[Husker] Crowd Noise

[Mark Landin]

On 10/4/06, Matt Phillips <matthew.a.phillips at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have to ask, Was the crowd too loud?... or was the scheme too
> complicated?
>
> Or did the coaching staff fail to adjust its perfect plan?
>
> It's hard to believe the angst in some of these posts (not yours, Scott).
> But I don't think folks are seeing the root cause of the problem.
>
> There are loud stadiums every Saturday.  There are defensive adjustments
> every Saturday - plenty of teams can pull those off.  But I've never heard
> that a home stadium was too loud for the adjustments.  So I have to point
> the finger at the people who designed the defense - the coaching staff.

The players blame themselves. There were some new defensive schemes
and adjustments, but the players admit they weren't lining up right,
or blowing an assignment, or making the wrong calls, etc. Probably
because there was only a week of practice for these new changes and
perhaps there were just too many of them. For all we know everything
went great in practice, only to some apart a bit during the actual
game. Do you know how practice went? And by halftime, we were pretty
much still in control, so what halftime adjustments do you think the
coaches should have recognized and implemented?

Do I agree with the idea that stopping the shovel pass to Cornish was
a  high enough priority that it warranted enough scheme changes that
it caused this kind of confusion? I don't know, because a) I don't
know how the changes would have worked if the players had not
committed the mistakes they are admitting to and b) I don't know what
kind of plays KU would have run if we hadn't been scheming to stop
Cornish. Do you know those things?