Championship Post Mortem

OK, so by now if you follow women’s football at all, you know the outcome of the National Championship game on Saturday. We lost to the Boston Militia, 69-34. There’s not much we can say, but I’ll try….

Boston is everything we thought they would be. We sort of had an idea that we might have to score in the 50’s in order to win. Three fumbles, two in the first couple of series, pretty much ensured that we weren’t going to do that. If you just look at our offensive numbers in a vacuum, you might say we played pretty well: 420 yards of offense, 4.75 yards per carry, 22 first downs, almost 300 yards passing. But again, those 3 fumbles killed us. We also gave up a sack, only the third of the year, but at an inconvenient moment.

The thing that really impressed me about Boston was their offensive line. I think it is the best in the game. I think we’re second, but they are really, really good. Plus, individually, they are very strong and each of them seem to have that nasty mentality that great offensive linemen have.

Defensively, obviously if you give up 69 points it is pretty ugly. What we’ll need to look at is if individual players always tackled like they did Saturday and got away with it because of inferior competition or if all of a sudden we forgot how to tackle and we all just decided to have a lousy game at once. I tend to think it was the former. For the most part, we had people in place to make plays, and didn’t. Hats off to Boston’s running backs, especially Whitney Zelee, who was as good as advertised.

We also didn’t help ourselves with a particularly bad penalty….we had Boston 4^th and 10, at about our 40. They punted, but we were offsides. Now it’s 4^th and 5, they go for it, and score a TD on that play. It was that kind of night.

So…. now what? We’ve already met as a staff to candidly discuss what we need to do to get better. Obviously, Boston has become to us now what Dallas was to us back in 2004-07, the hump we have to get over. We focused on Dallas and were able to beat them every time we played them since 2006. It remains to be seen what kind of success we’ll have against Boston in the future, but we have a very clear picture of where we want to go and how to get there. You’ll see a different Surge team in 2015.

Quite honestly, the advantage we have over other teams who want to get where we’re at is that we’ve been there so often. A 43-4 record since 2011 (with 2 of those losses against Boston) and three appearances in the national championship game mean that we’ve got a formula. It may not be the formula, as I’m not sure there is only one way to get it done, but we’ve certainly got a successful one.

So we’ve got a little down time….the rest of August. I should have some camp updates next Wednesday when I get back on schedule. Overall, the last week being on vacation was great. Just a three-hour period on Saturday was less than fun. But hey, it was still championship football, so, really, how bad could it have been?