San Marcos — Teenagers and young adults don’t like waking up early on weekends. If they had their way, they’d sleep until the afternoon, get up, eat dinner and then begin their night.

Football players don’t have that luxury — especially at Texas State.

Saturday morning, while most of their fellow classmates were asleep, the Bobcats took to the turf at Bobcat Stadium for their final spring scrimmage.

“We got used to practicing in the mornings last year, but it’s always different waking up in the morning and coming out hitting,” Texas State linebacker Bryan Iwuji said. “After you go through your warm-ups and individual drills, you’re ready to go.”

Iwuji and the Bobcats’ defense had their work cut out for themselves after digging themselves into a hole at the last scrimmage.

A week ago, the defense didn’t have an answer for the offense. Texas State’s first- and second-team offenses pounded the ball at the defense, scoring on 15 of its 98 plays.

“We had a lot to prove to ourselves and the coaches after last week,” Iwuji said. “It wasn’t a good sign to see the offense have such an easy time, so we had to make sure we made their jobs a little harder today.”

It took the defense one drive to get adjusted to game speed, but the Bobcats’ settled into a groove soon after. While it was the quarterbacks who impressed the coaches at the Maroon vs. Gold scrimmage, the linebackers and defensive backs stepped up Saturday.

Iwuji led a goal-line stand at the 3-yard line by tackling Frank Reddic in the backfield on an option pitch and Brian Lilly continued his hard-hitting ways at middle linebacker. Derek Lopez and Mario Wiggins, Jr., each defended their share of passes while San Marcos grad T.P. Miller put a clamp on anything over the top.

“Offense sells tickets. Defense wins championships,” Texas State head coach Brad Wright said. “We have a chance to be better on defense than we’ve been here in quite a while. It was a special group of guys in 2005, but we’re moving in that direction right now.”

Since the defense played considerably better than 11 invisible men, the offense stalled.

The Bobcats’ trio of quarterbacks (Tim Hawkins, Bryan Hill and Eric Soza) didn’t look sharp. Hawkins and Soza made incorrect reads and were lucky three of their passes weren’t intercepted. Hill scored on three runs, but didn’t display his arm.

If Texas State is going to have any success in 2010, the quarterbacks need to be consistent. Throughout spring practice, Hawkins, Hill and Soza were anything but steady and the battle will get even tougher when heralded freshman Tyler Arndt arrives in August.

“You can’t go wrong with competition,” Soza said. “With the signing of Tyler, it helped all of us out because it gave us another urge to perform and get that edge to try to get better. We weren’t the best we could be this spring, but you better believe we’re going to be working hard this summer to prove ourselves in the fall.”