we lost our flag game today 28-6
there were a number of problems we had. to begin, we had 3 of our regulars out. being a team with no depth, this is an obvious problem. two played football in highschool and one of those guys went on and played football at a small college (nothing fantastic but still much better than your average obviously).
we replaced them with two acquaintances. neither played amazing and there was a very significant drop off in terms of overall talent/speed/organization.
we were actually just a man short…we had to ask a guy from the team who just played on the game before to be on our team. (probably against the rules, but whatever).
with all this trouble, we were also playing probably the best team in the league.
there were huge problems from the start. in order-
1. offensive ineptitude- we couldn’t move the ball. this was due to a few factors- 1) their DEs were very very fast, especially the left end. they wreaked havoc along our line, and our QB had literally a second or two to throw. Our QB isn’t the quickest guy in the world either and that resulted in either a) bad decisions or b) a sack. our line didn’t play well (and i played line today, i got beat on more rushes than i should have)…the thing that really pissed me off about line play was the two pickups – they just went out for passes instead of hanging there..they got beat literally off the first step. it was a joke.
we need to think of plays against super fast rushes. we had the same problem in my flag league in lincoln…fast DEs can just destroy. we threw two picks, which didn’t help our cause. the new guys didn’t know the routes nor even ran clean ones.
2) our lack of pass rush- their QB had all day and night to throw…we normally have different people on the line, but they just frankly weren’t getting the job done today. long times = broken coverage and that results in big plays. we should have mixed in some blitzes, but with new people along all areas, nobody knew wtf their responsibilities were.
3) new people- this was a large part of our failure. our team in omaha has played flag together the last few years, and we are all organized/on the same page (typically). the athleticism was down as well.
i didn’t play fantastic…i can admit this. i’m still ****ing pissed off that we lost though.
I’ve been trying to think of what we could have done differently-
We should have used a TE. We needed another blocker, especially on the left side of the line.
We should have moved the pocket away from the pressure. This seems pretty obvious- maybe a designed roll out…we have such a play but couldn’t work it since nobody knew the plays.
maybe something like this?-
I think we should have worked some option/misdirection stuff? I don’t know…I’m going to have to think about plays in the future…for both teams. We have some pretty obvious problems in terms of protection and blocking and how to counter tough pass rushes.