About that fake punt…

by Dallasdomer, Thursday, January 23, 2025, 01:40 (17 days ago)

I always find it remarkable, after the season is over, for various facts to come out that, f we had known them earlier, we would have offered different opinions here. For example, learning that Golden never sold his house in Cincy—maybe this was a well known fact but I had never heard t before—would have caused me to have a very different opinion about his likelihood of leaving. But the thing is, Freeman and others did know that, so when the Cincy job opened they had to know he was not just maybe gong to take it, but likely going to take it. This kind of thing happens all the time with injuries. We often don’t learn, even though the coaches know full well, about the extent of an injury and its impact on a player until after the season and thus realize that our opinion about a player’s performance or use in a game was uninformed. The Love injury comes to mind. Sure, he played but that injury was quite a bit more limiting, it seems, than the high percentages offered by him of his recovery pre-game. And of course the coaches knew that and knew that his best use was as a blocker and a decoy. The apparent Sneed in game concussion is another example.

But it turns out sometimes we have complete information and just ignore it. Two hours before the game, I was in the stadium having a drink speaking with one of my son’s ND pals. He tells me that he has “heard” from a connected source that we are going to run a fake punt involving an Angeli pass. I said, with all the “Son, you don’t know how the world works” confidence I could muster that there was no way something as top secret as that could be known by people outside the team because, well, that would take away the whole surprise factor from a fake punt, which would be fatal to its success. Yet it played out exactly as he had predicted it would. Of course, given the game circumstances that play couldn’t have been much of a surprise to OSU either.

As news trickles out about transfers, I think that is another example of where we have strong opinions about what should happen or is likely to happen but we don’t know the most fundamental facts necessary to really “know” anything, unlike the coaches, for example, who probably know exactly who is likely to leave and why.