Regular Season Finale

First off this week, there’s not much in the way of a camp update. If you missed the announcement, you can find it here. Next week I’ll write up an introduction of the guest coaches coming in from across the country – it’ll probably be a slow news week.

You may recall a couple of posts ago when I wrote about A Pleasant Surprise regarding our win over the team that put us out of the playoffs last year. This week we went back up to the heat of Central Cal to play them again. We knew going in that we were going to be down 4 WR/DB types – 3 of them starters. That was only mildly concerning to me as the OL coach, but as ST Coordinator, it made my ST depth chart look like Swiss cheese! Then, an hour before the game I found out my 5 time (now 6) All American left tackle was going to miss the game with a freak tweak of her back. My center was in the same boat but (barely) able to go. So THAT got my attention in a big way. Fortunately for us, having a former All American ready to step in at LT was/is a blessing.

It became apparent quickly that our opponents were in fact missing some people from the first game. I first noticed it where depth usually shows up – on special teams. In San Diego, their punt team was definitely devoid of speed and athleticism.  Their punter wasn’t very good either. So I changed up some of our scheme to take advantage of those developments only to find out they were now obsolete. Different punter, and a ton more athletes running down the field. Oh well….we were able to change things back and ended up returning one for a TD.

The overall result was a 35-6 win for us. It was a good win in that we showed that other people could step up in times of trouble and get us through the game. It wasn’t so good in that we had an awful lot of brain farts…..I don’t know if it was due to the heat (97 degrees at kickoff – 7:00 at night), or a feeling of complacency after the first win (I really hope not – we’re not good enough that we can take anyone lightly) or just the amount of players who had to step in and play more snaps than normal (a definite possibility, but one that might come up again).

Now we move onto the playoffs – the best time of the year! We have players that played on other teams before, and they were a little surprised that the coaches didn’t praise our 8-0 record in our post-game chat. They thought it deserved mention. Welcome to the world of raised expectations! Who else would you play for (well, I can think of three other teams) who would go 9-2 and declare it a “down year”? That’s us. That 8-0 means squat if we lose our next game. Many of us remember very well the bittersweet feeling of 2011, of getting to the championship game and losing to Boston. It fueled us for 2012. I’d prefer not to have to experience that painful lesson again, but I wouldn’t trade those experiences for anything.