under the bus

the chronicles of a coach putting his skilled players in positions to fail...

just chatting with a buddy of mine and he asked a great question...

"why was chris meadows in the game in the first place?"

it leads me to compile a list that we can call "under the bus" which refers to the position that many of our players have unfortunately been placed in.

1) since it was mentioned, we've got the Chris Meadows drop. now i've heard all these nice practice reports from the guys over at BruinGold that do a good job posting up summer and fall practice reports  about meadows making these amazing one handed catches and a 30-plus vertical...

the problem is that you can see all kinds of things from a player in practice, but then you put a player in a relatively new position during a game and you do not know how he will react...why not put meadows in on offense on some other plays at the end of the wsu game to get some experience? even jamil turner and ryan graves would be better options for that play, (each has 1 catch on the year i believe) not to mention that either joe cowan or terrance austin or BOTH were on the bench on that play...

2) the terrible ATV punt muff that brought back horrible memories of wyoming that i didnt want to be reminded of...a punt off the face mask? the sad thing is that ATV is one of our guys who plays his heart out, doesn't pop off in the press or after he makes a play (see Loudmouth Bruce Davis, Trey "I can't cover any player on the field" Brown, and Dennis Keyes with his BS walk-it-in TD against washington)

the problem is that ATV has only been returning kicks (which are DIFFERENT than returning punts) in his past experience, and so against the #9 team in the nation, why do we go to the 2 returner set, especially when austin proved that he is more than capable of making plays back there.

the saddest part of the decision to put ATV back there is that he has had such a fine career in his 2 years here so far, and then he gets put into the game doing something he has little to no game experience doing (i believe we did the 2 PR thing a few times, with austin or ryan graves handling the ball every time) in the middle of an important game (despite all the problems this year, had we won we would still be in rose bowl contention) and  it sets the poor kid up to fail when he has done nothing but work as hard as he can and play as hard as he can in his prior experience

3) we all know what happened against ND and don't really need to relive it, but how about the 4th and 1 decision to roll mac out when we should have run the ball...all on a 4th and 2 from the 22, which could have been a FG that put us up 9-3. based on the way the D had played that day, this lead may have held up...

we all know MBT was put in a position to fail...dont need to say much more about that.

4) how about OR, who i hope to see turn into a great UCLA QB by next year's head coach, hopefully in the spread or in an offense that is designed for him to SUCCEED and not to fail...the problem with getting excited about OR's athleticism is that we run the "unstoppable" WCO. so on the first series (and for much of the first half) we call these QB draws when we do all these short routes, keeping 8 guys in the box...the ludicrous last play does teach us something, and that is that if we want to see OR running with the ball, then it isnt a bad idea to send our receivers on deep routes (which is not really the WCO) to pull the DBs and a LB or 2 back deep, giving him more room to run. now i know that that was the last play and the defenders were deep, but the principle is still there...running a curl or a crossing route isnt going to help ORs athletic ability.

and how about when we actually called a pass play that wasnt a swing pass to breazell? never mind that these actually worked and that weve got a guy named dominique who can go up and get the ball, but instead we decide to go run-run-qb draw for the ENTIRE first half...

5) and how about the defensive secondary against WSU and Arizona, first being the excessive PI calls in Pullman, and then the most amount of jump balls thrown in the history of football by Willie Tuitama. yet we put our DBs in man coverage on every play...verner has been able to get the job done, and even rodney Van, for as bad as he's been over the years had an excellent game oN Saturday. but putting trey brown or michael norris on a receiver one on one has almost been an automatic completion, TD or flag over the last few games. and to top it off, we put christian taylor, fresh off his unfortunate injury a few weeks ago, into one on one coverage against a faster RB in the first half of his first game back from a seizure...talk about putting our players in a position to fail

it really makes me feel bad for our players, because we do have some guys on our team who play hard, and i really do feel bad that they are not being put in a position to succeed...chris horton and reggie carter come to mind. from section 22, it looked like horton was flying on the field 2 days ago, and when he gets interviewed, he doesnt talk about "dominating" or give the other team BB material, but he just talks about being focused on what the team can still do...another example is reggie carter...another is ATV...kids with great character who come and bring it on saturdays.

i would love to go on but i have class registration soon, and thank God for basketball season being here so we can watch a team where the coach brings his players along at the right speed, in the right situations, and giving them as much as they can handle but not more...i guess i could have summed this post up as "dorrell needs to go" but i think we can keep coming up with new and inventive ways to say that before dec. 1.

GO BRUINS