The good and the bad from Vandals opener

MOSCOW — They talked about it all last week, Idaho football coach Paul Petrino said earlier this week in his weekly news conference with local media.

The Vandals were going to score on their first drive last Saturday at North Texas, kick and recover an onside kick, then score again for a quick 14-0 lead and see how the home team could recover from that.

Idaho got the first part right, scoring on its first possession for a 6-0 lead (the PAT attempt was blocked), then recovered the onside kick. But the Vandals couldn’t finish off the next drive, and never scored again in a 40-6 loss in Petrino’s debut as Vandal coach.

“We thought we had a great chance to get the onside,” Petrino said.

But a delay of game and a holding penalty led to the next drive fizzling out.

After North Texas scored to take a 7-6 lead, Jerrel Brown broke a 47-yard run, but the Vandals came up a yard short on fourth and 3 from the Mean Green 21.

“Those are all three drives where you need to come away with touchdowns, and you’re in a lot better shape,” Petrino said.

Also, the Vandals, because in part of mistakes getting the right no-huddle personnel on the field, used all three first-half timeouts in the first 2 minutes, 40 seconds of the game.

“And to be honest with you, we still haven’t called the third timeout,” Petrino said. “We used two of them — the third one was a mystery one. I don’t where it came from, but, regardless, we can’t let that happen.”

Chad Chalich, a redshirt freshman quarterback from Coeur d’Alene High, completed 19 of 27 passes for 230 yards and a touchdown. He was sacked four times and fumbled twice, losing both.

Petrino liked that Chalich completed 70 percent of his passes — pretty good for someone making his first college start.

“He really only missed two throws — he missed a post that could have been a 93-yard touchdown. And he missed an out,” Petrino said. “What he’s got to work on is his decision making, because there were a lot of first- and second-down calls where we had easy completions if he could have got the ball out of his hand quick, and he was looking at the wrong thing, or he just took off and ran. But he’s got to take more of those easy completions that were out there.”

Backup quarterback Josh McCain came in late in the game, rushed twice for 24 yards, and threw incomplete on his only pass attempt.

“Going into the game I told both Chad and Josh there was a chance I could use Josh earlier in the game and a lot of times just to give Chad a rest and take some hits off of him and let Josh try to make some plays with his speed,” Petrino said. “And it ended up just being something I didn’t do until later, but there’s a chance it could happen earlier in the game (at Wyoming).”

Wyoming, Idaho’s next opponent, nearly beat Nebraska on Saturday.

Chalich rushed 16 times for 42 yards, which includes 18 yards lost on the four sacks. Asked if he’d like to see Chalich run out of bounds rather than challenge the tackler when he runs, Petrino replied, “the day he has to run out of bounds, or slide, he won’t be our quarterback.”

Petrino singled out wide receiver Dezmon Epps, who caught seven passes for 89 yards; Brown, who totaled 70 yards on six carries, and tight end Michael LaGrone, who had a big catch early in the game, and blocked well.

“With the offense there were situations where we’d have one, two, three good plays in a row, and on the fourth play we’d shoot ourselves in the foot,” he said. “Either with a silly penalty or a missed assignment, or a missed read. They didn’t do anything to stop us.”