Thursday, October 13, 2005

Charlie Weis....Can He Do It....

We saw a big game last week - Texas-OU. Well, it turned out to be a boring affair midway through the 3rd quarter at which point I switched over to the Michigan-Minnesota match-up that kept us on the edge of our seats till the last minutes.

I then made the trek over to the Marina on a perfect San Francisco afternoon to watch the Blue Angels perform some mind-blowing manouevers - the kind of stuff they need to broadcast across the middle east so that the few skeptics who still believe they have a chance against the US can be put to rest. All this purely for recreation - I don't want to imagine what they do when they're in battle. It would look like last years Orange-Bowl contest!

In any case - back to football. I went on to watch the CAL-UCLA game- What a game!!! That's the sort of game we hope for from Charlie Weis this weekend. I'd like to point out that I put my emphasis on Charlie Weis and not on Brady Quinn or anyone else in the Irish Backfield because it is Charlie (and only Charlie) who can win or lose this game for the Irish. He, is one of the few people who can beat USC this year but it will be an uphill battle.

The problem for USC opponents is that they can't focus on one or two individuals - as is the case for most other college teams today. It's a game of resource-allocation and how do you allocate your resources efficiently to contain the USC offense?! Weis is one of the few people who can answer that question and the bye week will help him tremendously in crafting the best possible response. Question is: Will it be enough??

I believe that Pete Carroll is concerned about the Trojans' lackluster performance in the last 3 outings. He might not show it and no one in Los Angeles is going to challange Carroll's "rockstar" status even if ND was able to pull off the upset. Still, he is scared because he knows it (just as Ty Willingham and others do) - a knock-out punch at South Bend could send the seemingly invincible Trojan squad into a the same spiral (downward, of course) that Notre Dame found itself in 3 years ago. So as "cool" as Pete seems - I'm sure he's done the scenario analysis in the event that (a) ND Blow SC out of the water OR (b) The Irish squeeze by with a lucky win. Mind You - These are both very different scenarios - Scenario (b) could be waved off as the "Luck of the Irish" BUT what Carroll is worried about is Scenario (a) - the type of thing that makes grown men (Trojans in this case) cry and reduce College Powerhouses into no-name High-School-Like teams that are resigned to the Las Vegas Bowl in the middle of December.

Prediction: USC wins by 3 on a last minute field goal

Fight On!

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home