Hercules M..
- Thread starter ElComanche
- Start date
Again...all the multimillion dollar coaches in the Pac12 are too dumb to figure out what UW figured out? Pete didn't even have a bye week to help him implement that genius plan either. That is truly amazing Ed. I guess they should all be fired.
Good grief...Almost half the Pac 12 changed their head coach. Dykes was fired a year ago. Helfridge as well. Mora this past season. As was Rich Rod. Oh and Gary Anderson left before the ax came down.
But to your questionn..actually before I go there why did Hercules look like an All American for 10 or so games. Are you saying he mailed it in and didn't give the same effort he did for the other games? Was he hurt? What would you credit his lack of the production he had in previous games and that earned him All American status? Just a bad game? Or did Grinch change things up. Why do you think he was so dominate against Stanford and USC and no so much against UW? Just a bad day for his standards?
Whether you want to acknowledge why something happened or not, feel free. Leach for example has a philosophy he is true to what he believes. Yes, he may add a play or two, but he is a stickler on reps and running something over and over again until perfection is achieved. He doesn't really change things up. What he will do in a game is start at what are his standard splits and widen them as the game goes along.
Stanford runs their basic stuff. Power football. Hercules sliced them melted butter. Do you disagree?
There are two things UW did to help neutralize Hercules. One was to close the gap. The other was not to fight the stunts. They just washed the stunts down hill and cut behind them.
Why didn't other coaches do it? Ask them.
Not to defend Ed (although he needs all the help he can get), but the UW wasn't the first to counter Mata'afa, who actually was ejected early in the second half of the AC, so there isn't a full body of work from which to judge the UW's efforts.
However, Arizona also cut behind the WSU d-line shifts, and its QB and RB made WSU pay dearly for it, especially with young, back-ups playing at LB.
The fact of the matter is that no great player is going to look great all the time. Keith Millard looked like crap his senior year v. USC. For one half, ASU made Mark Fields look average in 1994. I could go on and on ed nauseam.
And you clearly missed the point of the post. The post in its entirety was about why a special player like Hercules didn't get drafted. The post was about being undersized for his position in the NFL. Then they will pop in the tape of him against UW and ask the question what happened to the player we saw against USC and Stanford. They will question if his success was a product of scheme and stunting. And they will ask where will he play and cant he stand up as a 3-4 backer. What they thought there were better players to pick up. So yeah what happened at UW was part of the equation.
Millard struggled in games...tore it up at the combine. Fields as you say didn't have great game against USC, but went out and ran the fastest LB in the draft. Heck look at X Cooper, the highest drafted lineman in the Doba (head coach) Wulff and Leach years. There is no comparison with his career and Hercules. Sorry, didn't mean to trash Cooper like that in my analysis why Hercules didn't get drafted.
The NFL isn't going to look at the AC tape and draw conclusions about Mata'afa's prospects as a linebacker or rush end in the League. You see, Ed, plenty of folks watched him after the season was over. It has nothing to do with your love of all things Peterson and purple. This thing called the NFL is highly competitive. I'll venture to say it's even more competitive than the Pac-12 (hope this limb holds!). There are quite a few 6-2, 250-pounders out there who run faster 40 and shuttle times and show more agility and, thus, show more promise at LB. In fact, they actually played LB in college!
If there were still 12 or so rounds in the draft, we wouldn't be having this discussion, because Herc would have been drafted in the 8th or 9th round. The fact that he's a FA really doesn't matter to me. He's getting his shot, and with more development he very well could be shaped into a fine LB. Someone recently posted how his forty time could have been shaved by a tenth of a second or more with the proper coaching and training (even so, his 4.7 times were a tad faster than your past claims he was a 5-flat forty guy). Just look at how far he's come since high school, when he was a mostly unheralded recruit. Same with O'Connell. Both were developed quite nicely, and placed in positions that garnered them some significant accolades.
Yet here you are going on and on about how he wasn't drafted and coming up with goofy arsed stuff about Peterson's defensive genius. Whatever happen to your fixation on Chris Ball?
And btw, I never said Fields had a bad game against USC, either in '92 as a back-up OLB or '94. I said ASU made him look a bit normal in the first half in '94.
Last edited:
Jesus...Did I say they looked at one tape and said don't draft him? As far as Peterson goes, call him what you want. Feel free to think of him as a defensive genius. I simply said what happened in the game and what adjustments were made to neutralize our best player. Sorry if that somehow offends your senses when talking about why the player didn't get drafted in the fourth round like many thought and wondered what happened.
As for Peterson...I wish he wasn't coaching for the Huskies. I wish Millen and the like would have run him out of town when Peterson booted Marcus Peters. I respect the man and dislike where he coaches.
And what is your point about Connor and Herc? Yes, Herc was a great college football player. Who said he wasn't, or that he wasn't developed to his utmost college potential? I said NONE of that. I simply pointed out why he wasn't drafted. And yes if there were twelve rounds yeah he would have been drafted. But that is like saying we could call you Joe even though your name isn't Joe. The fact is there are not twelve rounds. If there were twelve rounds Tuel and Halliday would have been drafted.
One made it to camp, the other did not. Herc seems to be in the best spot to make a 53 man roster.
Similar threads
