Anatomy of a Blow Out

We played a game this past weekend, sort of. We ran fewer plays than we would have in a 30-minute team practice session (26, two of which were kneel-downs) and scored 12 TD’s. Add in two defensive scores and the opening kickoff, which we returned for a TD, and you get the idea.

How does something like this happen? Several reasons:

1)      Small roster size. Despite our owner asking for confirmation that the other team would bring the league minimum of 20 players, they only brought 17. We practically invited them to call it off as another one of our opponents did previously due to injuries. We don’t want to be a part of having other players get hurt any more than they do.

2)      Limited coaching staff. As far as I could tell, they had two coaches. They may have had three. In theory you could do it with three coaches, but they had better be the exactly right three coaches! I think these coaches were all new this year, some of them may have been in their first seasons of coaching. Too few coaches, with too little experience is a bad combination for an inexperienced team.

3)      Not enough athletes. Forget the raw numbers, if you have to put a 350-pound player out on your kick off team, you’re in trouble. Fortunately, she only had to run down the field once.

4)      Not enough interest. When we played this team at their home field, they played a spirited game. Some of them were flying around making plays. This time, they largely acted like they didn’t want to be out there – and this was early on, so it wasn’t fatigue. We’d run 8 offensive plays and were up 40-0 with 6:42 left in the 1^st quarter. A few of them would take one or two steps and simply stop. I don’t get it….drive 6 hours to come out and do that?

Now, if you take all those points above, and reverse them (well, except for the large roster size - ours is “larger” but I wouldn’t call it big in comparison to Chicago, Boston or DC at between 30-35), then you have our team. I don’t mean that to brag, but it is true. You have one team that has been to and won the national championship and has aspirations of winning it again this year. The other team, quite frankly, is just trying to survive.

Games like this should not be played. But what is the alternative? If you only had the competitive teams in the league, you’d have about a 12-team league nationwide. That model was the old WPFL from about 2001 until 2007. There were never more than 20 teams in the league, and there were frequent flights during the regular season. I can remember going to Dallas, Houston, Albuquerque and Wisconsin, and having all of those except Wisconsin come out to us, along with New York. That was some great scheduling and fun games, but boy I bet it was expensive! Our owner at the time pretty much paid for everything. When we won the conference title in 2007 in Rochester, NY, she held up the trophy and said, “This is my $500,000 trophy!” She’d owned the team for five years.

If you schedule like that, soon there will be no teams left. In many instances, the owner can’t pay for it so it falls on the backs of the players. Back in the early 2000’s I remember thinking that the female players were so much older than their male counterparts and that maybe because they tended to be more established in their careers that they were better able to afford those extra costs. But over the years, the age of our athletes has gotten younger and younger and now they face the same problems that men’s teams have – broke players.

So since we can’t exclude local teams from our schedule because they are all we have to play, the answer is to do whatever we can to bring those teams up a level. That was the genesis of Coach Suggett and I wanting to continue the camp concept (with a few tweaks) that Dion Lee started in 2008 in Las Vegas. Certainly teams have to do a lot to help themselves - all the camps in the world won't help if there is no follow-up on the team's and player's part.

We just want competitive games week in and week out – or at least never repeating what happened this week. And if that means opening our playbooks for ideas and coaching up our opponents, even to the point of it costing us a win at some point, then so be it. A rising tide lifts all boats.

PS - I'll be on vacation next week during our two bye weeks, so there will be no post on May 21. See you on the 28th!