Posts
I saw an interesting comment from Charlie Weiss from one of his press conferences this week:
In answer to everyone's question of whether he expected Georgia Tech to bring blitzes throughout the game, this was his response:
"....But all of the blitz zones and the Michaels and the Sam Mikes, they were, unfortunately, they were what we practiced every day unfortunately. And the reason why I say unfortunately is because when you know what they are doing and you don't handle it, that's even a bigger problem than when you don't know what they were doing, because at least you can say, hey, we weren't expecting that. That's where I feel we had our biggest failure. So rather than sit there and blame the players for not getting it done, I blame me for not practicing enough to get it done."
This points out an important factor in football - "tendencies". We like to think that the best plan is to have some razzle-dazzle and trickery. Some "tricks up our sleeves", particularly on offense. We like the reverses (well, except on 3rd-and-one), we like the half-back passes... You know what I'm talking about.... We tend to think that the unexpected is what ultimately good game-planning and winning comes down to. In reality, it mostly comes down to the opposite. In my opinion, you better have tendencies. You better have a system. You better be good at something as your base offense and base defense. You want to have some base plays that you run over and over, that you can consistently execute, even if the defense knows they are coming. You develop tendencies by practicing over and over, then executing those plays in games over and over. A wishbone team. A spread. A sweep team. An option team. A wildcat. Whatever it is - more of your success is going to come from having tendencies, and being great at executing them. Trickery might pull you out of the fire on occasion, but well executed tendencies can keep you out of the fire altogether.
That's ultimately why Weiss's charade of not telling us the QB prior to our game only proved one thing - he had no QB. If he had a QB then he would be developing his tendencies, and it wouldn't matter what we knew or didn't know. Seems that every other head coach with a QB controversy named their starter in the weeks prior to their first games. Are they all idiots and Weiss the only genius? I think this past weekend proved that point.
In terms of defense, Georgia Tech has tendencies. Weiss said so above. He knew exactly what was coming and there wasn't a dagum' thing he could do about it. That my friends, is why tendencies are a good thing.