I recently witnessed the saddening yet wonderfully fulfilling finale of Breaking Bad, a popular tv drama on AMC.
The show, for those of you who haven't yet experienced the best show on television (other than Gossip Girl of course), the show follows a high school chemistry teacher, Walter White, who is "forced" into using his knowledge of chemistry to cook crystal meth when he learns he has terminal cancer. Desperate to provide for his family after he is gone, Walter embarks on an eventful (to say the least) journey through the drug world.
As expected, things hardly go according to plan for Walter. As new problems arise, he is forced to make adjustments to his plan, or risk being caught by the law, or worse. As White alludes to in one of the first episodes, chemistry is, in his mind, the study of change, and change is what I've chosen to focus on in this piece.
I like the word adjustments. In addition to being aesthetically pleasing from an appearance standpoint, it signifies a confident approach to adversity. When we are making adjustments to our plan, it means we are drawing upon measured and learned knowledge to improve the way we do something.
In the world of sport, adjustments are huge. Every sport is played with breaks, whether they be halves, quarters, periods or just timeouts. These times should be considered opportunities to quickly review what is and isn't going well for the team, and how the team or individual can alter their play or strategy to make change for the better.
In Central Michigan University's football game against #23 Northern Illinois University on Saturday, the Chippewas started the game off very well, even leading the undefeated Huskies in the 2nd quarter and carrying a tie into halftime. The important stories of the second half would be whether the Huskies could kick start their Heisman hopeful quarterback Jordan Lynch into gear, or if the Chippewas would continue to restrict his impact on the game.
I was beginning to wonder if the Chippewas had the ability to hold back the daunted offense of NIU enough to squeak by with an improbable victory, and even allowed myself to hope, which, in hindsight, was a poor decision.
The Chippewas failed to make any sort of defensive adjustments, whereas NIU proceeded to give Lynch complete control of the game. Lynch ran all over the Chips in the second half, repeatedly moving the chains with designed quarterback rushes, and turned a close game into a rout in just one half of football. CMU, meanwhile, completely neglected to adjust to NIU's game plan, and never keyed in to the fact that Lynch took the ball himself on almost every play in the second half.
This is the major problem with this coaching staff. It was apparent to everyone watching the game near me that the NIU game plan was incredibly simple and thus vulnerable. Lynch kept the ball on every single third down, and converted EVERY single one of them. And while this was happening, the CMU coaching staff was, I'm assuming, napping on the side of the field. I'll reiterate this again to the point of redundancy, Jordan Lynch ran the ball himself on more than 3/4 of NIU's second half plays, and CMU stacked the box to counter it exactly zero times.
So what, right? Upsets are rare and no one really expected CMU to win this game, so what's the harm?
Two things come to mind here. First, this was Homecoming, there were easily two or three times more fans watching this game than any other game this season, and it was easily a game that we could have won, given the team's very fast and efficient start, and tie going into halftime.Instead, NIU broke open the game, made the score look like it wasn't ever a close game, and oh yeah, Lynch also set an NCAA record for most rushing yards in a single game by a quarterback. Yes, that's right, this game was immortalized in stone for eternity, and all due to the inability of the coaching staff to make the necessary adjustments.
Oh, and before I finish here, I have one final, immense bone to pick. To the student "fans" of the football program; I am completely and utterly disappointed in you. Easily half of the student section left at halftime, in what was a tie game with a team ranked in the top 25 in the nation. Imagine how that looks to our players. Imagine how that looks to guests of our program, and think of how much easier it makes it for our opponents to play in a stadium where there is no home crowd advantage. At one point, CMU was considered one of the hardest stadiums in the MAC to play in for our opponents, but it won't even touch that list now. So pathetic is the commitment shown by the student section of CMU that I shudder to think of how many recruits will go elsewhere after seeing how many "fans" will really support them during their time there.
CMU will continue play against Ball State on Nov.6th, and you bet your bottom dollar I'll write a recap for it after that. Thanks for reading, and continue to check this blog for exclusive content on the regular.
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