iogyhufi

I want to give a shoutout to the gentlemen on the Goshen football team. Basically nothing has gone right for them luck-wise this season. They lost their D1 recruit lineman to injury after two games. They lost their first-string and second-string QBs to season ending surgery in the same week. They've had so many injuries and departures from the program that they've had to cancel the rest of the JV season. (All of this came from Coach Wogomon on the postgame radio show tonight.)

But despite all that, they managed to pull together after a crushing loss last week where nothing went right and heads were hanging and gut out a last-minute win. Doesn't matter against who or where or how, winning in a situation like that takes guts. Hats off to them and I pray that next season, they avoid injuries and can continue to build.

34 minutes ago, 00NWP said:

Plymouth V. Goshen:  Not a whole lot to say here.  Goshen just doesnt seem to play for 4 quarters.  I gave my thoughts on Plymouth above.  I think Goshen wins this game, but not a blow out.  Goshen by 14.

 

Goshen's QB broke his collarbone midway through the second half, which made things difficult going forward. Fortunately it sounds like he's going to be fine, but that was really rough for him and the team to deal with.

I've been thinking about this, I think Goshen's first-half second-half splits are mostly due to the fact that they have a lot of guys playing both ways. Hard to maintain that level of play when you're sucking wind and the other team isn't.

Goshen has looked really tough at a lot of times this year. If Coach Wogomon can get the numbers back up, I think in a year or two, you'll see a very different Goshen team than we've seen in recent years.

1 hour ago, 00NWP said:

Goshen V. Wawasee:  Come on Goshen...your killing me.  They have shown that they can play football...just not 4 quarters.  I still have hope that they are turning that program around.  Wawasee on the other hand...its a struggle bus down in Syracuse.    I see Goshen winning this game with little to no trouble. Goshen by 21.

Goshen absolutely bossed NP in the first half last week. Better team on both sides of the ball. In the second half NP made good adjustments and started dictating things on offense, but Goshen still was able to move the ball themselves, and even after their catastrophic start to the second half, they had the ball in the red zone with a chance to tie it up. Things will come around I think.

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.

On 8/15/2022 at 10:44 AM, MarshallCounty said:

How’d the scrimmage go? 

I can't say for sure (I was out of town) but I heard people say they saw good things. It's not going to be an overnight change, I'm sure, but it was nice to hear that the team's going in the right direction.

On 8/9/2022 at 9:50 AM, NLCTigerFan07 said:

All quiet in the NLC... it's a shame we do not have more posters here. I feel like back in the day we had quite a few from Plymouth and NorthWood, and Concord, Wawasee and Goshen posters have all but disappeared.

Who scrimmages who this upcoming week?

Warsaw is scrimmaging Fort Wayne North Side, and I believe I saw Mishawaka scrimmages Elkhart.

I've lurked for a while as a Goshen fan - don't usually have anything useful to contribute so I keep quiet. 🙂 I may have more to say now that we're in the Wogomon Era - at least I hope so!