Week 4, everything is falling into place
The unbalanced sweep is a hit, Michigan grinds out a wild win, and Brent Venables' Oklahoma regime is effectively over.
I have a couple of issues to solve on my flag football team that quickly emerged after installing my unbalanced sweep play and teaching it to the kids for their practice game.
It turns out I have a co-coach who’s a veteran of the flag football league and when we ran the sweep against a defense directed by him in the practice, he knew what was up immediately and countered by having his best tackler in position to the frontside. The sweep was stuffed and so I worked on the play-action components a few times with very little success because most of the kids couldn’t catch. Finally I dialed up the sweep again. This time the tackler in position missed and we scored. Hmmm.
In the actual game, the first time we ran the play our runner made it to midfield for a first down. We ran it again and immediately scored. Next time on the field, we dial it up, touchdown. After that I tried to change up who did what so we could get the ball to different kids. We were rolling. The final was something like 34-6. The poor other team was running some sort of highly detailed, Power-I nonsense where the running back got the ball at a standstill and was always immediately tackled because our best player was blitzing the quarterback every snap.
There’s apparently some super team in this league called the Cyborgs that only runs sweeps and reverses and wins every year. We’ll see about that. In the meantime, I need to teach the roles to the other kids so we can just alternate who gets the sweep. We also need counters for when opponents do what my fellow coach did.
In the world of college football, it was a very big weekend. My long predicted collapse of Oklahoma at home against Tennessee came to fruition and my long predicted “Jackson Arnold is a young player for whom the game is moving too fast and his limitations will crush them” was borne out in spectacular fashion as the poor kid melted down in front of his home crowd and was benched. It was so disastrous, and the fallout so massive (Brent Venables essentially threw him under the bus), that I suspect he will be transferring in December.
USC nearly beat Michigan but couldn’t tackle Kalel Mullings with the game on the line. They are massively improved along the defense but the Michigan power run game is in fact still a thing. Alex Orji is also exactly who I thought he was. Maybe they can get Jackson Arnold in the portal and move Orji to tight end next season.
Let’s dive into the overall picture and break down some of the fun stuff.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to America's War Game to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.