Campbell County's guy is slightly worse, only because he thinks he's funny.

 

He is pretty bad.

Manual's football community is very tight-knit and relies heavily like most on alumni. I know that he may have seemed annoying to you, but the home crowd loves him.

 

I understand. You can't account for taste.

I understand. You can't account for taste.

Or the lack thereof.

My first trip to Manual Stadium and I thought it was a wonderful, charming old high school stadium and atmosphere for the game (and perfect weather to boot)--the way it was situated in that neighborhood really made it nice-- and perhaps my favorite visiting stadium. I also was impressed by the sportsmanship of the Manual fans who wished us polite and what seemed to be very sincere good game wishes as we exited the stadium after the game (seriously, I was so surprised I didn't know how to respond). Likewise, while I haven't watched any tape of the game, I was very impressed by Manual's team overall and especially the linebackers and defense which was as good as RRR advertised in advance and by the athletic play of their QB. Best wishes to them for the rest of their season (and looking at their schedule they have their work cut out for them).

Moving on......

 

Where is LN's assessment of this game?

 

We did some things well; we did some things not so well. The not so well things are being addressed. The players that did things not so well have had it pointed out to them rather clearly. If they want this team to go undefeated, it will be up to them to correct their mistakes starting this Friday. If they don't, then we are beatable by just about any one on our schedule. It's up to the players to decide what outcome they want and work hard on every play in every practice and every game to make sure that happens.

 

 

Personally, I think the folks making the blow out predictions got carried away with Highlands big win against Male and Manual's struggle against Ballard. Some of the folks saying Manual was going to be really down this year may have been some sandbagging. We'll see as Manual's season progresses (although, with their schedule this year, they may have a very good team and still end up with a losing record).

 

Against Male, you create just a seam on the line at the point of attack and it's a long gain or a touch down. Not the case with Manual. They have much greater dept of defense and have very good linebackers. We simply were not going to have long runs between the tackles. Folks tend to forget that we have a fair amount of inexperience on both sides of the ball. Bardo (who I thought played a good game and made some outstanding throws and ran the ball for 9.5 yds the only time he was asked to run the ball) is inexperienced as a qb; two of the interior O linemen are inexperienced varsity players; when we went to a two tight end set to provide another blocker, the second tight end is a sophomore. Plus giving credit where credit is due, Manual's defense was much better than the Ballard score indicated. Two of Ballard's scores were not given up by Manual's D. The third one was scored against Manual's D, when a secondary player missed a tackle on a pass completion. Otherwise, Manual's D played very well against Ballad and they played very well against us. No shame at all in "only" scoring 3 touchdowns against them although I'll stand by my prior statement that had we done better in certain aspects of the game, we'd have scored more. We most certainly can be better offensively than we were against Manual.

 

Manual's O is much better when 18 is the qb. To my recollection, he played no or little qb against Ballard. Not sure why. Completely different and much better offense when 18 is at the qb position. Having said that, we held them to just 8 points so you can't find too many faults with the Highlands D.

 

All in all, I was okay with the performance. It wasn't the blow out and high offensive performance that some predicted. For the above reasons and I think in part due to the fact that we knew very little about Manual heading into the game, it wasn't bad at all.

 

We'll be just fine.

Manual's O is much better when 18 is the qb. To my recollection, he played no or little qb against Ballard. Not sure why. Completely different and much better offense when 18 is at the qb position. Having said that, we held them to just 8 points so you can't find too many faults with the Highlands D.

I can say with 100% honesty that that I didn't find this out until Friday but Woodmore the qb had an injury that held him out of the Ballard scrimmage completely. He was our #1 reciever last season so I (and I assume the people who did the webcast I listened to of the Ballard game probably) thought he was just lined up at WR for the scrimmage and had a quiet night.

 

I don't know how much practice he missed either, which could be big early in the season.