SWC75
Bored Historian
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Why Florida State will win
- They just said on the radios that an awful lot of dominos would have to fall in a certain way for Syracuse to win this game. Like this:
- Remember last year’s game? It was 3-59. And that was the score after the third quarter.
- What I remember beyond that was that it seemed like we were playing an NFL team. Not just in terms of talent. It was boys playing against men. They were bigger stronger, faster and more confident, which made them more efficient.
- Do we have one player who could start for them, even when we are fully healthy?
- And we aren’t fully healthy. We have no less than 11 players who will be out for tomorrow’s game, including our starting quarterback.
- And our coaching staff is in chaos. There are probably pro- and anti- MacDonald factions. We will not have a unified front going into this game.
- Ah, the Nebraska game. Here’s what I wrote in my pre-season preview:
“Will it happen again? Probably not. Nebraska was a bullying team. They were the first school to become famous for their weight room. They met you at the point of attack. You knew what was coming but you couldn’t stop it because they were bigger, stronger and tougher than you were. A big asset for the Syracuse team was Mike Wojcik, the team’s strength coach who later held the same positon with the Dallas Cowboys Super Bowl championship teams. Our guys were getting stronger each year. The strength of our team was our “four wheel drive” defensive line of Tim Breen, Bill Pendock, Jamie Kimmell and Blaise Winter. It was hoped that this group could give Nebraska some trouble the previous year but the team received so many motivational speeches from the coaches they forgot to maintain their assignments and ran wherever they thought the ball was on every play. Every misdirection play went the distance.
In 1984, the coaches stressed that they stay at home, secure their positon, then get aggressive. It made all the difference. That and the unfocused state of the over-confident Huskers. That game was football’s equivalent of Buster Douglas beating Mike Tyson Buster, on that night, wasn’t scared of Mike as his other opponents had been and met him at the point of attack. Tyson didn’t know what to do when an opponent was forcing him against the ropes and got knocked out. From the opening kick-off when Tom Rathman was ko’ed, we took it to the Huskers. Tim Green spent the whole day in their backfield. We hung in the game with our model T offense and it became apparent that we might actually have a chance to win this. Then came Norley, (on basically the last play of his career) to Siano and we’d pulled off the greatest upset in SU history. We didn’t become a power immediately but the recruits that would engineer the turn-around three years alter were surely watching.
Florida State is a team with NFL caliber athletes all over the field. They take advantage of that by making you cover the whole field and seeing if you can keep up with them, which you can’t. If you can’t keep up with a team, you can’t out-tough them. That will be the difference. Mental attitude will not be as big a factor in this game as the Nebraska game because the gap in physical talent will be too great. I’m hoping for better than 3-59 but I expect this will be similar to last year’s Clemson game where the Tigers, whenever they got in any kind of mild trouble, could just launch a bomb and explode our chances and our spirits.”
- I remember a player from the Frank Maloney Era talking about speech Maloney made before a game against Penn State. He stressed what a supreme effort they needed to give to win that game. It boomeranged. The player said it made it seem like the situation was hopeless. It might have been better to stress that they had the ability to beat this team, rather than how hard they had to try to do so. Here’s a quote from Scott Shafer’s press conference after the Louisville game:
“After losing seasons in the past is there a feeling that this is going that way after the last three losses?
“Not at all. All that stuff that’s going through your head because you have doubt in us and me doesn’t happen with me. We’re going to continue to fight our butts off. We’re going to fight to the very end.”
My reaction to that is that if you telling your players to “fight to the very end”, you are telling them that there will be an end and it will be the end of our hopes . He’s not telling them to win.
- They just said on the radios that an awful lot of dominos would have to fall in a certain way for Syracuse to win this game. Like this:
- Remember last year’s game? It was 3-59. And that was the score after the third quarter.
- What I remember beyond that was that it seemed like we were playing an NFL team. Not just in terms of talent. It was boys playing against men. They were bigger stronger, faster and more confident, which made them more efficient.
- Do we have one player who could start for them, even when we are fully healthy?
- And we aren’t fully healthy. We have no less than 11 players who will be out for tomorrow’s game, including our starting quarterback.
- And our coaching staff is in chaos. There are probably pro- and anti- MacDonald factions. We will not have a unified front going into this game.
- Ah, the Nebraska game. Here’s what I wrote in my pre-season preview:
“Will it happen again? Probably not. Nebraska was a bullying team. They were the first school to become famous for their weight room. They met you at the point of attack. You knew what was coming but you couldn’t stop it because they were bigger, stronger and tougher than you were. A big asset for the Syracuse team was Mike Wojcik, the team’s strength coach who later held the same positon with the Dallas Cowboys Super Bowl championship teams. Our guys were getting stronger each year. The strength of our team was our “four wheel drive” defensive line of Tim Breen, Bill Pendock, Jamie Kimmell and Blaise Winter. It was hoped that this group could give Nebraska some trouble the previous year but the team received so many motivational speeches from the coaches they forgot to maintain their assignments and ran wherever they thought the ball was on every play. Every misdirection play went the distance.
In 1984, the coaches stressed that they stay at home, secure their positon, then get aggressive. It made all the difference. That and the unfocused state of the over-confident Huskers. That game was football’s equivalent of Buster Douglas beating Mike Tyson Buster, on that night, wasn’t scared of Mike as his other opponents had been and met him at the point of attack. Tyson didn’t know what to do when an opponent was forcing him against the ropes and got knocked out. From the opening kick-off when Tom Rathman was ko’ed, we took it to the Huskers. Tim Green spent the whole day in their backfield. We hung in the game with our model T offense and it became apparent that we might actually have a chance to win this. Then came Norley, (on basically the last play of his career) to Siano and we’d pulled off the greatest upset in SU history. We didn’t become a power immediately but the recruits that would engineer the turn-around three years alter were surely watching.
Florida State is a team with NFL caliber athletes all over the field. They take advantage of that by making you cover the whole field and seeing if you can keep up with them, which you can’t. If you can’t keep up with a team, you can’t out-tough them. That will be the difference. Mental attitude will not be as big a factor in this game as the Nebraska game because the gap in physical talent will be too great. I’m hoping for better than 3-59 but I expect this will be similar to last year’s Clemson game where the Tigers, whenever they got in any kind of mild trouble, could just launch a bomb and explode our chances and our spirits.”
- I remember a player from the Frank Maloney Era talking about speech Maloney made before a game against Penn State. He stressed what a supreme effort they needed to give to win that game. It boomeranged. The player said it made it seem like the situation was hopeless. It might have been better to stress that they had the ability to beat this team, rather than how hard they had to try to do so. Here’s a quote from Scott Shafer’s press conference after the Louisville game:
“After losing seasons in the past is there a feeling that this is going that way after the last three losses?
“Not at all. All that stuff that’s going through your head because you have doubt in us and me doesn’t happen with me. We’re going to continue to fight our butts off. We’re going to fight to the very end.”
My reaction to that is that if you telling your players to “fight to the very end”, you are telling them that there will be an end and it will be the end of our hopes . He’s not telling them to win.
