Thoughts on UDel: Part II

OK, so this has been a long time coming. Here goes.

Our offense was miserable at times, bad at others. One of the biggest problems we had was the timing of cuts. I was the first cut out of the stack a lot of the time, and after I'd make a good cut and get open under despite my defender fronting me, I'd have to wait 5 seconds for the next cut to develop. The end result of all of this was that by the time I caught the disc and looked upfield and saw that nothing was happening yet, I just looked straight to the dump. We can't be waiting 5 seconds for anything to develop, because if something isn't already developing in the first 1 or 2 stallcounts after a pass is completed, it's already too late. This killed our flow - if the first cut is going to get open and get the disc only to not have a second cut set up, the first cut may as well have never happened in the first place.

Another problem was with our stack. This is a problem that both I realized during play, and one that I noticed at practice on the next Thursday when Sean was talking. First, our stack positioning was poor most of the time. There were many occasions where I was the first cut and our stack was very clearly too deep. There's no good reason to stack up too deep, especially when you're 50-70 yards outside of the endzone. So we need to shorten our stack and just be more disciplined, and we'll have a much easier time getting open on our first cut, making the deep option viable, and ensuring that continue cuts can happen. Beyond that, however, was a more serious problem. Our stack was static. We'd complete a pass upfield, and rather than sliding our stack downfield as we should have been doing, we'd keep it relatively static. This also contributed to our inability to complete continuation passes, because the stack was always "behind the play" in the sense that it was too close to the disc both in an absolute sense and when compared with the movement of the disc relative to the stack. In simpler terms, if the disc was moving upfield at one speed, the stack was moving upfield at a speed that was too slow to support the disc's movement. Now, I was guilty of contributing to this. I'd get tired really fucking quickly, and I'd just hang out wherever I'd get to in the stack. I wish the rest of the offense could have not followed my example.

Now, this is going to sound kinda retarded, but bear with me. Our offense played poorly, but regardless of that, we should have won the game going away. Our defense was getting 3 turns on every point, but was so painfully unable to score the disc that they were only able to produce a fraction of the number of breaks that they should have. Sure, the offense didn't score when we needed to, but when the defense is getting 3 turnovers every point and only scoring on 1 out of every 4 or 5 posessions (that's an estimate...am I in the right ballpark?), we should still win the game. The D got 4 or 5 breaks I think...maybe 6, but should have got 10 or 12 or more. A big problem that I noticed was the first throw turnovers. I think Sean has too little confidence in the rest of the D line's offensive ability, and because of that, was trying to make too many plays himself. Despite his insanely good skills, this will never be successful. It was very difficult to watch the defense get some great D's and force tons of turnovers but then give the disc back 1 second later. We've gotta at least make their offense work to get it back.

Either way though, I have no doubt in my mind that we have and will have the best team in the Metro East when all is said and done. We have a ton of stuff to work on. But we have the strongest work ethic in the country and the loss we suffered at UDel will only make it stronger.