Eric Peterman's 2008 Spring Blog
Throughout Northwestern's spring season, senior wide receiver Eric Peterman (Sherman, Ill./Springfield Sacred Heart-Griffin) will share his thoughts on the Wildcat football team. Peterman starred for the 'Cats in 2007, leading the team in receptions (66 catches for 744 yards, 3 TD's) and earning the team's co-MVP honors. He also was named a second-team All-Big Ten selection by Rivals.com. Check back on this page throughout the month of April for Eric's updates.
April 8, 2008 MAKE YOUR FREE THROWS! Can you believe that game last night? Memphis gave them the game because they couldn't finish. CDR, Rose and the whole Memphis team had been shooting great and their early season free-throw problems had not been a hindrance in the tournament. I am a huge basketball fan and have been following the tournament very closely. I was rooting for Memphis last night and it tore me apart to visually see a team not be able to finish a game and seal the deal. On the women's side of the NCAA basketball tournament, the amazing victory of Stanford over UConn Sunday emphasizes a topic that I brought up last week. To preface the situation, Stanford lost to Connecticut by 12 points back in November. The 12-point deficit is deceiving as UConn dominated the entire game. Therefore it looked as if it would be yet another Tennessee vs. Connecticut championship game. Stanford had other thoughts. In preparing for this semifinal battle with the Huskies this past weekend, they watched a clip from "Any Given Sunday," specifically the "inches" speech by Al Pacino that I mentioned last. They applied it to their specific situation: "This Given Sunday" and reversed the role on the Connecticut Huskies and played phenomenal, dominating all facets of the game and coming out victorious. Now, why am I telling you about these two basketball games? These two games prove as great examples of 1) a team that can't finish and respond and 2) A team that can. When thinking about these cases a phrase comes to mind that Coach Walker used to preach to us. "The pain of discipline or the pain of regret." With anything in life you have two choices: You can choose to prepare and suffer the pain of discipline now, or you can choose to not do the right things to prepare now and suffer the pain of regret later. For those who aren't following me, let's apply this analogy to our two scenarios here. Clearly, Memphis knew that they had difficulty with free throws. There is a problem when your team is shooting 61.4% from the free-throw line. What did they do to fix this problem though? By not getting this problem fixed throughout the duration of the season, finally it caught up to them and they suffered the pain of regret by losing the national championship rather than taking responsibility among themselves and enduring the pain of discipline by getting their free-throw problem fixed. On the flip side, the Stanford Cardinal tolerated the pain of discipline by taking the required steps in order to revenge their loss. By practicing harder, watching film and learning from their mistakes, and tweaking their game plan the Cardinal avoided the pain of regret and chose to respond and they conquered their foe. Finish and respond are two extremely important words to our football family. And when I say football family that extends far beyond what people would normally think. I'm talking about the extraordinary care and support from our athletic training staff. The wise-crack comments, jokes and internship proposals from Tory Lindley get my day going. His super-natural ankle taping abilities are just another one of his great qualities. Mel's personal rehab clinic gets our guys in shape and back on the field in no time. And bitter Jen is there to brighten everyone's day as well, holding down the defensive injuries and taking care of the black shirts. These three special individuals keep us safe and healthy and are as much a part of our family as any one of us players, such as Phil Brunner. They are forced to respond and finish in their daily activities just as much as we are. When Scott Lilja shows up in the training room at 5:56 a.m. and meetings start at 6 a.m. the athletic trainers are forced to respond and step up their game to get him to meetings on time. We are very thankful for the work of the athletic training staff and we know that we would not be able to play this great game without their help and support. That being said it seems as if more people are injured during the spring than the rest of the entire year. Every year it seems like we are struggling to rotate guys around so we can have solid depth. I distinctly remember our last spring game when we were down to four wounded wide receivers trying to run a four-wide spread offense. To go along with this, for some reason the offensive emphasis during last year's spring game was to launch the ball down the field. I still haven't figured out if they were testing CJ's arm or they thought that the wide receivers just needed more conditioning. It is very difficult to run go route after go route after go route when we have absolutely no subs. Therefore we are trying to keep our depth chart loaded by taking the right steps to prevent these injuries this spring by an extensive stretching program pre- and post-practice (compliments of the athletic training staff) and by playing fast and playing up. Like I mentioned last week, "thudding" or wrapping the ball carrier up and NOT taking them to the ground. This will hopefully eliminate those injuries that happen at the end of a play when people are standing around the pile and get "rolled up" on and blow out a knee, ACL, ankle, or whatever it may be. We took a step in the right direction today at practice. The learning process continues as we are still figuring out how to practice with the new coaches. Things are getting fixed, however, and we are learning from our mistakes which allows us to improve. Finally, the offense looked organized today. We were presented with different situations during 7-on-7 and the team periods of practice. We focused on 1st-and-10, and third-and-medium, exclusively. Everyone knows that third down is the money down in football. As an offense we like to convert at least 45% of all of our third-down opportunities. We were operating around 70% today! What does this really mean, probably nothing right now, but what does matter is that we are improving and that is the main goal at this point. - EP |
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