Two games to talk about to end the season. And the whole season can be summarized in those two games.
Holt: Won(!). I don’t know if I even remember the final….21-6 maybe? And I can be honest about it….they were winless too….and they played that way. Seemed like they wanted to throw on every play…not a recipe for success.
After the last game (where Cpher was yelled at quite a bit…and part of the yelling was that his stance was horrible) I talked with the big guy and found out that he wasn’t quite sure how to fix it. So, we went and talked to the coach, and Cpher got a nice pep talk which was along the same lines of what I was sure of what was going on…hey, you’re doing ok, but, with you size and your speed you should be doing a lot more. The stance he was in was robbing all of his power…he had no choice but to stand up as his first movement instead of moving forward. A simple correction.
So, Cpher had that to think about as this game started. And there was one thing that became apparent pretty quickly; if Holt was going to block Cpher with one guy, Cpher was going to be in their backfield all day.
You can click on either of the two photos for the video highlights of Cpher’s day….
The first play of the game…the quarterback there is recovering his fumble as Cpher rolls over the top of him
This is two or three plays later….the guy in pink socks has tried to block Cpher…Cpher ran by him and through him to get to this reverse right as the exchange takes place.
About immediately thereafter Cpher saw double teams on running plays for the rest of the game (they didn’t double him on passing plays…which is weird, because he was always in the backfield hurrying the throw). He did OK on the double teams too….I think sometimes he was just content to take the block and stay at the line of scrimmage and look for the ball but there were a few times he just drove both guys off the line and made a play.
East Lansing: And the season ended with a thud; we were down 25-0 before rallying to make it 31-12. Thought Cpher played poorly as well; kind of slid into the butt-down stance as time went on and didn’t hold his blocks on offense at all (which led to a fumble recovered by them and a pretty big loss on a running play).
To be fair, EL lined up a very fast guy way outside of Cpher on the line…..and we did nothing to help Cpher out (no running back or TE help) and Cpher had very little chance of getting out that far that fast off of the line to do anything.
I’m sure we’ll be back here next year…8th grade football is sure to have only one team so that alone will make us a heck of a lot more competitive.
