I'll give the board my recollections from Goshen-Fairfield. I think it's easiest to break it down into what Goshen looked like in each of the three phases of the game. (If anything I say seems wrong to anyone else who was at the game, you're probably right; the game was long enough and had enough stoppages that it's tough for me to remember now what happened all the way through.)
Offense:
Fairfield ran an interesting defensive look at Goshen tonight—they played the majority of the game with no deep safeties and 8 in the box. Goshen realized reasonably quickly that the Fairfield CBs were having trouble staying in front of their men and that the deep ball was almost always there, so they (not unreasonably) threw deep an awful lot. Of course, throwing the deep ball requires excellent touch and accuracy, and even very good HS quarterbacks are still high schoolers. (I think Quinn Bechtel looked very good, for what it's worth.)
Goshen's offense was really its own worst enemy tonight, because it killed a lot of its own drives with holding and false start penalties. That's to be expected from a team learning a new system playing the first game of the season, and I'm sure they'll iron that out before too long. (In the interest of full disclosure, there was one drive-killing holding call that I think was wrong—I think the umpire caught the tail end of a pancake block and assumed it was a hold when it wasn't, but that's only one.) Goshen is also learning a new blocking scheme, transitioning from zone blocking to man blocking, so I'm sure that'll resolve itself with time as well. Goshen pulled off some good runs, but I think it's hard to say how good their offense will be after this game just because I doubt most NLC schools will scheme them the way Fairfield did.
Defense:
Fairfield runs the veer offense, and as any opponent of a service academy will tell you, it's no mean feat to defend a triple option. I think this is where Fairfield deserves a ton of credit—they ran their offense very, very well. The quarterback made a lot of really good reads and though I think Goshen stops a lot of these plays after learning from film, credit to Fairfield for making them pay. Goshen's halftime adjustments on this side were really good, but I think fatigue did them in.
The worst part for Goshen was how long they spent on defense, as Fairfield ran tons of plays and ate tons of clock. There were lots of players down with cramps in the second half, and I suspect that was a huge part of the second half struggles.
As far as execution, my impression was that Goshen won the trenches, but Fairfield was successful at falling forward and gaining one or two extra yards. Goshen will need to work on that.
Special Teams:
Goshen's punter looked really good today. Fairfield chose not to send a deep man on the first two punts (which I've never seen before—anybody know what the strategy is there?), and Goshen pinned them deep both times. He had a fantastic punt to try and pin them deep, which landed just a millisecond too soon for the gunner to keep it out of the end zone. There was a snap over the punter's head that let Fairfield back in the game early in the second half, but I don't think that'll be an issue for long.
Tl;dr, Goshen clearly has plenty of talent and a good staff coaching them, but the players are still learning a new system and working out the bugs. Aside from a few loose turnovers early in the game, Fairfield executed on offense extremely well and kept Goshen off the field, so they deserve a lot of credit for a well-played game. I don't think Fairfield wins again if they play tomorrow, but there ain't no second chances in football. I'll be interested to see how Goshen looks against a very good New Prairie team next week.
