TULSA - For nine months, Drew Mestemaker was the quarterback everyone around North Texas wanted to talk about as a rising star. On Saturday, though, the conversation circled back to the same old mistake.
With the game slipping away in the fourth quarter of Tulsa’s 24-10 win, Mestemaker forced a throw in the end zone that ended up in the hands of Golden Hurricane safety Zach Williams. The interception came on a play Eric Morris said echoed the kind of decision that already burned the quarterback before.
“It happened twice last year too,” Morris said, pointing to Mestemaker’s end-zone interception against Tulane in the conference championship game. “In our conference championship game against Tulane.
I mean, there’s two where we’re down there, and we’re trying to get in. They’re playing, you know, heavy, heavy drop eight zone at that time.
You know, which they should be, right? I mean, they’re trying to defend the end zone.”
Morris didn’t stop there. He said the play at Tulsa started with protection issues and ended with a mistake a quarterback can’t make when he’s under pressure.
“And to begin with, our protection was terrible on that,” Morris said. “He (Mestemaker) gets pressured, he spins out, makes one miss.
There’s a lot of things going on. I mean, he needs to run and get what he can and get down, or you know, but throwing across your body with so many people back as you’re scrambling, usually bad things happen back there.
“And so, yeah. I mean, I think that’s definitely something that he’s shown in the past that he’s done, it has hurt us, and it hurts again tonight.”
The play came with 4:13 left and the Cowboys needing a score to cut it to one possession. Mestemaker rolled away from pressure, absorbed contact from a defender who swiped at his thigh, and launched the ball about 30 yards into the end zone toward Justin Bowick. Williams got there instead, either taking it away from Bowick’s fingertips or intercepting it just before the receiver could make contact.
“It was kind of just a bad ball,” Mestemaker said. “I was off platform, it didn’t come out right, and that safety made a great play.”
At that point, the Cowboys were already fighting the clock, though the down and distance still left some room to work. The interception was especially familiar for Mestemaker because it came in a situation that looked a lot like the one he faced against Tulane last season, when he threw one interception on first-and-goal at the 2-yard line and another on third-and-goal from the 6.
UNT was already trailing by 24 in the third quarter and by 13 in the fourth quarter when those throws happened.
“I felt like I tried my best throughout the game trying to get the ball down whenever I got moved off my spot,” Mestemaker said of the pivotal play at Tulsa. “But at that point in the game, we were down, and I was honestly just trying to make a play. And if I’m going to try to make the play, I have to make it.
Mestemaker finished 24 of 49 for 241 yards, one touchdown, two interceptions and one lost fumble.
Even with the rough finish, the game still looked salvageable for him going into the fourth quarter. He was 20 of 30 for 157 yards at that point and had just thrown a fourth-down touchdown to Bowick.
The offensive problems, though, ran deeper than the quarterback. North Texas lost starting left tackle Jacob Sexton to injury on the sixth offensive snap, and he had to be carted off. The line struggled after that.
“You can’t let that rattle you and then go out and try to do something too much,” Mestemaker said. “Which I feel like I did.
I just have to take it with a grain of salt. You know sometimes something happens, and someone gets through.
We just have to go to the next play and stick to our process.”
Afterward, Mestemaker and Morris both owned the performance, which wound up as the quarterback’s worst touchdown-interception ratio, fourth-worst completion percentage and fifth-lowest passing yard total.
“The first thing is everyone knows I need to play better,” Mestemaker said. “I’m not the one to point fingers.
I need to play better, and that’ll help the offense play better. I think it’s just being straight up with guys: ‘That’s not us.
We need to play better, and it’s just on to next week.’”
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