Dicken’s first start a mixed bag of good

It wasn’t the first pass 6-foot-3 true freshman Tyler Dicken has thrown this season, but his 19-yard strike to sophomore Nick Slezak on the second play of North Central’s 24-3 victory Saturday against Augustana demonstrated accuracy and a strong arm.He completed his first two passes, only to miss on his next four. He completed two more, including a 38-yarder to freshman Jeff Stolzenburg that set up the Cardinals only first-half touchdown. He missed on his next three passes.Dicken — starting in replacement of senior Brad Crackel — was 9-for-20 for 128 yards in the first half, and the benchmark for success in the North Central offense is a 60 percent completion percentage. Turns out he was doing just fine.

“I thought it was dynamite,” Cardinals offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Jeff Thorne said about his QB’s performance. “They gave us a front we hadn’t seen. In every game they’ve played, they’ve played maybe two, three snaps of it. For a freshman to be in there in that situation with something he hasn’t seen yet, I thought he handled it well. We didn’t turn the ball over, and when you have a defense like we have … you have a real good shot at winning.”What Dicken did positively display was a strong awareness of the pocket. Twice he avoided first half sacks without hurrying from the pocket before protection broke down. The first bit of eluding resulted in a 19-yard run. The second, a pass for 13 yards to Joe Antonacci while running to his left.

The kid from Bloomington did it again twice in the second half, scrambling and finding Nick Hicks on a third down play and running for nine yards later in the drive that led to Nick Dace’s 24-yard field goal.“Coming in, we had a game plan of what we wanted to do and we come out and they’ve totally switched things up on us,” said Dicken, who finished 14-for-31 for 205 yards passing to go with 70 yards on the ground. “We had a couple passes early, then had to adjust, and hit a rough patch. We made some changes at halftime and towards the end we started to hit our stride, although it wasn’t pretty all the time.”


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