USM had an excellent strength coach in Zac Woodfin. Then, he was suddenly declared acting AD (WTF USM?), and left for Kansas shortly thereafter.
When Zac was replaced by a guy named Sajason Finley, nobody really knew what to think. Losing good people is just how it is at USM. You just hope the next guy's good.
Well, the verdict is in, and Sajason is guilty. What we saw in last night's pathetic display was one of the flabbiest bunch of couch potatoes ever to take the field at M.M. Roberts Stadium.
I started noticing it around the middle of the 2nd quarter: defenders huffing and puffing between plays, with their hands on their hips. WTF, man? You're just getting into this thing, and you're dominating, and y'all are winded?
I swear, that defense played like they'd been force-fed whole turduckens at halftime, washed down with room temperature malt liquor.
ESPN publishes something interesting alongside their box scores. It's a graph of each team's win probability over the course of the game. This isn't subjective; it's based on historical data about teams in the same situation. Here is the graph for yesterday's eagle-impersonators:
We hovered around 85% win probability until some point in the 2nd quarter, at which point we fell off a cliff. And as I said, it was around the middle of the 2nd quarter that I started noticing how winded the team looked.
To me, this indicates that every attempt to keep the team fit since Woodfin left in the Spring has failed.
We can bitch about Hopson, Dawson, Pecorraro, whoever... but if the guys they're coaching don't have the endurance for ~3 hours of football, nothing they do matters much.
Sajason Finley needs to go. I will be all over him until the team either turns things around (unlikely), or he's gone.