Well gang, [thanks Terry, by the way, for your generous praise---actually embarrasses me a bit], it's nearly midnight in West Virginia and this old man should be calling the day over, but I have an urge to post something that has been bugging me about the Navy game and our inability to stop their offense. This is going to be largely BS so get your crap detectors up and working. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------We all know that football has been compared to war [battlelines, strategies, generals, troops, victory/defeat, and on and on]. Navy's in the "war business"; they're good at it. And I wouldn't be surprised if the Navy coaching staff took a big picture look at their season and said: "Notre Dame's the battle that we're going to do something special for". They might say this not to slight Army or Air Force, but with the idea that this was the game that would gain them the most national street cred with media and potential players and bowl bids. If so, what might they have done?-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------George C. Scott said in Patton [when he had defeated Rommel/// yes, I know it was a fictional quote but it makes the point] : "Rommel you magnificent bas*ard!! I read your book!!" I think that the Navy coaching staff "read Kelly's book". By that I mean that they knew that Kelly and thereby his staff are optimists about the winning value of thoroughness of preparation even to micromanagement detail. This detailed systematization of offense is not too risky if you're a genius [Kelly is], but defensively it might not be so. In other words, Kelly can put out an unstoppable offensive plan, which will not work only if we ourselves screw it up, or we're playing the Pittsburgh Steelers. Offensively, he says: here we come and there's not much you can do about it. But what about defense??--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------whereas we activate the action offensively, we only react defensively. [generally speaking]. If you try to use the Kelly philosophy, and your name is Coach Diaco, you're going to scout the heck out of every piece of film you've got for patterns, and micromanage/coach a defense aimed at those patterns in such detail that they threaten to become robotic rather than spontaneous [as defense at least half needs to be]. Well, if you know exactly what the bad guys are going to do, you'll be OK. But what if they break their patterns?? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I think that it's just possible that Navy planned for this from the beginning. They "read Kelly's, and Diaco's, book" and knew that if they showed only one strong running pattern that Diaco would micromanage for it. So they came out doing something subtly different, and our great plans robotically went awry. But their staff didn't stop there. They knew Diaco would figure it out and adjust at halftime. So they had a second half "we're ahead of you" tweaked plan of shifting subtleties for that too. NONE of which they'd showed precisely before. They read our book, planned their war, and we were wrong-footed all day. If anything like that went on, it would explain why Kelly said what he said about them doing different things at halftime, and the many "not-quite-veer/not-quite-ever same" subtleties that Neutered has noticed in his analysis of the game films. And it should be Hats-Off to their staff. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Yeh, you're right---WAY too much speculation. Attribute it to the lateness of the hour. At least maybe it was a bit amusing. Falling asleep at the computer---see you guys on a clearer day.
