughts postgame

“Well, what a shame.”

Karl Dorrell’s opening line in his postgame press conference summed it up. For the third week in a row, Colorado’s offense struggled to gain yards. Just 13 points were all the Buffaloes could score in their first Pac-12 Conference game of the season. Defensively, the many abilities of Arizona State quarterback Jayden Daniels made things tough for the Buffs as they relinquished a season-high 35 points. The loss dropped Colorado to 1-3 on the season. A week after losing to BYU, the Sun Devils moved to 3-1.

There was some optimism in Dorrell’s voice when he said freshman QB Brendon Lewis played “okay” and took a step forward. As for the other two Buffs we heard from afterward, Mark Perry and Alex Fontenot, their strong performances were once again clouded by a loss.

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Karl Dorrell’s opening statement:

Well, what a shame. It was I think a competitive game for at least the initial quarter and a half. I think things were going decently defensively. I felt we did some really positive things in the first half. Those things were negated with the penalties, with the personal foul penalties that extended drives and they ended up getting points. But those guys played hard and did some really good things in that first half.

I think the second half was a little bit of a challenge for really getting a chance to really contain that offense. I think offensively in the first half there was some struggles as we all know, but I was really encouraged that we came out of halftime with the ball and we went down the field and scored. That was kind of more reminiscent of what we saw a year ago with how we played with the running game really leading the way, so to speak.

TEMPE, ARIZONA – SEPTEMBER 25: Head coach Karl Dorrell of the Colorado Buffaloes watches from the sidelines during the second half of the NCAAF game against the Arizona State Sun Devils at Sun Devil Stadium on September 25, 2021 in Tempe, Arizona. (Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images)

I thought Brendon played okay. I thought he had a couple steps of progress this week. We need to continue to bring him along, along with our passing game. I thought he hit some opportunities for some throws and a couple of receivers dropped the ball. That was something that negated some of that productivity on the passing game side of it.

We got to just keep bringing this team along. It’s a lot of young players that are playing and a lot of new players playing. It’s challenging each and every week now that we’re in season. There’s no preseason games, all these game count, unfortunately. We got to just keep working at getting better each week and hopefully that light bulb starts to glow a little bit brighter for us to be much more productive and score more points and actually do as well as we need to do defensively as well. We’ll keep plugging at it.