A little behind here….but the season only ended on Sunday.
Christopher: This is only reporting, no picture, no videos. Team got absolutely hammered on October 14th, lost 44-12 to Dewitt. Lost the last game of the season 28-16 to Haslett on Sunday. That game wasn’t as close as the score indicated; we scored on a kickoff return and a long pass; they drove the ball up and down the field on us…..I’d be shocked to learn we had more than two first downs.
Had a talk with Cpher about sustaining his blocks before the last game….thought he did a better job of that and played ok on defense. Had a crushing block on the kickoff return……I was afraid he was going to get called for a penalty…it was a legal block, but, not really necessary.
Matthew: Lost the last game of the season to Haslett 16-8.
There are two ways you can approach playing time in football……we have tried, at least for the first three or four games, to play everyone equally. As the season went on, a ‘squad’ of the best and biggest players played substantial parts of the back ends of the first and second half after everyone had played their 7 plays mandated by the league. One group plays offense the first half, one group plays offense the second half.
Other teams keep their best players on the field all the time; on offense and on defense. They substitute the weaker players for the weaker players to get everyone their seven plays. Haslett is one of those teams. I wonder what each approach does for development later on; I’d bet Haslett’s approach chases away a lot of the smaller kids who may grow into bigger kids later.
So anyway….did they win? Yeah, sure. Were they better than us? Only because they played their best kids on each and every play. When we went to putting our best kids on the field a lot, we had a lot of success….
One thing we didn’t have a lot of success on was Matthew’s tight-end-reverse. They did a good job of stringing the play out and making him go wide….and that’s not going to work for him, he needs to cut back. The picture above is the first of those plays in the game…he got four or five yards because he cut back up field towards the middle. Didn’t get the first down….
The weather sucked…..it was cold and very very windy. Matthew is kicking this extra point with the wind, and you can see in the first shot he’s upright, and planting his left foot and about to swing through. He may be a smidge to far forward on the plant foot though…..and he ended up flat on his butt. He did nail the kick though.
Matthew’s defensive play of the game…he’s lined up as the far defensive end here and has come up field and kept his pursuit…they ran a reverse away, and then back at him and because he stayed home he forced the kid to have to cut inside. The kid fumbled, and Matthew came back to make the recovery.
Matthew’s other good play (there was nothing, nothing, notable on offense). We came out and attempted an onside kick at the start of the second half. And Matthew nailed the kick, got the high bounce right before it got to the Haslett kid, and we recovered.
Video of Matthew highlights later, maybe…..
