Uncharacteristic offensive struggles for the New Mexico State football team and total domination in the fourth quarter by the visiting Red Wolves led to a 37-21 shellacking at the hands of Arkansas State Saturday night in Aggie Memorial Stadium.

The Aggie offense was held to 256 total yards on 72 plays, falling well short of their average of 469 yards per game entering Saturday’s contest. The running game was a complete non-factor with the team only averaging 1.1 yards per carry, and the passing game struggled to get going because of shaky line play, something Head Coach Doug Martin called an “embarrassment.”

“Our offensive line got totally manhandled. I think we gave up seven or eight sacks — we just really got whipped up front and that’s disappointing,” Martin said, addressing the poor performance by the offensive front five. “They didn’t have to blitz. Their four whipped our five and that was the story all night.”

NMSU hung around for three quarters and even took a brief 21-17 lead after quarterback Tyler Rogers rushed for a 2 yard touchdown one play into the fourth, but an inability to move the ball led to fatigue and Arkansas State capitalized, scoring the final 20 points of the game with little resistance.

The expectation was that this game was going to be a shootout, having featured two of the top three scoring offenses in the Sun Belt, and while the point total was relatively high, it was all about the defenses.

Even though they surrendered 37 points, the New Mexico State defense played pretty well. They created two turnovers, had seven sacks and held the number one offense in the conference to 3-14 on third down conversions despite being on the field for most of the game and having to defend a short field often.

“I felt like we didn’t help the defense out as much as we should have, offensively,” running back Larry Rose said when asked about the effort given on the defensive side of the ball. “They played a really good game.”

Linebacker Dalton Harrington felt differently, stressing the importance of playing a full game and downplaying the offense’s ineffectiveness.

“It’s a team game. We made some plays in the first three quarters but we have to find a way to make those plays for a full 60 minutes,” Harrington said. “At the end of the day we just have to play better and put our offense in better situations. We have four games left and we have to find a way to play a full four quarters in those games.”

As well as the Aggie defense played, Arkansas State was just that much better. The Red Wolves held NMSU to 3-17 on third down and had seven sacks of their own, but were in Rogers’s lap the whole night.

It’s fair to say that Arkansas State’s Justice Hansen won the quarterback battle, throwing for 297 yards and 4 touchdowns and outshining Rogers, who was under duress all night, completing only 50 percent of his passes for 221 yards and 1 touchdown, which are both season lows.

While NMSU did struggle, they did it against a really good Arkansas State team that improved to 5-2 and a perfect 4-0 against conference opponents. This loss is far from the end of the world for the Aggies, but adjustments will have to be made if they want to eclipse four wins for the first time under Coach Martin.

Looking forward, New Mexico State will try to get back on track when they take on Texas State on Nov. 4 in San Marcos. This, like the three other games left on the Aggies’ schedule are very winnable, but this team will have to play much better than they did tonight if they want to have a chance at a bowl bid come December.