skip-zip

It's an interesting topic. Is there any research that explains some of this? The last I heard, youth soccer is still the most-played organized youth sport. Is it because it's easy and inexpensive to put kids in t-shirts and throw them out into a field with a ball to kick around? And why do they lose interest in the sport as they get older? Does it become "cooler" to play and watch other sports instead? Does the media influence this change of heart? Is it because the rules limit the amount of scoring?

If we can turn on a switch and blow past a team like Tulsa like that, you'd think that this team has endless potential. To think that we can possibly be a lot better than we were last year is simply mindboggling.

And their budget also dwarfs any other sport. Unfortunately, it also dwarfs their revenue. Because, to have a I-A football program, you have to hand out 85 scholarships, travel and lodging for 85 players, etc. It was a great night tonight. And a great Zips victory. But, I don't quite understand why every good night for Zips soccer has to conincide with a new thread that seems to attempt to directly or indirectly try to convince people how popular soccer is. Akron soccer is popular because people are enjoying that the Zips have a sports team that is tops in the nation. Soccer will always be "dwarfed" in this country by football, basketball, and baseball. It's not even close, and never will be. Now, can we please enjoy another great night to be a Zips fan without making more out of it than what it is?

In theory, I don't believe this is a bad idea. I just question whether Cleveland-area college students would make the hour drive to Akron, on a Saturday, to see MAC-level football. I still think it's difficult to convince a lot of people, especially at college age, that the college football world consists of anything else except two groups of schools......the top teams in the country in one group.....and everyone else in another. You wouldn't believe the number of younger people who still say to me, "Oh....Akron plays in the top division? With all of the big schools? Really?" I still believe there are only two things that are ever going to change attendance significantly as long as we are in the MAC: 1) We do some big things that get us known nationally, such as knocking off a major school, or getting at or near the Top-25. 2) We are able to someday get into another arrangement similar to the Acme/Zip games, where our own local community comes out to a game as part of a big community gathering type of event that includes a lot more than just a football game.

Certainly. That's not calling out his players. Calling out your players is actually naming names or at least naming positions. "Nicely needs to complete those passes to open receivers", "Waller needs to stop missing tackles" "our receivers need to catch the ball", "our linebackers need to tackle", etc. He didn't call out anyone really. I agree, and I am not sure why some people here bring up the "well..you might hurt their confidence" excuse. This is football. It's a tough game that needs tough people in order to succeed. For instance, in this article a far more experienced coach like Solich directly called out his team's QB play, after his two QBs completed half of their passes against Ohio State's defense. A little harsh considering the opponent? Maybe so. But, I don't think we'll get better unless we hold our players to much higher standards, and I sure hope we aren't talking to our players as softly as we appear to communicate our problems to the media. Again, I don't consider that harsh either. It doesn't matter who the opponent is. I think it's good that a coach criticizes even against a BCS team. I don't want a coach saying hey we gave up 600 yards of offense, but because it was Florida it's ok. I get your point though. On the other hand, if you are not a good enough player to get the job done, screaming and yelling and criticizing can only do so much. But, I'd sure feel a lot better if we were lighting a significant fire under these some of these guys at this point.

Certainly. That's not calling out his players. Calling out your players is actually naming names or at least naming positions. "Nicely needs to complete those passes to open receivers", "Waller needs to stop missing tackles" "our receivers need to catch the ball", "our linebackers need to tackle", etc. He didn't call out anyone really. I agree, and I am not sure why some people here bring up the "well..you might hurt their confidence" excuse. This is football. It's a tough game that needs tough people in order to succeed. For instance, in this article a far more experienced coach like Solich directly called out his team's QB play, after his two QBs completed half of their passes against Ohio State's defense. A little harsh considering the opponent? Maybe so. But, I don't think we'll get better unless we hold our players to much higher standards, and I sure hope we aren't talking to our players as softly as we appear to communicate our problems to the media.

When you sit back and look at what Keith has done when its NOT basketball season, you have to appreciate where we are. We're now a perennial MAC East contender, with 4 straight trips to the MAC tournament final. If we matched this success in football, I think we'd all be one happy bunch of Zips fans. I'm saying this now because...once basketball season starts, I can't help but to complain about why we haven't improved our national standing by playing a harder schedule, and why we didn't win a couple more of those MAC title games. That's what happens when you start to give fans a reason to have higher expectations

I see it as an opportunity to play 4 other teams this year that we actually have a chance to beat

That's what I want to hear!!!!

Especially those fans who didn't approve of the coach selection in the first place. OK, I get it! Even though I had concerns about his qualifications, I wasn't openly critical of his hiring. But some things that have happened since that time have been troubling to me. Lets just hope things turn for the better from here.

Skip, this is the part I don't get. You say you're not a Rodgers fan, you're concerned with his tendency to throw interceptions, and you question how his recovering knee would affect his running. So, given Rodgers' weaknesses, exactly what "things" does Rodgers have that would give the Zips "a better chance to have some level of success offensively right now" than Nicely? Neither Nicely nor Rodgers have shown potential greatness. Neither has really shown anything to suggest that they could lead the current Zips team to anything better than a .500 record in the MAC at best. It seems to me that we're pretty much down to the point of picking which one of them is most likely to develop into a more effective MAC QB within the confines of the Zips current offensive scheme. Since some QBs develop their full potential more slowly than others, once the choice is made, I think you pretty much have to ride that choice until it becomes painfully obvious to everyone that it either is or isn't going to work out. The coaching staff obviously believes Nicely is the best choice under the above parameters, even if only by a small margin. What specifically do some of the fans here see that the coaches are missing? Come on Dave! If sports fans trusted the decisions of our coaches, you'd take away most of the things we like to complain about.

I want to think that too. But, WKU rang up 28 points and a ton of yards on the ground against Kentucky....the same Kentucky that held us to 1.8 yards per carry. At this point, I want to be somewhat optimistic this week, and be happy to say that we could equal WKUs 17 point loss, and at least beat the spread.

I think we beat GW with Manning... Remember, I said "I think". I agree. In fact, I will go one step further and say "pretty sure"

Lets hope the "disaster" is what we are seeing right now, and it will only get better. Again, I am not saying that Schilz is great, or Dysert is great, or Keith is great. Stats certainly don't tell the whole story, I agree. But, all of these QBs deal with dropped passes and receivers not getting open as well. I'm merely questioning how we're evaluating our own performances in light of how other MAC QBs are being critically evaluated for far better performances under similar circumstances, similar experience levels, and similar competition. I'm not a Rodgers fan. I see no potential for greatness in him, and I've made that pretty clear. But, I do see that he can possibly add some things that could give us a better chance to have some level of success offensively right now. I join you in your concern over his tendency to throw picks. And after what Zipseuph revealed to us, I question whether his knee is anywhere near 100% healthy as well.

I think it would be hard to argue, right now, that Nicely is better than Keith. But, again, Keith is in the same system. I know...football is football. But, I'm sorry, there is a big difference btnw the offense we are running this year vs. what we had last year. And, remember...last year we had quite a few veteran receivers. And, with those veteran receivers, Nicely put together a couple of nice games (and some bad games). This year we have one, and that one apparently dropped a big time TD pass in the last game. I watched a good deal of the Can't/BC game. Keith really struggled and, if memory serves, threw at least one if not 2 picks. Towards the end he seemed to be playing better, but at that point the game was in hand. Not to mention, being that I am a big BC fan (my Dad played football there), BC plays a bend don't break style of D that waits for the QB to eventually make a mistake. So, it is not surprising he completed a decent %. It looks like his coach might agree with you. So that's my point. If 23 of 37 was judged so critically, how should we be judging our own situation? I certainly didn't intend it to be a "which QB is better" comment. But FYI, Ken+ was so thin at WR this year that they had to put a backup RB into one of the starting WR spots. And when Jarvis got hurt, they had to return him to RB. So, should we also use that as an excuse that his numbers should be even better than 60% also? It was just amazing to me to see a 60% passer against good BCS competition described as struggling with his accuracy, and missing a lot of open receivers, while some of us sit here encouraging patience with numbers that don't even remotely approach any level of acceptable efficiency. So, to what standards should we hold the performance of our own QBs with several examples on this thread alone of other young MAC QBs performing well? When should all of the excuses about systems, coverages, etc. stop, and we start looking squarely at the fact that we are seeing an extremely low amount of good throws in our passing game?

I couldn't help but to notice something when I was reading the paper tonight.... Here we are evaluating our QBs, the number of drops, missed open receivers, etc., and we're talking about other MAC QBs in comparison. So, in reading the article about Ken+ and their evaluations after their 2 BCS games against Boston College and Penn State, I see comments about how Keith struggled with his accuracy against Penn State. And how he missed many open recievers in both games. I would have thought, based on those descriptions, that I would have seen accuracy maybe similar to Nicely's numbers in our two BCS games, but that was not the case at all. Keith was 20-36 against Penn State, and 23 of 37 against Boston College. That's almost a 60% completion percentage!! For a Sophomore QB, playing against some good competition, in only about his 10th game. So, what's the standard by which these guys should be judged? If one can describe a guy with 60% accuracy as struggling with accuracy and missing a lot of open receivers, what should we expect from our guys? Does it indicate that we are setting the bar pretty low if we want to be patient and give our QB more time to develop? I at least have to wonder after seeing a number of comments about how we should remain patient after seeing our QB complete only 30% of his passes in our two games against far-from-the-best BCS competition.

1) It seemed like a mix from my perspective. In some cases, I think they were just flat-out getting in our backfield. In other cases, I think he had enough time to get out of there and just throw the ball away. Side Note: A lot of people I know feel that Nicely was throwing the ball out of bounds in the Syracuse game. But in the last 2 games, it seems like he is holding onto the ball much longer, and even taking the sack. Has anyone else noticed it that way? And you always wonder if maybe the coaches are encouraging him to be more patient. 2) I thought I saw a lot of shotgun on 3rd and long. And there were a lot of those, unfortunately.

It's wrong. But I still can't stop laughing.

This should be a worry for us. Even Western Kentucky ran very well against Kentucky's defense. I know we tend to see a lot of "coach speak" in these articles. We've all done it to defend our team. But, the fans are only going to have so much patience with "we need to get better" as the solution to our problems.

Of course it's hilarious. It's also surprising that it happened while the team was running out onto the field. If something like that would happen, I would expect to see it sometime during the game in a corner on the sidelines. This is the first I heard about this. I can't believe it didn't happen make national news.

I was at that Ken+ game. Embarrasing. In my opinion, Getsy did indeed have a better Junior year than Senior year.

Exactly what I talked about earlier in another thread.....when do you pull the plug? Is 12 games enough? This is one of the toughest decisions a coach has to make. Our patience with Getsy paid off. But it didn't take long. In fact, it looks like this thread materialized after that inexplicable shutout loss to Army. This looked like a reaction simply to one bad game. However, on the flip side, what if we had "given more time" to a guy like Spencer at QB?. Or, inserted a highly decorated recruit like Uhlenhake and just "gave him some time to develop"? Or, if we had stuck with C. Jackson as Getsy's successor? In all of these cases, I think it would have resulted in a major setback for us.

The Kentucky game was his 11th start. 11 starts, 2 coaches, 2 schemes. Proof is in the play of the field, but this is a kid that everyone (just about) in the MAC offered a scholarship to, and who had interest from Boston College. He has the size, the strength and the arm. Sure, I get it...we are not sure if he has the accuracy, the footwork and the leadership qualities necessary. But I still don't see any good reason to jump ship from PN7 for Rodgers. On the flip side, I totally realize Rodgers was not given a great chance either. It is a tough call, and one that Ianallo and his staff are paid to make. Right...the Indiana game would be his 13th game (he played half of the Ohio game last season). If Zipseuph is right, and Matt is still hampered by the knee problem, I sure hope our staff is hitting the recruiting trail for QBs this year!!!!

I'd obviously give PN the benefit of the doubt if this was going to be his 4th game. But, if my count is right, I think this is his 13th game, and I think 8 of those were conference games. And the same pattern continues. So, how much longer do we wait? If there is someone we know very little about, it's Matt. And our time is running short to find out any more about him, or to benefit from him as a starter, with only 20 games left in his career.

I respect everyone's opinions. And I can clearly see that many of those who were debating the QB situation a few weeks ago have at least started to come to grips with the common reality of the situation. And that is..... How long do we wait?? and Can we put our individual personnel evaluations aside for a moment and look closely at how this situation effects the Zips? Rodgers is down to the last 20 games of his career, while PN has almost 3 years left. And we don't know all that much about Matt, really. As a starter, he played 2-1/2 games for us? I think? With PNs ineptness so far, what's the loss to the Zips if we see if Rodgers can possibly show some progress, and be the Senior starter next year that we've wanted ever since Getsy left? And if things don't look promising for Matt by November? PN still has 2 full years of eligibility remaining, and can work on his game and come back next fall with a chance to battle to be a Junior and Senior year starter himself. Based on the situation, it just makes sense for the Zips.