ECU Game Thread

[BackinBlack97]

Lucky one there…onside kick to a TD and this would have been a ball game. Just pathetic. I think Army needs to stop believing their own hype and put a complete ball game together against a real team. Today proves they have not or cannot do that.

[kfan12]

Thought Army got conservative on both sides of the ball after the first drive of the second half. No real pass rush in the second half. Playing too far off the receivers to prevent catches, but preserved the win. Just made a stellar first half look less impressive.

Had Daily taken the ball outside the first play of that drive that started on their own eleven, he might have gone the distance.

[neumanna1]

Why can’t we ever just blow someone out. This is why even when we are ranked we never go much higher than 23ish

I’m frustrated with how bad the D was in the 4th quarter, but “why can’t we blow anyone out?” Is really not a comment that holds water this season with this team.

[ARMORMAN]

Concur w kfan. Both coordinators went risk-averse in 2d half and it cost us dearly. We could/should have stepped on their neck, instead of playing stupid safe. On O, precious few option plays, even though the pitch was open all day to Robinson or Short. On D no pressure and soft coverage was maddening and ineffective.

"Scared money don't make no money."

We play like that vs ND, N Texas, and the squids and we lose to all. We find our cahones for 60 min and we can run the table. Up to Monken.

[ARMORMAN]

Particularly disappointing that we let ECU so far back in the game that we could never even get many of the subs in....

[ARMORMAN]

In perspective, good to get another win for sure. Just hoping for relentless execution from both coaches and players......as I'm sure are they.

[Boris23]

In perspective, good to get another win for sure. Just hoping for relentless execution from both coaches and players......as I'm sure are they.

Army played essentially two halves of widely divergent competencies in today's football game.
This is due, I subjectively believe, to Coach Monken's on-going desire to make the forward pass and a "shotgun" based offense a fully complementary, and not supplementary, part of the team's offensive arsenal.

He was quoted during the halftime of this game, which I viewed on Fubo, as stating "If you are going to pass the ball....Pass the ball."

Coach Monken is, I subjectively believe, unwilling to commit to refining, honing, and then relentlessly pursuing, for a full sixty minutes, the robust execution of diverse interior blocking packages and the full utilization of his ends in blocking on the perimeter, and there is no consistency to his deployment of an outside ground game, even when it is available. He does not have his team scrimmage hard, with to-the-ground tackling at full speed, or often by his own admission. He substitutes the time that should be given to these aspects of the game to scheming a downfield passing offense, which I believe has always had pride of place in his strategic landscape, at the expense of instructing and maintaining the execution of fundamentals.

This is a pattern that was commented upon by Cole Christiansen when he captained Army's football team and marked the losses, including a winnable game against Syracuse, last season until it was rectified against Coastal Carolina. Coach Monken does not naturally gravitate to the smash mouth game, nor do I think he relishes the repetition, harshness and consumption of time taken to get a finished product from the really talented team he has on offense and defense, I believe Coach Monken takes tactical short-cuts in preparation and this is a big reason for intrusive inconsistency in the second half execution of the offensive line and the penalties that were derived therefrom. On the defensive side it manifests itself in arm tackles, late arrivals to a point of convergence, a lack of spatial awareness and inadequacies in leveraging and containing physically gifted, technically sound receivers.

The better coached teams will be kept in the game, through Coach Monken's unwillingness to fully extend his team's capacity to play to its strength's and the resultant compromises Coach Woodey must make on defense. Coach Worley has done well and overall the coaching staff has turned in good work. But, Coach Monken seems, at least to me, to be slowly but surely sabotaging his own creation. Unless there is a modification of these impulses, the chance for him to a have a truly special season will be greatly diminished.

[USMAPAFAN]

I don’t agree with the previous comments. To say that Monken is inconsistent with trying to utilize the outside ground game is way off the mark. We have gotten the ball outside more this year than in the past decade. ECUs coaching experience against the option played a big factor in why there was less outside pitches etc. Daily was 7/10 passing so it’s hard to fault Army for throwing more than usual. Coaches try to take what the defense gives them. Each defense is different. Against AF we may throw little or not at all. Monken realizes that Daily has developed his touch passing and he is pursuing that as an advantage so I’m not going to fault him for that. As for all the comments on the defense in the second half. Let’s remember that ECUs entire game plan changed when they fell behind by so much so they were throwing a lot more. Add in the facts we had some backups playing defense and of course they scored some. We didn’t play faultless football but gimme a break with all the negative stuff about Monken.

[Lusk2003]

We scored 45 points. That is enough about the offense.

Defense didn’t have a great second half.

My increasing concern is on special teams. Each week they have been a weakness. Roughing the kicker, 10 yard punt, etc. this will hurt is in a close game.

[Dude69]

Excuse me Boris, but do you happen to have any Grey Poupon?

That was an athletic, big and well coached ECU team that had a game plan for Army’s bread and butter, the ground game. Unlike in past years to include the Monken era, Army blew up that ECU defensive strategy in its first offensive series. Army is 7-0 in FBS-D1A and has been impressive in all of its wins. Army is a really good football team running a scheme on both sides of the ball that effectively compliments personnel.

Coach Monken is clearly allowing the team to see what can be if they allow themselves to be unburdened by what has been. The team is like a bus navigating the circles of a Venn diagram in search of the intersectional areas of progress. And so the bus goes here, and the bus goes there, because that is what buses do.