The End (Almost)

This will be the first of two posts on what happened yesterday. The first will be on the game, and the second on a worrisome thing that one of the players said...and how it kind of puts everything together.

The game yesterday was a disgrace. This was a really poor team we were playing, and we simply threw the game away. Every part of the game was pretty bad. To wit:

We had 101 penalty yards, and a number of stupid personal fouls, often at the worst possible moment. Miami's opening drive was largely built on our penalties.

As I feared, we gave up 200 yards and 5.1 yards per carry to a team that has been averaging 2.8 yards per carry. This has become so common that it is not even funny anymore. We tackled terribly, and when the RBs from Miami cut back or bounced out, they were often all alone, because no one was home for us. Our defense has proved it can defend the run, making today's performance (and regression) all the most disappointing.

On offense....I don't know what to say, except for this. We are not a good offensive football team. Our playcalling was just terrible at key points on Saturday. We opened up and the direct snap worked great, and somehow, our offensive braintrust was unable to move on. On key plays, we would go to the direct snap, everyone in the stadium knew what was coming, and then it came, and Miami would swallow it up.

At one point, I said to myself, this is just "3 yards and a cloud of dust" all over again. Our offensive is so conservative...I swear, yesterday's playcalling looked like the same plays that the coaches gave to AT when he had to fill in for Omar when he was injured. At the time, I thought that was because they didn't trust AT...now I start to think that is how Coach wants a team to play.

I guess Urban Meyer might have been the brains behind the offense after all.

I know what Coach would say...that we didn't block those direct snap plays. Well, I'm sure that's true. I think that it wasn't our best line performance, though they still might have been the players of the game. Anyway, here's the point. After you saw they weren't blocking it a couple of times, maybe you might have tried something else. And, its hard to block a play that the entire defense can see coming.

And the QB? I don't know. Its very disappointing. I didn't notice this, but a poster on AZZ.com (who notices this kind of stuff) said that there were receivers open downfield and he just checked down to the short route...for whatever reason. If that's true, we've got to fix that, because we're dying here.

I could go through the game flow and all that, but I think that covers it. We played undisciplined football, unimaginative football, and we lost at home to a team that should be inferior to us.

Again.

On the post-game, it was a Coach Brandon special. After the EMU loss, he showed some emotion. I was absolutely shocked at his reaction yesterday. First, he fell back on his favorite two things, which are:

• We had a chance to win the game.
• This MAC is tough.

He's right. We were winning in the fourth quarter, amazing as that is. That doesn't make it better.

It makes it worse. We were leading in the fourth quarter at home against a team we should beat, we should be able to pull it together and close the door. And we didn't.

Again.

At this point in our program, it should in no way be considered a success that we had a chance to win the game. That's what we say when we play at OSU. In our conference, on our field, against our weak division, we should be in every game pretty much automatically.

Oh, and this stuff about how much parity our league has. I've written about this before, but the football in the MAC has fallen greatly since its halycon day earlier this decade. There is parity in the MAC. There are a bunch of bad teams, and we're one of them.

Coach said we wouldn't push the panic button unless we were getting blown out. Listen, panic is never advisable. Even if you see someone having a heart attack, panic isn't the thing. People who think other people are overreacting always say "we're not pushing the panic button."

Well, I'm not advising a panic button. I'm advising hitting the Fix It Button.

The Coach at that press conference was certainly talking like a man with a big contract extension. Only under duress did he talk about benching people, whether things were unacceptable, etc. And not once did he say "we got out-coached."

Because we did.

Listen, its true. The season is not over. I think three losses will win the East, and we could lose next week to NIU (a virtual certainty as we look at it this morning) and then beat Kent, OU, Buffalo and Toledo coming home and win the East.

Yes, that could happen. But given our team's performance since the Wyoming game, it is virtually impossible to imagine. We are 3-4, and would have to win 4 out of 5 just to have a winning season. That's impossible to imagine, too. A 6-6 season would be an accomplishment at this point. And given our returning players from an 8-5 team, that's just a huge disappointment.

This team has some ability, though I am not sure that we are as loaded as we thought, frankly. My other post will cover what I fear is really going on, but for now, let's just say this. We had an opportunity to rebuild the season after the EMU game. We essentially had the same problems against Akron and against Miami.

Could it get fixed? Sure, it could, like it was last year. I'm rooting for it to be fixed. But, I'm losing confidence.