I'm a firm believer, that football, is a sport, where strategy, play calling systems are way overrated. You get your system, and you go. Some systems are more complex and require more thinking than others. I watched the entire Temple game again, play by play. I'll reserve my judgments for the rest of the season on players and coaches. There are too many people around here, that cannot differentiate between a critique of performance, and personal attacks, opinions on people, stuff like that. I'm sick of the complaining and negative energy, and I confess, I fell into it myself. It's so easy.
I think what they need is to get into practice, and challenge themselves, to perform to the very limits of their capability, and get into each other's faces. There were many times, when in the Edsall era, I wished I could be a fly on the wall in the practice facility, and watch what's happening. See who's in the middle of things, really mixing it up. See who's out there really pressing buttons on teh field, and making things happen.
There are always leaders and followers, at all levels of everything. One of my biggest problems in teh past with Edsall, was that he seemed to wait too long for leaders to emerge on his teams, and we lost early season games. It seems the current coaching staff, which in retrospect, shouldn't surprise me, expects the exact same thing for the players in this program.
Part of a football education, is learning to become a leader, if that's a strength, you have, to be a workhorse, whatever, to find what you're good at within a very large organization, and excel to the best you can be at it.
There are other programs, other coaches, that lead by example. We just had one on the field in Addazio. THis is a guy that is going to take the responsiblity, week in and week out, to set the tone, to be the leader.
The critical thing, that's most important, and I had the same criticism of Edsall, a little over 3 years ago, when I came on this board, is that you have to balance winning with the rest of it at this level of football, with what we want to achieve. The coach needs to be able to assume that responsibility of being the leader to set the tone of how things are going to be on the field, if the players aren't coming along fast enough, otherwise you lose games, you should win.
it's a tough criticism to make, because you're balancing the principlies of education and development, with winning at all cost.
I think we're going to finish out this season strong, not sure how strong, but the players we have, that are going to develop into leaders, will do so.
And I don't think our cupboards are going to be bare at all in coming years, when I look at this roster.
What we have to do, is get players on teh practice fields, really in each other's faces, offensive vs. defensive, and demanding that the offense frigging block for entire game.
