ZachTheZip

I hope UA took out an insurance policy on the stadium.

http://www.ohio.com/sports/zips/62420867.htmlHe's trying to get the running game going. He's also not opposed to burning Nicely's redshirt.

The game has officially sold out. The doors open at 6:30 and student attendance is first-come, first-serve with no wristbands.

I thought it would make several people happy. (Including me).Specific details are that it has to attach to the second floor of the "hotel" dorm rooms as well as have a ground entry on the Quaker side. Span the 200 ft while maintaining clearance height for trains and have a ground entry on the eastern side of tracks.Help me to visualize here. Would this bridge in essence connect The Quaker Square Inn at The University of Akron with The UA Performing Arts Hall (aka: E.J. Thomas) or to The Wonder Bread Company and auto parts store?It will go from the front entrance of the Quaker Square hotel/dorms (not the shops), almost directly across the tracks to the Olson Research Center, which is located between the groundskeepers building and the polymer engineering and substation. Looking at a map, it would sort of be like if you extended the sidewalk on the north side of Bowrey Street next to Quaker Square and put it across the tracks, where it will land next to that round building that looks like a storage tank.

Yeah. I thought of doing the same.

Those things will happen anyway, no matter when a coach is fired. But if you do it earlier, it gives a chance for a new coach to come in as soon as possible and clean up the mess instead of being left scrambling with only a few months to recruit a full class.

I want to give JD one last chance. He has two weeks to change the offense to suit his new lineup. He has two weeks to draw up something other than a draw play up the middle for negative three yards. He has two weeks to get the offensive line on the same page as the QB, and he has two weeks to choose a featured RB that can get into the flow of the game.If the team comes out flat against Ohio, then I will look at whether it was because nothing changed as far as playcalling and personnel or whether it was because the players have given up. Then it will be appropriate to make a choice on whether JD (along with most of his assistants) needs to go at the end of the year.

This morning, a sign from on high came crashing down to UA's campus. Literally.Part of the "Infocision Stadium" sign on top of the press tower facing west came loose and went crashing down into the parking lot below during the windstorm (which, coincidentally is a a great metaphor for our season: a violent tempest which is bringing about a major change). The "-ium" section is now laying shattered on the ground. If anybody with a camera on campus can get a shot of it, both the tower and the wreckage, it would be much appreciated.This is a fitting symbol of all that we've seen in the past few weeks. Really makes you wonder...

JD is part of the problem, but not the whole problem. There are many different factors at play here, some of which are beyond anybodies control.Factor #1: Off the field problems affecting the team on the field. Jacq screwed up that has been a killer, but I do think that the team should be better off as a unit without somebody like that in the locker room. Then you have an offensive lineman suspended for legal problems. Given how the line has played, this one might hurt more than you think even if he didn't play since early last season. He showed more attitude than any of the linemen that actually saw the field and I would imagine that his presence would help. Then the running back coach gets suspended for who knows what. That one has to add into why the running game is as bad as it is. The thing is, these problems can't be helped. You simply have to move on. I don't know if the team did that.Factor #2: Lack of heart on the field. This one is on the players, especially the captains. Where's your competitive spirit? A captain is supposed to lead his men into battle, rally and inspire those underneath him. I'm not seeing that at all. I know some of the players are reading this. You're going to hate me for saying this, but WORK HARDER, NOT MORE. Focus on quality over quantity. I would rather you make the most of the practice time you already have than see you putting in extra hours lifting or studying more film. Go all out when you can, and take that attitude with you on the field. You can only affect the plays that you're in. At the end of the Steelers-Bengals game, the announcer said something about the victor Bengals that needs to happen to the Zips: "The players, the core veteran players, decided that they had had enough and that they would do something about it." It's time you did something about it.Factor #3: The offensive and head coaching staff. The defense is working with what the offense gives them, and that's not much. It's a revolving door at almost every position on offense. The coaches need to make up their minds and stick to it. I wonder if there are too many head coaches to be productive here. Maybe it was a mistake to hire people who are so used to doing things their own way. I have to imagine that JD and Harris are mostly on the same page thanks to their past together at Pitt, and that leaves Shane Montgomery as the outlier. Who is calling plays: JD or Shane? Whoever it is, something's not right here. I'm not going to tell you which plays you should be calling, but I will tell you that the draw play up the middle does not work. It has never worked. It will never work. Not with this O-line. I get the feeling that you're trying to keep the QB in the pocket longer, holding back his running ability to develop a pocket passer when he's clearly not that kind of QB. You can't keep running an offense designed for players you don't have. You have two weeks to adjust to your personnel changes. Whatever happens I feel that the offense needs to be drastically different from the current offense if you want to win another game this season.Those are the three main factors for this mess. There are others, but without something changing with those three it won't matter.The more I watch football, the more I understand how the little things affect the big things. How the details come together and affect the grand scheme. Right now, both the details and the big picture are messed up. You can get all the details right but if you don't put them together right you won't succeed. You can also have a great overall plan and execute it but if the minor details are all wrong it will fail. Right now the players are in control of the details and the coaches are in control of the overall picture. Both are at fault. Both need to change what is wrong with their end and not worry about the other. Players don't worry about the coaching problems, just focus on improving yourselves and doing what the coaches are teaching you. Coaches focus on getting your stuff together cohesively and then teach the players what to do to contribute to your plan. If both sides do this and trust the other, you will see a great football team. If only one side does their part, you will see an average team with some problems with room for improvement. But if nobody does anything and puts all the blame on the other side, you get a terrible team like the one I watched yesterday.

If anybody listened to the game on the radio yesterday, they had a good observation. The OL would go from a 3-point stance to immediately standing upright on a passing play, and would only pick up their blocks and push on a running play. It was broadcasting what the offense would do the moment the ball was snapped and you can bet that the CMU defensive coordinator picked up on it. That's a coaching issue. Who tells your OL to do something that stupid? Who teaches them two entirely separate techniques for a run or a pass, something that tells the defenders exactly what they need to do to beat you?

I blame most of the team's problems on Shane. No way do I want him to be the HC.

You were watching MAC refs. The MAC borrows their refs from the Big Ten.

Anybody change their minds? Right now there is no competition in the coaching merry-go-round.

Talk to the coaches, then. The offense can only run the plays that the coaches give them.

Have you really actually seen Mr Bowser run a route? Thats the part of his game that he works on the most. Crisp route runner!I've seen him run all sorts of routes. They're just not the routes that the QB has called.

Why would any Akron or any school want to pigeonhole a sport. This thinking is backwards and should never be adapted as part of any strategy. Every great program at any school has cycles of great and down years. The big schools cycles are shorter. Any coach and AD should never be satisfied with one "great" program. We should in fact strive to dominate the MAC in all sports. Dr. Proenza And Tom Wistrcill said as much.I'd love us to be great in every sport as well. I just don't think it realistic. Right now, our best sports program is soccer. It is a low cost sport and something we can be great at with limited resources.It's not realistic to be good at everything. But it is possible to be great at a few things and average at everything else. Akron is already great at soccer/rifle/women's track and is getting there in basketball.If you look at teams that are great at football, they are able to parlay that into being good at other sports. Football is the driver for all other sports except basketball. Akron needs football to make money, which it can spend on other sports to make them competitive. Basketball makes enough money to support itself but not to fund anything else. If the soccer team continues to draw well they might become self-sufficient, which takes a bit of the burden off of football.But the point is that Akron needs to be good (not great) at football if they want to create any more successful sports. Just getting to a bowl game every other year and threatening to win the MAC East every year. We would still be a lower-tier team in the national scheme, but it makes enough of a difference in attendance that the football team could be used as a catalyst for other programs to improve.

Bowser has a long way to go. He's great at making plays where the QB just tosses it up. You couldn't ask for a better receiver on a Hail Mary or a toss to the corner of the endzone. But his route-running leaves a lot to be desired. Look at the Indiana game again. When Rodgers hit Bowser, he wasn't going through his progressions, he was looking to find Bowser after he wasn't where he was supposed to be.

Poor OL play and injuries are a bad combination. That and the coach was suspended (they may have known it was coming for a little while).

I'm hoping to see a few personnel changes, like Devoe starting at RB and Andre Jones moving back to WR. We need somebody with big play making abilities to compliment Bowser.

I would love it if we could consistently get 3.5-4yds a carry. That's power football. Beat down CMU and keep their QB off the field.That's why his plan won't work. Matt Rodgers is our leading rusher and he has only played about 6 quarters of football. We're averaging less than 3ypc and the offensive line looks like a sieve.

JD's #1 problem slightly ahead of loyalty.Loyalty and stubbornness go hand in hand in the coaching profession.

http://www.mlive.com/chippewas/index.ssf/2...ms_for_100.htmlAccording to this link, JD's strategy for the game is "run the ball for 3.5 yards a carry and never give it back to him. He can beat you in so many different ways with so many weapons. You want to limit him, but you also need to score. Teams that beat Central score points."Run the ball for 3.5ypc all game?! That's your strategy, JD? If so, then you can kiss your job goodbye.

CMU is one of the few MAC teams that hasn't has a major player go down yet. Karma might be catching up with them.

I seem to remember Frye doing a TV commercial in the fieldhouse once.But back to the original topic, I have blindly followed JD's teams, cheering for them and never giving up even when it was hopeless. I have seen the team actively lose games in ways that require much effort. It's hard to screw up as many solid leads in the fourth quarter as the football team has under JD. You have to put a lot of effort into that. But I never gave up. I never left after the third quarter or halftime, unlike 2/3rds of our attendance. I kept cheering even as the team clearly didn't believe in themselves as much as I believed in them. I've also seen JD's teams perform incredible feats that border on magic to win against impossible odds on last second plays. The team was always so close to having a winning record and the only thing holding them back was themselves, but they were also so close to being the worst team in the country with what can only be described as a series of miracles keeping out of the cellar. What this tellsme is that the team is undeniably talented, but incapable of utilizing that talent to win games that they should. Glimpses of what could be but but not knowing how to sustain it. This is it for JD. I've watched him go from a copy-machine salesman to a head coach, learn from his mistakes, and grow. He is a far better head coach than he was when he came here, but he might be in over his head. He had no idea what this job required but now that he does he has realized that he can't handle it alone, hence the hiring of assistants with experience that could conceivably take over for him. He knows that this is his last chance. I know that he is doing everything he can to make the best of it, but his past mistakes are coming back to haunt him; even though he won't repeat those mistakes again they still haven't played out completely. He was doomed to begin with. A tragedy. But there is still hope. A good showing on Saturday will reveal it and a bye week allows him to build on it. But there is no more important of a game than this next one for JD's career. It is unfortunate that it has to be against such a tough opponent in such a house of horrors, but it would have been crucial no matter who we were going up against.This is the time to pull out all the stops. This is the time to put the talent on the field and open up the playbook. No more conservative crap that doesn't work, no more favoring upperclassmen for the sake of loyalty. Your job is on the line, JD. Your assistants' jobs as well. Start acting like it.[The preceding rant has no direction, nor much of a point.]