Who Can Steer Ship Ahead?

The season is still young, but Eastern Michigan’s offense isn’t playing up to what it believes it can do.

Which is to say, there hasn’t been a clear improvement from where this team left off at the end of last season.

Let’s begin with some clear positives, though.

EMU (1-1, 1-0 MAC) has some talented pass catchers. The primary three receivers, Nick Devereaux (9 receptions, 97 yards, 1 TD), Harold Mack (9 rec., 86 yards, 1 TD), and Benson Prosper (7 rec., 81 yards), along with tight end Joshua Long (11 rec., 78 yards), have made some big plays so far and have all been used to flip the field with explosive gains and/or made grabs in the end zone.

The run game, though inconsistent, has some home run power with Amareon Blue (50-yard score vs. SJSU) and Braydon Bennett (also 1 TD) as the team’s top two running backs so far.

The team’s defense is playing complementary football. In both games, after a blocked punt to Sacramento State and an interception to San Jose State put the opposing offenses onto the field for their respective best starting field positions of the games (EMU’s 28 and 33 yard lines), EMU’s defense held those offenses to field goals.

The two teams totaled eight yards in 11 plays on those occasions.

Eastern’s defense has shown that it can respond in a moment’s notice.

In both games, EMU’s defense, co-led by co-coordinators Kasey Teegardin and Tate Omli, wiped offenses off the field with game-opening three-and-out stops.

EMU’s offense, with fourth-year OC Mike Piatkowski, has already punted to end nine first-half drives this season (five three-and-outs).

The issues might be worse in the second half. EMU’s offense scored three touchdowns in the first half against Sac State, and once in the second half (two punts). In the final 30 minutes of Friday’s action, even though Blue took off for a 50-yard score on 4th & 1 from the midfield logo, EMU didn’t take a snap in San Jose State territory.

Here’s EMU’s drive summary from the second half against the Spartans of San Jose:

“As an offense, …we can't get too comfortable with, you know, just relying on the defense to bail us out or whatever the case may be,” second-year starting quarterback Noah Kim said Monday at the team’s week-opening press conference ahead of Michigan State, where he began his college career back in 2020.

“You know, our focus is going to be every time we're on the field, (we’ve) got to go score points, and, …when we get off the sideline after scoring a touchdown, we're going to watch our defense get the stop, either way. So it's like we just have to play complementary football in a sense.”

Kim knows how much is on his shoulders. It’s his second season at his third college, and this Saturday he’ll have the opportunity to show the thousands of fans in East Lansing just how much he’s grown since they last saw him.

After he made five starts at MSU in 2023, he spent a season with no starts at Coastal Carolina. In 2025, he came to Eastern Michigan and has been the starting guy ever since.

While everybody assumed that 2025 would be Kim’s one and only season with EMU, Kim’s father figured out that his son’s eligibility shouldn’t be ruled out yet.

If the pandemic year of 2020 doesn’t count against anybody’s eligibility, and 2021 was a normal redshirt year, and 2023, even though he played in five games, can be treated as a medical redshirt year, then only three years should’ve been counted against him: 2022, 2024, and 2025.

There aren’t many seventh-year quarterbacks out there, but Kim’s one of them. With the added age comes a bigger responsibility. It’s an on-paper advantage for EMU to have an elder leader as the offense’s pilot, but this team has already proved too dysfunctional to properly take off at will.

Creighton, after the loss, credited the coverage of San Jose’s defense in the fourth quarter of Friday’s game, but he did acknowledge one of the throws that should’ve been made better that night: the fourth-down incompletion to Prosper.

On 4th & 3 from San Jose’s side of the field, Prosper was wide-open to Kim’s right on a double-move vertical route. Kim lofted up the pass for Prosper to make a diving grab that would’ve taken EMU’s offense to the 11-yard line, but a second look by the officiating crew overturned the original call. Prosper had his right arm underneath the football, but part of the ball touched the turf as his body hit the ground.

Said Kim of the play: “I think that's a play that you want to score on, honestly. And you know, I take full ownership of (that); I have to somehow give him the ball without him having to dive and make a circus catch for me, and because he's obviously a great player, …I have to give him the ball on that play.”

The quarterback, who has completed 63% of his 81 attempted throws this season (453 yards, 3 TD, 1 INT), has some incompletions that he knows stalled this offense in this game.

Though not everything is Kim’s to fix. Kim can’t protect himself, and EMU’s offensive line problems never went away after he decided to stay another year.

The offensive line has been a mess for months. It’s a largely new starting five, and Kim has enough mobility to avoid pressure at times, though the box scores say he’s been pressured 17 times by opposing defenses.

At right guard, Cole Dellinger’s status is questionable as he left Friday’s action with a left ankle injury. At right tackle, transfer Tyler McMillan was replaced by freshman Samuel Adjin in the first half against SJSU.

Through just two games, the O-line has neither given Kim consistent protection to throw the ball nor opened enough holes in the run game. As a team, EMU rushed for 176 yards and scored three times: On Blue’s 50-yard bomb last week, and by Bennett (after a defensive turnover) and Kim (from 5 yards out) against Sacramento.

It’s averaging just 3.2 yards per carry.

“We were expecting more of a push on our double teams with backers that weren't fast-fitting,” Creighton said. “In the first half, we had some decent rhythm, other than things that we did to ourselves. And then the second half, I don't know if (the offensive line) was ‘wearing down’. I think just the inconsistency got to us, and we played poorly in the second half.”

Eastern Michigan’s not going to have an easy test before it gets back into MAC play.

Up next, EMU has to go to Michigan State (1-0, beat Toledo 30-20) and Wisconsin (0-1, lost to Notre Dame 41-13) for a pair of Big Ten road trips, then it returns home to face FCS-level Lindenwood (1-1), which is no slouch (and will be entering the EMU game off of a bye week).

Then in October, EMU will re-enter its MAC schedule, and it’ll have to go to UMass, which may or may not be for real after it opened the season with a 37-21 victory over Rutgers.

EMU can’t wait until the schedule softens up for its offense to do serious damage. MSU’s defense, rated #66th nationally by SP+, is as tough a task that EMU could ask for at this point.

“At the end of the day, we are playing a football game, and it doesn't matter who we play or what the logo is,” said Kim. “We have a football game, and we have to execute at a high level. So that's kind of the mindset that I'm taking.”