[NU Sports] Cat report card

[Roy S. Lamberton]

A few old coaching maxims:

1. You lose a game for every Freshman you start - we're lucky to have won 7 just based on
that.

2. It all starts on the offensive line - what impressed me about Ill-noise was that the
inside of their O-line either blew holes in the middle of our D, or piled them up so they
could run inside. What you saw there (and then at Wiscy) was an upperclass ladened
offensive line, who have played together for at least 4 years, and who wanted to make a
statement. 

O-line is the key to the running game and the passing game - the big guys up front want to
stop everything, but keep the LB's off the QB 95% of the time and you usually can win.
This year we didn't see a lot of pancake blocks from our guys - the stuff that RS Juniors
and Seniors do all the time. O-Line is also where you give the Eberts time to get loose.

3. You have to tackle to play defense - no first guy strip attempts, no grab an arm, you
have to stick your shoulder pads into the ball carrier, and doing that well is a function
of experience (see #1 above). Even Fitz commented on this "issue."

4. Three things happen when you throw the ball, and 2 of them are bad - You have to play
your game though - for us it’s a variation of ball control with a high tempo. You stop
that game by taking the ball away. Wiscy did it how many times?

5. If all else fails, blitz - something we talked about on our chats quite a bit. We did
swarm the ball at times, but only 17 sacks (to our opponents 39) suggests that we spent
most of our time in contain and didn't (or couldn't) attack. 

Saturday night, Maryland, using a RS Frosh QB, absolutely humbled NCState and knocked them
out of the ACC playoff. The kid isn't any better or worse than Evan, but he's got 12 games
under his belt and has played the entire season. The Terps lost to FSU the week before
because of interceptions - sound familiar?

Anyway, most of us didn't expect much from this season, except some of us thought Persa
would give us a decent year and the team wouldn't return to the late 90's when we'd
graduate a bunch of guys, and hit the crapper again. IMHO, we showed our inexperience when
we couldn't put Minny away, then really showed our weaknesses with Purdue. MSU exploited
what we'd shown the next week and then the challenge was to try to improve each quarter as
we looked ahead to the November where we usually earned our bowl berth, but needed to show
improvement just to stay respectable.

I real irony would be if we get to Dallas and stomp some team into the stone age, and get
our first Bowl win in 50+ years to redeem the season.

Dallas, and the Cotton Bowl on January 1st isn't that bad a place to be - unless you're on
the losing end of the Red River Shootout.

Go Cats

rsl

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Roy S. Lamberton - Senior Associate & Unix Guru.
Computer Applications & Support Associates
-------------------- Also ----------------------
"Commissioner" Delaware American Legion Baseball
Director Media Relations - Little League 
  Senior League Softball World Series
Retired Senior Chief Cryptologic Technician [R]
Northwestern University - Speech 1974 - 
Chi Phi: Pi 1974, KD 1968
Publisher Emeritus: Purple Reign (Fox Sports)
==========  Go Cats -  Beat 'em All  ===========

"...Then I get on my knees and pray,
WE DON'T GET FOOLED AGAIN!" -- Pete Townsend

================================================

This is a young team that needs leadership. By the Wisconsin game there were 7 Freshman, 6
Sophmores, and only 3 seniors on the two deep chart for the offense. It was a little
better on defense with 3 Frosh, 6 Sophs, and 4 Seniors. But basically half the team that
played in that game were playing in their first or second year of college ball.  Compare
that to Wisky where it seemed like the whole team were seniors.