Keys to the Game: UTEP

UTSA looks for their second conference win of the year as they travel to El Paso to face the winless Miners. As always your Keys to the Game is brought to you by Jackson Financial.

Beware of the trap game

This is does seem like a little bit of a trap game for UTSA. Then again UTSA isn’t really contending for anything at the moment. This should be very similar to the Rice game, but these UTEP/UTSA games do tend to get kinda weird as evident by the 5OT game last season. UTSA has the better athletes on both sides of the ball, but UTEP has nothing to lose and they would love nothing more than to beat UTSA for the second year in a row.

Red Zone offense

UTSA doesn’t have a bad red zone offense, they actually score 94.44% of the time they enter the red zone. The problem is that in three conference games UTSA has only scored touchdowns two touchdowns in seven red zone trips. That touchdown % rate is good for dead last in Conference USA. UTSA is scoring, they just aren’t scoring touchdowns. This is a perfect opportunity for the offense to rectify some of this.

Stay healthy

I can’t recall watching a UTSA football in which so many players went down due to injury. Frank Wilson lost several key players to injury last week vs. Rice, but the only one that has been ruled out is fullback Halen Steward. The goal for this week is to survive and get out El Paso as relatively healthy as one could be after a football game. The offensive line might be a little bit of a mash unit with the injuries to Stefan Beard and Jordan Wright. Josh Dunlop seemed to be a little banged up after the last weeks game as well.

The young guys and backups will get some extended run regardless if the injured guys play or not. What UTSA needs is to stay healthy.