Meager Looks Good In First Start

MeanGreen61 · September 12, 2005

Brett Vito: Meager looks good in first start for UNT

08:14 AM CDT on Monday, September 12, 2005

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — When it came to statistics, there was no comparison between Middle Tennessee quarterback Clint Marks and Daniel Meager, his counterpart from North Texas, in their showdown on Saturday.

Marks threw for more yards and completed more passes. He made more plays down the field at Floyd Stadium.

That didn’t matter at the end of the night, when UNT was the team sitting at 1-0 in the Sun Belt Conference after a 14-7 win over MTSU in its season opener.

Meager’s contributions might have been easy to overlook, but make no mistake, the redshirt freshman did just what he was supposed to do in the Mean Green’s system and outplayed one of the top quarterbacks in the Sun Belt Conference in the process.

UNT doesn’t need a player to throw for 200 yards every Saturday as Marks has been known to do for the Blue Raiders. The Mean Green doesn’t need a flurry of touchdown passes.

UNT needs a quarterback to drive the bus — or the Buick — as some Mean Green fans have nicknamed the team’s offense.

That is just what Meager did against the Blue Raiders.

“I was very pleased with how Daniel performed Game 1 in this environment with the crowd, them putting everything into the game and them having momentum most of the night,” UNT coach Darrell Dickey said.

UNT threw Meager into the fire in its season opener. He hadn’t taken a snap in a college game and had minimal experience after missing the majority of spring practice with a shoulder injury.

That inexperience showed at times, especially early on when UNT struggled to get going offensively.

“He checked the wrong way a high percentage of the time,” Dickey said. “We knew that would happen. We are going to have to grow and develop him.”

UNT will deal with those growing pains, especially if Meager can avoid mistakes.

The former Richardson Pearce standout didn’t throw an interception or fumble the ball.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the game was that Meager did more than just avoid mistakes. He made a few key plays while completing 10 of 15 passes for 122 yards.

A big chunk of those yards came when Meager lobbed a 42-yard pass to wide receiver Johnny Quinn, who hauled in the ball and set up what turned out to be a game-winning 4-yard touchdown run by Patrick Cobbs.

The pass to Quinn was one of the more encouraging plays Meager made. UNT is blessed with perhaps its best group of wide receivers in the Dickey era and will need to take advantage to reach its potential.

The decision Meager made to get the ball to Quinn certainly proved to be better than those Marks made. The junior had a chance to put away UNT in the third quarter when MTSU drove to the Mean Green 7-yard line.

The Blue Raiders led 7-0 at the time, but saw that advantage disappear when Marks inexplicably threw a ball right to UNT linebacker Maurice Holman, who returned it 99 yards for a touchdown.

Marks fumbled the ball away a short time later to set up Meager’s pass to Quinn and UNT’s game-winning touchdown. The mistakes Marks made overshadowed a performance that saw the preseason All-Sun Belt selection complete 21 of 27 passes for 195 yards.

“Both of those turnovers were my fault,” Marks told the Nashville Tennessean. “We’re not good enough to [overcome] those kinds of errors.”

The turnovers Marks committed were the types of plays the Mean Green feared Meager and the rest of the team’s new quarterbacks would make.

The fact that Meager avoided those mistakes was one of the reasons he stayed in the game from start to finish, despite Dickey’s pledge to play more than one quarterback against MTSU earlier in the week.

“Daniel was doing fine and we didn’t want to make a switch in a tight game,” Dickey said. “He was not doing poorly. He missed a few checks and short passes that we would like him to make in the future.

“Hopefully we can take what happened tonight and build on it.”

It’s still too early to anoint Meager UNT’s quarterback for the next four years, but if he can rapidly improve on a solid initial outing, the Mean Green’s plans to experiment with playing multiple quarterbacks could be a short one.

BRETT VITO can be reached at 940-566-6870. His e-mail address is bvito@dentonrc.com.