Mercer not looking for a shootout with Samford

Bobby Lamb has confidence in his Mercer offense and defense, but that doesn’t mean he wants his team to get involved in a shootout with Samford.

The Bears are averaging 28.0 points and 383.6 yards per game to rank fourth and fifth, respectively, in the Southern Conference in those categories. But Samford, coached by Macon native Chris Hatcher, leads the conference in scoring (39.9 points) and total offense (469.8 yards).

The Bears and Bulldogs face off at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday at Samford.

“Not really, to be honest with you,” Lamb said, when asked if he was comfortable getting into a high-scoring game with Samford. “We have the capability to put a lot of points up. We haven’t put up the points we want to put up, but we’re going to run our offense the way we run it. We’re going to try to go uptempo, as well, and be efficient with what we’re doing. We know we can’t have turnovers. We can’t give the ball away — we had two turnovers the other day to East Tennessee State and didn’t have a takeaway until the last play of the game. We lost the turnover margin but won the football game. It’s imperative that we don’t turn the ball over and give them something free.

“We gave Wofford a free touchdown with the punt block. The bottom line is we’ve got to be efficient in all those areas to win the game.”

Hatcher sees a similar team to his own when he looks at Mercer. The Bulldogs have defeated the Bears the past two seasons, including last year in Hatcher’s first season at Samford.

“They play hard, they’re very well-coached. They’re very similar to us in a lot of ways,” Hatcher said. “I think they’re more balanced offensively than the teams we’ve played up to this point. Defensively, they do a lot of movement; they show you a lot of different looks. They’re a very solid football team, and they’re having one of the better years they’ve had since they reinstated their team. Again, it boils down to us executing, us playing with great passion and emotion, and we hope to have a great crowd to help us do that on Saturday.”

Mercer bounced back from a road loss to Wofford two weeks ago to beat East Tennessee State last week to improve to 5-4 overall and 3-3 in the conference. Samford is 6-3 overall and 4-2 in the conference with its conference losses coming to the top two teams: The Citadel and Chattanooga.

Bulldogs quarterback Devlin Hodges leads the conference in passing with 354.8 yards per game, and he has thrown 30 touchdowns. Hodges has completed 289-of-413 passes for 3,193 yards.

No other quarterback in the Southern Conference has even attempted 300 passes, and only one other quarterback in the conference has at least 2,000 yards passing: Western Carolina’s Tyrie Adams.

“Western Carolina runs a very similar deal, but as far as the number of passes, it is going to be a minimum of 50 throws, probably,” said Lamb, whose team lost to Samford 47-21 last year. “You’ve got to change some things. You’ve got to play a lot of nickel and a lot of dime, a lot of defensive backs on the field, a lot of pass rushers on the field. It’s going to be a challenge for us. If you take last year’s game, it was 14-12 going into the fourth quarter, and then they score to make it 19-14. Then bam, bam, bam, they hit three big plays, and the game is over.

“We’ve got to do a great job of looking at what we did last year in the first three quarters and emulate that and not let the fourth quarter get away from us.”

Samford’s offense will put pressure on Mercer’s defense, for sure, but that also puts pressure on the Bears’ offense to keep up.

“They just put a lot of points on the board. I was just looking; I think they’ve scored 350 points this year in nine games,” Mercer quarterback John Russ said. “Their offense scores a lot of points, and that means we’ve got to figure out a way to help our defense. They scored 41 (points) on Mississippi State, so you’ve got to help the defense out. We haven’t been there this year for the defense as much as we should’ve been.”

This story was originally published November 11, 2016 at 2:53 PM with the headline "Mercer not looking for a shootout with Samford."