Game Week Jitters

This is Game Week, finally! This will be the 27^th Week One for me (over 24 years) and this is just as exciting as any of the others. I’ve coached in 268 games and won 159 of them, including two National Championships, but yet I know for sure that when the Star Spangled Banner is played at about 5:25 Saturday night, I’ll still get goosebumps.

Our opponent Saturday night is a long-time rival, the Las Vegas Showgirlz. We’ve been playing against them and their head coach, Dion Lee, since 2006. It is sort of rare at the adult level to see the same coaches over and over again, but it is nice in a way, because you get to know the person behind the name.

It is always difficult to guess what a Week One opponent is going to do. The only indicator you have is previous film. In a Week One situation, you normally have to go back to past years and see what they did and who they did it with. Then you’re checking rosters to see who is returning, see what coaching changes they’ve made, etc. – anything that might give you a little bit of a clue.

We as a staff feel like we’ve got a pretty good handle on what Coach Lee “wants” to do from a personality standpoint, but we really don’t know “how” he’ll do it, and so in a Week One situation, you’ve really got to be able to adjust on the fly much quicker than you might in later weeks.

As a coordinator, Week Ones always take on an extra level of anxiety. This is when the schemes you’ve introduced take their first real test. Is one of your plays not working well in practice? Is it because your defense has seen it enough times that they react differently than an opposing defense does? Well, if you believe in the scheme enough, there’s only one way to find out!

As an Offensive Coordinator, I’ve always remembered Homer Smith’s words of advice: “The main reason for an OC to script out his First 15 plays is so he can sleep the night before the game.” I have no point of reference as a Defensive Coordinator, but I imagine that they worry if they’ve drilled enough of the opposing looks and if they think they’ve got a handle on what the opposing OC wants to do. As a Special Teams Coordinator, I always worry about whether I’ve given enough emphasis to the right units and “how can I get burned?”

Many people have said that they expect the Surge to return to the National Championship games we appeared in in 2011 and 2012. Those expectations also place a large target on our backs, but they are also “our” expectations. In three days we’ll have a much better idea of how realistic they are.