Sept. 18, 2014
The Great Bug-Tussle
There was much anticipation throughout Wildcat Nation regarding whether
or not the ‘Cats would rebound from the previous weekend’s abysmal
performance against Cal as they prepared to face the Northern Illinois
Hush Puppies at Dyche’s Ditch last Saturday. Would HC Fitz and
his coaching staff finally conceive offensive and defensive game plans
better suited to utilize the quality field play capabilities of their
many playmakers on both sides of the LOS more efficiently and
effectively? Would the individual players, who seemed to operate
as independent entities during portions of the Cal game, regain their
collective commitment to excellence and coalesce into a cohesive,
fundamentally sound team dedicated to execute those games plans more
consistently? I truly believed that each NU player, embarrassed
and disgusted with his own dismal field play against the Care Bears,
would flush the memory of those failures to take it out on the NIU Hush
Puppies.
I couldn’t have been more mislead by HC Pat Fitzgerald’s
well-chronicled football philosophy of a team and its players
recognizing and learning from the shortfalls and mistakes of their
prior game and then flushing it – to purge the whole damn thing from
their memory banks – as they prepared for their upcoming foe (NIU) with
greater resolve and determination to “get it right” and bring home the
“W.” This mental exercise of exorcising the demons discovered
during review of the last game is a fantastic coaching concept that
allows the individual player to assess his field play rationally and
objectively, to assume ownership of his failures then to take the
necessary measures to ensure those failures to execute don’t reoccur in
future games.
Unfortunately for the ‘Cats, that turnaround in mental commitment
towards continued improvement just didn’t happen. In fact, it got
worse when playing the Hush Puppies.
In retrospect, the grapple between the ‘Cats and Hush Puppies, the
projected cat versus dog fur-ball, could best be described as “The
Great Bug Tussle.” Most especially in H-1, the competitive
interplay between both teams resembled two sow bugs going face-to-face,
pushing one another around Ryan Field in a titanic pillow fight in
their bid to best the other, and consequently, going nowhere fast for
the effort. This “battle of the banana slugs” wasn’t merely an
exercise in futility, it progressively transitioned into a comedy of
errors, highlighted by numerous blunders and dunderheaded field play by
members from both teams, as the game wore on.
In the end, the team who captured the “W” flag was the team who made the fewer blunders. And it wasn’t the ‘Cats.
How the Hush Puppies Gummed
the ‘Cats Into Submission
Calling Out Mick McCall
Please understand that the following perspective is strictly my
personal opinion, nothing more. However, I’m not apologizing for
it, either.
IMHO, ‘Cat OC Mick McCall is as stubborn as he is arrogant regarding
his offensive schemes for the 2014 campaign. Somewhere, somehow,
he has gotten it into his thick skull that NU’s O should aspire to
emulate the BuckNut offense. His offensive game plans over the
past 2 games explicitly depend on a power ground game to set up NU’s
passing attack. The major flaw in this plan: the ‘Cat O doesn’t
possess the personnel to do so – in particular, the team is missing a
LOS-controlling OL or a bruising heavy RB. And it’s absolutely
destroying NU’s ability to control the ball and game clock and
subsequently, to score points.
Exacerbating the whole scenario is McCall’s frustrating penchant to
keep to the preconceived script of plays per down & distance, in
spite of whether or not the opposing D has planned for and implemented
an effective counter defense against those plays. One example in
the NIU game was the use of the jet sweep. Obviously, the Hush
Puppy defensive brain trust recognized NU’s liberal use of this latest
ground game twist in attacking the defensive edge - an alternative to
the read option – and configured a strategy to defend that point of
attack. Whenever the ‘Cats ran the jet sweep (or the read option
or a slip screen, for that matter), the outside LB to the side of the
attacked edge and the FS (acting like a 2nd LB in rush support) both
sprinted to that edge and drove past the LOS into NU’s wide backfield
to catch the ball carrier just before or at the time he planted his
foot to turn downfield. Using the sideline as another defender,
this inside-out rush support from the NIU secondary squeezed the target
rush area allowing the pursuit to attack the ball with abandon.
Any hesitation by the ‘Cat ball carrier when making his cut towards the
LOS, then this sellout pursuit would blow up this edge play for little
to no gain or worse, a TFL. After the 3rd such failed execution,
it became apparent that the Northern coaching staff had established the
appropriate reads for their D to stone NU’s jet sweep (or read option
or slip screen) in its tracks. Conventional wisdom would conclude
that these defensive edge attack runs by McCall had been neutralized
soundly and it was time to shelve this play set and employ some other
rush package at another point of attack along the LOS.
But no… McCall kept calling these defensive edge plays a number of
times per quarter and virtually every attempt was stoned - often
handcuffing the ‘Cat O into subsequent long distance downs, which
placed even more pressure on QB Trevor Siemian and his receiving corps
to bail NU’s offense out from behind its self-inflicted proverbial
eight ball and sustain the current drive. Not the best
strategy to lessen the performance challenges of the ‘Cats’
inconsistent passing attack by its OC, to be sure.
”You Have Been Found Lacking”
A major contributor to NU’s performance woes on either side of the LOS
has been the general the lack of discipline by the ‘Cat OL -
highlighted by frequent boneheaded offensive holding and illegal
blocking calls which frequently reversed substantive yardage
gains. In particular, the ‘Cats’ starting LOT had a painfully
penalty-laden afternoon.
Making matters worse still was the OL’s inability to neutralize
Northern’s pass rush - even against 3-DL sets - giving up 6 sacks while
backing up the ‘Cat offense 40 total yards in the process. The
most putrid piece of NU’s blocking breakdown pie was that the Wildcat
OTs simply did not engage their DE blocking targets soon enough off the
snap of the ball, routinely allowing those edge pass rushers a full 3-4
strides across the LOS to compress the ‘Cat backfield in towards the
QB. By the time those OTs locked horns with these edge rushers,
the hand-fighting tandem was a scant 1-2 yards from Siemian. To
the most casual fan witnessing such action unfold before him on the
green grass of Ryan Field, this piss-poor pass protection technique by
NU’s OTs was way more than just inefficient, it was as fundamentally
unsound as it was game-changing. The ultimate head-scratcher was
that this wholly disastrous pass blocking methodology was a coached
technique - conceived and implemented by the OL coach and the OC as
part of their original game plan - one that, in the final analysis,
severely compromised NU’s passing attack in the worst way. It
forced Siemian to constantly shift his attention from going through his
downfield receiver progressions to focusing on protection breakdowns
occurring all around him, compelling him to avoid a pass rush that was
often at his level or in his face mere moments after completing his
drop-back and setting his feet for the throw. It made the
simplest pitch-n-catch pass attempts an adventure.
Couple these OL woes with the receiving corps’ all-too-frequent dropped
passes, and it’s a recipe for point production failure.
Most notable of all dropped receptions in last Saturday’s game was the
perfectly-placed pass from Siemian to a wide-open WR, Miles Schuler,
who had gained 3 full yards of separation from his cover DB at the NIU
5, only to inexplicably muff the bean as it hit his mitts free and
clear. Coaches make decisions and playmakers make plays.
Schuler, a transfer senior in his last season of eligibility, looked
like he’s not quite personally prepared to execute as a primary
playmaker in the unforgiving glare of the bright spotlight that is B1G
football. His completion gaffe was a
momentum-changer.
On the defensive side, personal fouls by NU defensive personnel reared
its ugly head which contributed heavily towards sustaining possession
of the pill during 2 of 3 TD drives for the Hush Puppies. Then
there are the damn explosion plays that the NU defense gives-up with
frustratingly expected frequency – like that 59 yard bomb, off a 2nd
& 19 yard down, for Northern’s game-clinching TD that shoulda,
woulda, coulda been defended and broken-up had the cover DB maintained
his poise and kept sprinting hard with the target NIU receiver. A
lack of discipline, to be sure.
The only conclusion one could make at all this was that Fitz and his
coaching staff, somehow, some way, lost connection with their players
and their field play on many levels – both in preparation and in
game-time performance.
Soft Shoe
With that hard conclusion of Fitz and his coaching staff losing
connectivity with their players, especially in the heat of the
game-time battle, fresh in mind, one is drawn to ask the equally hard
question: How?
IMHO, the less-than-stellar field play exhibited by Wildcat players in
all phases over these first two games of the 2014 campaign have their
roots in HC Pat Fitz and his decision to conduct a pillow-soft, very
limited full contact pre-season. The hard truth is that the 2014
Wildcat team, as a whole, has shown little, if any, of the necessary
mental toughness and resiliency to act boldly and decisively in the
face of adversity when playing opponents like the Cal Care Bears and
the NIU Hush Puppies, who, quite frankly, are not that high quality
themselves. These characteristics of toughness and resiliency are
more a product of nurture - by the coaching staff - than it is nature -
as commonly found in the DNA of the individual Division 1A
player. And this nurture is forged in the crucible of intense
competition – the kind of competition that comes to the fore during
full-contact drills and scrimmages where hard-nosed contact is a
necessity to survive and succeed; and where the best players bring-out
their best field play. Consequently, those best players then
become a team’s most reliable playmakers and go-to
leaders.
Perhaps pre-season injuries to projected primary playmakers like WR
Christian Jones and DT Sean McEvilly compelled Fitz to take this
toned-down, milquetoast approach to full contact drills in order to
avoid further casualties from friendly fire. Whatever the
reasoning, the absence of impassioned live hitting during Camp Kenoshia
practices was noted and reported as such in the biggest of ways when
viewed firsthand by the talking heads who host the Big-Ten Network’s
travelling circus for pre-season analysis and hype. So it’s my
opinion that all the negative consequences to this predominately soft
approach to pre-season preparation has come to roost for Fitz and his
‘Cats and were on display, in all its ugliness, during last weekend’s
game against the very beatable Hush Puppies. And it will be
almost impossible to reverse these negatives when neck-deep in the
thick of in-season competition. The zero-zero score at the end of
H-1 and the virtual white flag waved by Fitz and the NU coaching staff
in mid-Q4 underscores this point.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, at this early moment in the 2014 season, I see little
leadership on the field or on the sidelines. Virtually everything
regarding in-game strategies and play-calling among Fitz and his
coaching staff seems steadfastly pro-forma and prearranged. NU’s
opponents rarely, if ever, appear surprised or unprepared when
countering whatever the ‘Cat brain trusts on either side of the LOS
throws at them. Strategic innovation and imaginative plays
designed to exploit opponent weaknesses, which formed the foundation to
the spread offense in seasons past, are peculiarly absent. And
when expected results are not delivered or mistakes are made, Fitz goes
ballistic rather than calmly, coolly taking control of the strategy or
game scenarios to reverse the trend. In post-game interviews,
Fitz sings the one-note song of Wildcat losses due to a string of
one-on-one breakdowns. Well, what ever happened to the Wildcats
being the team to deliver those one-on-one breakdowns on their
opposition? Such a deep, probing question deserves an equally
deep, unambiguous retort… and Fitz has yet to provide a viable or
believable one.
It’s very difficult for me to articulate my deep feelings after
witnessing this “bug tussle” between the ‘Cats and Hush Puppies.
Unfortunately, it may not be the last one in the 2014 season.
Fitz is in dire need of being served and noshing on a heaping helping
of humble pie, coupled with a soul-searching review of past poor
decisions regarding personnel and team preparation. Mick McCall
simply must resurrect that innovative forward-thinking profile when
constructing initial offensive game plans and introducing effective
in-game adjustments that were commonplace with his OC coaching tenure
at BuGS-U and in his seasons through 2012 as OC for the Wildcats.
Likewise, DC Doc Hankwitz has got to get his defensive squad back on
track to operate as a comprehensive force rather than the hap-hazard
collection of individual parts seen in NU’s first 2 contests of
2014.
The Western Illinois Feather-Weights are next up for the ‘Cats.
On paper, this team appears to be a relative weak sister to what the
Wildcats possess position-by-position. However, 2nd-year HC Bob
Nelson had his Feather-Weights primed and ready when his team ignored
pre-game prognostications, faced the Big Bad Badgers of Wisky and held
their own for the first half, giving the Badgers all the competition
they didn’t expect, and more, from a motivated underdog.
They will be just as motivated for a ‘Cat team dealing with their own
internal demons.
The Waterboy
“Win with Grace, Lose with Dignity”
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The Waterboy is a former football player
and a Northwestern
alumnus. Aside from these facts, he has no affiliation with
Northwestern University. The commentary he posts here is his
own, and does not necessarily reflect the views of HailToPurple.com.
