Your last paragraph has been my main point for most of the season, but that hasn't been good enough for a lot of our fans.
I also don't think going downfield was the plan for Shawn, as he didn't start doing that till the 2nd quarter. It looked like he just got a little excited about hitting the big play, started looking for that immediately after the snap, and never went to his check downs. No doubt it's very excusable since it was his first college start, on the road, but today is just another example that you don't have to throw it downfield every other snap to be a good offense. We were best when we ran the ball and kept the chains moving, as we've done all year with KH. That whole "we need to air it out more, which Kenny can't do" train of that has beaten me down all year. We need to do exactly what we've done to get us to this point, which is the opposite of throwing it downfield for an incompletion.