Arkansas State won anyway, 17-14. Tony Carter dropped a Kennesaw State runner for a 1-yard loss on fourth-and-2 in the second quarter, and Arkansas State's recap credited Carter and Kam Moore with two crucial fourth-down stops. Trey Owens tied the game at 14 with a 2-yard touchdown run capping a 76-yard drive late in the third quarter, and Clune Van Andel's 33-yard field goal with 8:19 left put the Red Wolves ahead for good after Daniel Kinney missed a 32-yarder for the Owls with about three minutes to play.
That is the shape of the season so far. It is a defense that makes a play when it absolutely must and gives up ground yardage the rest of the night. Memphis rushed for 335 yards in the opener. TCU piled up 468 total yards, 337 of them passing at 11.6 yards per attempt, though the same KAIT report noted Arkansas State ranked among the top five nationally with seven takeaways through three games. The playmaking is real.
Saturday at Louisiana
Arkansas State plays at Louisiana at 7 p.m. Central Saturday on ESPN+, the first of three straight Sun Belt West games. The model gives the Red Wolves a 24% chance. That is a real underdog number, and it should be enjoyed as one rather than leaned on. A win would put Arkansas State's shot at reaching the conference championship game around 28%, while a loss drops it to roughly 4%. Almost the entire division season, in other words, is priced into one Saturday night in Lafayette.
Louisiana just made the assignment harder. The Ragin' Cajuns held Charlotte to 137 total yards, the fewest a Louisiana defense has allowed since a 57-yard game against Nicholls in 2001, and Charlotte's offense did not score at all. Set that against the unit Louisiana fielded last season, which gave up 29.2 points and 410.8 yards per game, and the gap between then and now is the whole question for Owens. He turned in a 244-yard passing night with no interceptions. He has not yet faced a defense playing like that.
What to watch
The front seven against Louisiana's run game is the thing. Arkansas State has already shown it can win a game on fourth down and situational stops; what it has not shown since the opener is the ability to keep an opponent from grinding out yards between those moments. Moore is the name to follow again. He led the team with 13 tackles filling in for an injured Robert Stephens III, with Butch Jones saying Moore "took advantage of your opportunity" and "really stepped up tonight." If Stephens is still out, the depth question and the run-defense question are the same question.
Stephens was a game-time decision against Kennesaw State; he had also exited the Memphis opener early after two carries with an apparent knee injury. Clay was a game-time decision entering the Week 4 Kennesaw State game, which means Solomon Baggett leads the ground game against a defense that just erased one.
And if this turns into another one-score Sun Belt night (Louisiana won 34-30 in Jonesboro last November on a drive that died at the 1-yard line), the margin may come down to the kicker. Van Andel missed from 42 in the third quarter before making the 33-yarder that won it. "We believe in Clune," Jones said. "He has a body of work behind him and sometimes Clune is an over-thinker," adding that Van Andel "came through for us when we needed it." A road upset in Lafayette almost certainly requires him to be right about that.
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