Just go play: TCU shouldn't overthink game against BYU
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By Jennifer Floyd Engel
McClatchy Newspapers
(MCT)
Stephen Hodge leaned on his crutches, a Dallas Cowboys cap outing him as he watched TCU football practice with a couple of former teammates on Thursday.
Horned Frogs coach Gary Patterson had asked him to say a couple of words to this group in advance of this evening's showdown between No. 10 TCU and No. 16 BYU, and Seahawks linebacker David Hawthorne and Ravens linebacker Jason Phillips were trying to coach him on what to say.
Biggest game of season? Shock the world? Stick it to The BcS?
What are you going to say, I ask, figuring a big finish awaits, filled with references to seizing moments and underdogs and usual big-game cliches.
"I'm going to tell them, 'Don't get overhyped,'" Hodge said. "This is Thursday and, by Thursday, you know everything you are going to know. Coach probably has it so all they had to do is see a look and know what BYU is going to do. So just go play."
There is a lot of wisdom in Hodge's pre-speech speech, especially with as much hype as already has been heaped onto an already huge game with ESPN "GameDay" traveling to Provo and bulletin-board brouhahas and revenge talk and Jerry Palm and his "Armageddon" junk. And that little thing about this quite possibly being the last, big hurdle between TCU and a big-money BcS game.
So the tendency is to go conservative in these games, to play not to lose and to not quite do what you had been doing. one. Almost every big-time coach has been guilty of this at least once, or in Mack Brown's case a couple of times before he got Vince Young religion. Patterson seemed to have played this game a year ago against Utah in Salt Lake City with crushing results.
Not this season, not judging by Thursday.
"When you go on the road, you got to go and take the game," was what he said word for word.
Can I use that?
"Yeah, you can use it," Patterson said.
It is always dangerous adding subtext to a quote but the message he was sending was "we are not going to play scared." This is not to be confused with the false bravado of guaranteeing victories or underestimating BYU. What Patterson was doing was letting his team know that "GameDay" showing up does not legitimize them, just as Palm giving them zero shot at a National Championship does not demean them. Who is he anyway? An overhyped statistician who is an expert in a fraudulent system.
How the Frogs continue to legitimize themselves as NC contenders is by doing what they have been doing for a while now, playing good enough ball to win a whole lot of games.
I was talking to a coach recently who knew The Redheaded Genius. We were talking about play-callers lay-calling and specifically was Jason Garrett a good one. What he said was too much time is spent analyzing things that have nothing to do with anything, play-calling, revenge games, et al. It always comes down to who executes the best.
"I'll take it one step further," Patterson said. "It has always been the most physical team that has won this ballgame."
And sure enough, he started going down a black-and-blue-ish memory lane, including an especially brutal 2005. If memory serves Patterson correctly, BYU had eight or nine guys who did not play against San Diego State a week after losing to TCU.
This is especially true in this game, in which one of the key battles will be fought by the junk butts. The Cougars offensive line will be trying to give QB Max Hall a smidgen of time. The Frogs will be trying to do to him what they did last year, which was, frankly, not nice.
BYU has talked ad nauseam about how to avoid/beat/scheme TCU's pass rush, a result of flashbacks to Frogs defensive end Jerry Hughes almost singlehandedly bouncing them from BcS consideration last year. He had four sacks and a fumble.
"One thing I have to do is I have to get the ball out of my hands quick," Hall said this week.
They also plan to double Hughes, have arunning back chip, all of the things teams try to do when they believe one guy can kill them.
It is not exactly recommended against TCU.
"There are a lot of people you have to block," Patterson said. "If you just rush four all of the time, then it's fine to double on Jerry Hughes, but not when you are blitzing."
And, oh my, will Patterson blitz. In the spirit of "go and take the game," he'll have bodies flying at Hall from every direction. So BYU can go ahead and double Hughes and it will learn what Colorado State did. This is when TCU blitzes from the other side and you cannot get a body on everybody.
This is their game, and Hodge was exhorting them to play.
"I told them before the season started, even if everything turns out where we can be undefeated, you still can't talk anything about the BCS or anything until you get done in Provo," Patterson said.
So just go play.
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Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
