[MIJB#19]

General Manager Notes: Not one of those season...
Up, down, left, right, back to .500 land?

Frustration isn't the right word, because I'm trying to not get too worked up about this young and promising team. But the way things are going, I've seen this before: when we win, we win big, but when we lose, it was a choke job.

So, how about that Houston game? We went up 17-0 in the first half, saw Houston make it 17-7 just before the break, went into the 4th quarter leading 20-14, saw them kick the 20-17 shortly after the side switch and with a minute to go they kicked a game tying field goal. That after both kickers had already missed a kick in the fourth quarter. Then in overtime we crumbled and saw Mark Giles (yes, that Mark Giles, the guy we didn't want to give 10M per year and now sees us pay 17M per year to a much older and much less accurate kicker) kick the game winner: Houston 23, Maassluis 20. Better team lost, but that too is football. "Better" can be relative, of course. So it goes, it happens.

It brought us back to .500 land, but only for a short time. The home game against the Bordeaux Vineyards would be an even bigger test. And boy did they fail this test. Not the Merchantmen, we steamrolled to a 31-0 lead and went into halftime leading 34-3. Then, a couple minutes into the third quarter, the brain fart of the Bordeaux' offensive coordinator was there, pulling their star quarterback Walt Czech in the middle of their best drive of the game. We responded with an equally puzzling quarterback replacement about 7 minutes of game time later, also in the middle of a drive: kick holder Jon Giles was allowed to play out the snooze fest of a second half. Filed goals and a pick six yanked up the score: Maassluis 41, Bordeaux 9.

Division:
1. Gothenburg 7-2
2. Bordeaux 6-3
3. Maassluis 5-4
4. Paris 3-6

So, the first big test for us was a good result, but we haven't even reached midterm yet, that comes in our next game in Gothenburg. If you think we're playing well, well, so are the Giants. The one chance we might have is their run defense that will be basically the only "stat group" in this matchup that isn't top10 in the league right now.

It's also a matchup between the #5 ("Merc" Pierce) and #6 (Earnest Ashley) quarterbacks in the virtual offensive player of the year race. A race that's pretty much already settled: Tucker's QB Donovan Muth could get hurt now, miss the last 7 games of the season and could still win it. He's that much ahead of the field. But that's something we're really not going to worry about, we're going to want to go to Gothenburg, play a good game and hopefully pull the upset: Solecismic has us as 7-point underdogs, DogBytes as 9.5-point underdogs.

Temper expectations and work hard to beat the spread and then see where we can get.