foxbat

To be accurate, AC is making their third straight visit to LOS in a row. Win or not; especially given that that they are facing Lutheran, again, they kind of fit the mold of the spirit of the law behind SF. Scecina ended up in that situation the first two years that SF tracking was in place and ended up in 2A with no blue rings. Given the way that SF works, if the argument is that a team shouldn't be bumped up if they went to LOS twice in a row and got two red rings, couldn't a team that won state in Year 1 of the cycle and only got a regional in Year 2 make a compelling argument for not being bumped in that they were just good for the one year and, at least by the numbers, actually getting worse? SF doesn't really address problems with precision, especially with just a two-year window, and the set points, regardless of acquisition sequence is just an artifact of that.

Saw DC play Harrison in sectional championship. Quick backs with decent amount of misdirection. Get to the outsides quickly after drawing outside linebackers in. Outside backers/ends have to play disciplined ball or they'll run up and down the field on you. Workhorse is Berry and you'll see him a bunch in the middle. Dodo is really fast and gets to outside quickly. Just when you've finally figured out what they'll do, Polston takes off with the ball. Passing game isn't great ... QB rating's in the 80s, but they are effective. Don't throw a bunch of long balls, but tend to get a a lot of +1 passes off ... i.e., on 3 and 5, the pass is getting 6 or 7, if it's 3rd and 3, the pass is getting 4 or 5. Do have to watch for the long ball though as, they do have a play when they get your safeties looking into the backfield after a few running plays in a row and then sneak a back downfield for a long ball. Matter of fact, Berry put up over 140 yards rushing on Harrison and got his lone TD on a long pass play ... his only catch of the game. Kicker is really good. Expect touchbacks most of the night. Expect 2 out of every three kickoffs to be on-the-fly touchbacks. Most of the rest are going to see the receiver fielding the ball around the 5 or so. Leads 5A in the state in both kickoff ranking and kick scoring ranking and is #2 in PAT percentage.

Chatard has "ended HH's season twice in the past decade and a half ... 2019 and 2007 ... prior to tonight. Prior to tonight, Gibson Southern had killed HH's season three of the previous five seasons.

Luers scores. Up 7-0 on LCC at start of Q2.

LCC and Luers knotted at 0 at the end of Q1.

Spent each Friday this season in person, except for one, following my son around. Even took in a couple of LCC games in person on Fridays when Harrison wasn't playing. Tonight though, I'll be at home following online and getting caught up on some work.

My only issue with that is remnance of a good class; especially if one point is picked up the first season up and zero the second.

I was referencing the inaugural class. LCC bounced back down to 1A having only acquired a regional in their first cycle. Personally, I like 2 to stay.

It was originally 4 to stay.

Biggie Smalls?

Not particularly. If you've always had an enrollment over the last 20 years that's kept you squarely in the middle of a class based on demand, then a statement like that might just be acknowledging facts. I've been in Indiana for over 20 years and every year I hear the Catholic school system do their annual enrollment spiel from the pulpits urging the choir to send their kids to the Catholic schools, but LCC was 1A when I got here and, at least by enrollment, is still 1A ... by a bunch. 378 is the top of 1A and LCC's a pinch under 300. If it was really about restricting enrollment to stay in a class, LCC's still easily got 50+ kids as slack to play with. Heck, given that, with SF they are in 2A with enough points to stay in 2A next cycle, restriction to stay in 1A's off the table and LCC could get all the way up to 500 and stay in 2A by enrollment. I'd be surprised, even with vouchers, to see LCC get close to 500.

That takes away the blue Knights west end zone point advantage. Maybe we can can get Sgt. Horvath to scoop up some dirt from LaRocca's west end zone and take it to Ft. Wayne. Looks like that came from @Coach Nowlin's home movies the night before RCHS traveled to play Luers.

But the question is whether or not that casino is in the city or the county????

Don't kid yourself.

But here's the problem with the city CYO argument ... it doesn't explain a school like LCC. LCC has no CYO program. It looks exactly like every other 1A - 3A youth program around this area and draws the vast majority of players for its youth program from the three local Catholic elementary school which technically is two schools as kids go to St. Mary from K-3 then go to St. Boniface from 4-6 or to St. Lawrence for K-6. There are a couple kids each season that come from the other Christian schools like St. James Lutheran and Faith Christian, since those schools don't have football at the youth level, and Faith may start dropping off soon since they've just started playing 8-man ball. The LCC youth program currently plays in the 56er league with Jeff ... which I believe may also play some other area teams too. Before that, LCC played in the Little Gridiron league which played public school programs including West Lafayette, Benton Central, Rossville before they canned football in their area, the three Harrison feeders of East Tipp, Battleground, and Klondike, Delphi, Kankakee Valley, South Newton, and Frontier. There were also a couple of crossover seasons playing teams out of the Monticello Youth Football League. For LCC, there's no "mix-in" of kids that "all want to play together." Just like WeBo, they get what they get and, even a smaller group because they get ONLY the Catholic kids attending Catholic schools as LCC's youth program will not allow a kid to play on their youth team who is from another school that has a football program UNLESS that kid is planning to join the Catholic schools in the next year. Incidentally, what most folks don't know is that LCC has situations where Catholic school families are split between public schools and LCC. Had a kid that was in LCC's youth program and had attended Catholic schools since elementary that ended up playing ball at Harrison for high school while his sister finished her degree at LCC. Had a family that my son played travel baseball with where the younger sons went to Catholic schools, but the older son went to public school to take advantage of a gifted and talented program at the public school that couldn't be matched by LCC. The older eventually headed on to Jeff. Had a kid played ball in the youth program who moved to Brookston ... that kid then played for Frontier and didn't drive back to play LCC. In essence, there's no "all over the city" that LCC draws. There's no "pool" ... LCC, like WeBo's youth program is limited to the kids that go to school locally. In essence, the LCC youth program looks like all of the other 1A-3A youth programs out there based on who they draw kids from. There's no one coming from Carmel to play youth ball at LCC. There's no one coming in from Attica to play youth ball at LCC UNLESS they are paying tuition already in the LCSS schools. And as someone pointed out, there's no logical reason to be paying Catholic school tuition for a 3rd grader to play youth ball ANYWHERE. Also, seriously, if you are coming from "far away" to get into LCC so that your kid can play football at a 1A/2A school to "be a champion," then the logic is severely flawed as you'd be better off moving down to Center Grove and getting a free education, and better offers, if your kid is really that good at 3rd grade. Again, in looking at LCC and using the CYO model argument for successful teams, it just doesn't apply. LCC looks like every other your program in the area in terms of who they play how they are built, etc. The only MAJOR difference that I've seen in most other programs compared to LCC is that the LCC program is less of a "dads' league" focus in the way that they run their teams and also, if they are ever fortunate enough to field two teams at a particular level, the teams are split evenly to the detriment of their season records. What I mean by that, is other programs tend to have a "draft" of players when they have multiple teams and that always works as an adversarial event WITHIN the program. With LCC, all of the coaches for that level get together and form equal teams with the idea that, if those teams ever had to play each other ... which incidentally they do every day at practice ... the record for both would be 5-5 for both teams playing 10 times. Honestly, I've never seen that happen in teams that I've coached against. Similarly to the idea above, LCC's program looks more so like its public school counterparts in terms of thin K-8 feeders. LCC on has the equivalent of two schools that turn out 6th graders and a single school that turns out 7th/8th graders. The one difference that we've tried with this, and this goes back to another post that I had about keeping kids engaged, is that we tend to have multiple kids involved in multiple positions. For example, in a couple of seasons, I only had enough kids for a single 3rd/4th grade team, but I practiced three QBs. It certainly wasn't perfect, and I had my fair share of parents who thought that their kid should be starting or getting more snaps, but a big part of the game plan was that, by design, just about every game, two QBs were probably playing a half game each and, in situations where I knew the game was in hand early or possibly even before the game started, we got that third string kid in there or started the game with the second stringer. Kept the kids engaged and kept them coming back. As you mentioned, the late bloomers are one of the biggest issues that most teams run into either with too many kids pushing out others or the "dads' league" mentality. My former coaching colleague and I were discussing that with a kid that played youth ball and was getting picked on because he was so small. The coaches worked to rectify the picking part and kept the kid engaged. By the time he hit high school, he started growing exponentially and, by his junior year, there wasn't anyone in the hallways who would even think of picking on him. The goal for youth programs has to be how to keep those kids coming back until they grow into their skills and bodies.

That's pretty cool, but I'm too cheap to pay for a vanity plate. Also looks like that car might be nice enough to have comprehensive coverage. If I were going to ever spend money on a vanity plate, it would be one that I saw in a McDonald's on the way back from a baseball tourney that was "RSH YYZ."

Menards!

I don't think that's as big a problem as some might expect. In the 18 seasons that I coached youth ball at LCC, we had six different varsity head coaches and an interim head coach. We always talked with the varsity coaches to ask what they wanted us doing at the youth level to help them have a better varsity. Almost everyone of them said, teach them how to tackle and block properly and safely, teach them about working together, make things fun and meaningful for them and we'll handle the formation stuff when they get to high school. None of them told us to run the varsity formations and comments that I heard from a couple that made me laugh were "Heck, I don't even know if I'll be running the same formations by the time these kids gets to high school" and another jokingly alluded to the fact that there wasn't a guaranteed that he might still be employed as the head coach by the time the 3rd/4th graders got to high school. A former coaching colleague of mine and I were talking before the LCC-LaVille game and reminiscing about how our main goal, as youth coaches, was to take some kid whose parents brought them out in 3rd grade to eventually move from the 3rd/4th grade practice field, to the 5th/6th grade practice field, to the junior high practice field, to the varsity practice field and eventually the varsity game field on Friday nights ... and most importantly, to make sure that we moved the moms with them. If Mom's not happy, ain't nobody happy and it doesn't matter what formation you are running.

I'm not sure it's sandbagging per se. Both programs, while having success this season, also have several things that say it's not one of their better seasons. Both programs have talent and have had performance this season, but it's like putting 7-11 gasoline in your Ferrari ... every time you step on the accelerator at the light, you are hoping for the growl of the engine, but aren't particularly surprised if you you also get a stutter and a backfire. This one will likely come down to inopportune penalties ... those 3rd and 3s while driving in the opponent's territory that turn into 3rd and 8s that turn into turnover-on-downs after falling a yard short ... and big plays. I favor LCC on the big plays, but penalties have cut into those for the Knights.

Probably thought they were Catholic.

"Is there someone else up there that we can talk to?" Get's me everytime ... especially knowing where the escalation is going.

To be fair, the last times that LCC had really good teams in 2A, they had to face Tipton twice, at Tipton, in the same year losing the tourney game by 4 ... and then faced RCHS twice in the same season, at RCHS dropping semi-state by a field goal. And that RCHS team was a once in a generation team.

I'm not sure how much can be read into the New Haven game itself with Luers. They had a 60% completion rate with 9 of 15 for 80 yards, two ints, and 1 TD. Ripped off about 8.9 yards a catch. Not sure they need the passing game given that they peeled off 286 yards on the ground with three TDs and averaging over 10 yards a carry. Toss in two sacks, nine tackles for loss on defense, and a fumble recovery and it seems like passing was the least necessary part of New Haven's night. LCC looked good on the ground in the second half. Alternating Page and Meister seemed quite efficient for the Knights with both averaging over 5 yards a carry. Similar running styles, but just different enough to make a difference in defensive attention. Meister tends to remind me of a bulldozer while Page reminds me of a wrestler. By that, I mean that Meister tends to run straight forward and plow you when he gets there. Page, has a fullback running style to, but when he gets hit, he "feels" the contact and adjusts his roll a bit to get free or more yards. LaVille played a fairly disciplined secondary game and that's what had them holding on early. Once Metzger started running when flushed, they became less disciplined, in my opinion, and made some of the flushes turn into passing gains. It also freed up the screen a bit too. Regarding the LaVille picks, I don't want to make it sound like they were nothing, but the first one Metzger threw the ball right to the LaVille defender. I think the closest LCC person might have been the LCC cameraman in the end zone. The second one was a throw to a lineman or maybe a linebacker on a screen as the defender was falling forward. Look, a pick is a pick, so I'm not discounting them, but these weren't defender-fitting-like-a-jacket picks ... these were ill-advised throw picks that seemed quite uncharacteristic for Metzger. Really need to find a way to bring LaRocca's west end zone to Ft. Wayne.

Since the analysts mentioned New Haven as a team with passing that Luers faced, I did a little back-of-napkin check across 10 games: QB Rating: 113 although it was only around 60 against Luers. Total passing yards: 1921 Comp rate: 60.1% Completions per TD: 5.95 Longest: 87 yards Picks: 5 New Haven averaged about 13 completions a game LCC (through 13 games): QB Rating: 103.9 although was 81.5 vs. LaVille Total passing yards: 2807 Comp rate: 62.7% Completions per TD: 7 Longest: 81 yards Picks: 10 with two against LaVille and three against Guerin LCC averages about 18 completions a game

That and the whistle on 4th down as LCC tried to draw LaVille offsides and, instead of a re-set and restart of the play, the ref just looks over at LCC's head coach with a "what do you want me to do about it" gesture as the play clock continues to wind down. On the LCC side of things, props have to be given to LCC's D who ended up with a chunk of LaVille's series, early in the game, starting in Knights' territory. Turning point where I think the defense had that flicker that they were starting to control LaVille was when they forced that field goal that was racing with itself to see if it was going out of bounds or over the goal line.