A bye week gives a football team the chance to do a bit of scoreboard watching, and if McNeese State players paid close attention to what happened on Saturday, they’d have plenty of reasons to feel good about themselves.

Opening-day opponent Nebraska rolled past Miami behind 229 rushing yards from running back Ameer Abdullah, who was held under 100 by the Cowboys. Presumptive Southland-favorite Southeastern Louisiana showed it has some chinks in the armor with a 24-23 loss at unranked Southeast Missouri State.

As McNeese heads into the final two months of the season, there are plenty of reasons to believe the Cowboys can live up to their billing as the No. 5 team in the Football Championship Subdivision.

They’d just prefer not to pay heed to all of that.

“I don’t pay attention to the rankings, personally, because as long as you win every game you’re going to get a bid into the playoffs,” said defensive end Everett Ellefsen. “Maybe towards the end of the season I’ll look at it more when you’re looking towards bye weeks. But this early in the season, I don’t look at it.”

“I think we do a good job of keeping that in check,” said quarterback Tyler Bolfing. “Football’s such a hard sport to compare scores in. Obviously we’re hoping for Nebraska to play well. They’re a good program and we played them close. It may help our confidence a little bit, but it really shouldn’t. We just need to worry about what we do and we’ll be just fine.”

In the minds of both players, there is plenty to address.

Offensively, McNeese has struggled on third down. The only teams to convert fewer by percentage are winless Incarnate Word and Nicholls State — company one does not want to keep.

“We’ve just got to throw and catch the ball better on third down,” Bolfing said. “We’ve worked on that every single day since fall camp started. I know we’ve had some missed opportunities in the throwing game.”

The defense also has some areas to nitpick.

“We really, really focused on our technique and getting back to the basics,” Ellefsen said. “That’s kind of what hurt us against Nebraska. And we’ve put in a couple new things for this week and a couple new defenses in our back pocket for whenever we need it.”

In short, the Cowboys head into the Arkansas Tech game with a sense of self-awareness. There is a realization that the potential is there for something special, but much to be done in order to make that happen.

“We do feel pretty good about ourselves, but nothing too over the top,” Ellefsen said. “We still have a lot to work on and a lot of ways to get better. We always take our nonconference games as really important to get ready for the conference games, because that’s where it really matters.”(Rick Hickman/American Press)

Rick Hickman