Cougar14.2

Very critical win for Crosby last night. At no point has the current regime given me any reason to think Crosby should be able to pencil in wins but for the sake of discussion I will for FB Kempner who we play two weeks from now and also Porter who we play a couple of weeks after that. That means if Crosby can beat Kingwood Park next week we’ll most likely finish district play 5-2 and in at least 3rd place. That being, the team could be a lot better if we had a competent offensive coach. Crosby’s offensive philosophy is to give it to Yarbrough and hope he breaks it which is why we lose to team with above average defensive talent. Crosby’s TE Landen Hammer is 6’2” and about 210lbs with crazy ball skills, an absolute mismatch problem and got one target last night. Friendswood realized Crosby had some playmakers on the edges and lots of times gave the receivers a 10 yard cushion. The problem is that Willis doesn’t know that so not once did we just raise up, throw it out to the receiver and give them an opportunity to be an athlete and make a play. So now that we’ve averaged 8 completions per game through our first four contest because 50% of the time Willis chooses to swap out 50% of the offense we look like we “don’t have the receiving talent that we used to.” Yarbrough probably had close to 300 rushing yards last night but I wouldn’t be surprised if he had 35 carries. I like our backup RB but there are several kids who could help Crosby more at that position and Willis chooses not to play them there and feed Yarbrough to the point he couldn’t even finish the game last night. He continues to display an inability to efficiently use his personnel which is why we get blow out by any team with at least equal talent. Maybe something changes but Willis being 6-19 his last two and a half years on the sideline and his inability to shake the Cedar Park model don’t give much hope, which is unfortunate for the kids.

What position is the talent missing from? I know you don’t know much about Crosby football so you’ll be shocked to learn that we didn’t have a single senior FBS signee off any of the regional finals, semi-finals or state final team. All the years of Walter, Singleton, Sqwirl, Patterson, etc. were first and second round losses. Off the state final team Branch was an FCS signee, everybody else went juco including Dunn. Outside of 2013 with the Twins and Singleton Crosby has never had three FBS signees in one class like they do now. That’s not even including kids like AJ Johnson, Malik Windfont and Josiah Jones who have/will have multiple offers to continue their careers at the D2 level or higher. We’re just a mediocre to poorly coached football team so the looks are deceiving. Real Crosby fans remember what we looked like under Kevin Flanagan. He was at Crosby for seven years and made the playoffs the last six seasons before he was fired because we finally got a supt. who understood what he was looking at. Crosby would get blown out in non-district games and then finish 3rd or 4th in district and then get blow out in the first or second round and it was because “Crosby just doesn’t have the talent.” All those years backing into the playoffs and Crosby’s community giving him kids like Dominic Merka and Chance Casey kept him viable. Now we’re in the same situation because of how bad the district is. There’s a good chance we finish in 3rd place which will mean a ride to College Station and a likely 4+ score blowout and first round exit. Willis will then sell that as improvement from the even worse coaching job he did last season. In actuality if he misses the playoffs it will be the first time Crosby has done so in back to back seasons in 20 years, meaning that even when we’re not good we still have enough “talent” to make the playoffs in any district we’re assigned. Any kid that’s ever been “recruited” at Crosby parents are from/live in Barrett Station from the C.E. King kids in the ‘14 class all the way Ayden Jones from Summer Creek in the ‘23 class.

Better hurry up and get to Walmart before we run out of Kleenex

If that’s what you think then you don’t know much about football or you don’t know much about Crosby’s football program. Must be one of the new ones

Have you seen the trash we’ve been under him his first year and a half? He’s 5-19 his last 2.5 year in the sideline.

Yeah, with good coaching we are. Instead we look slow and unathletic with our deficiencies always able to be exposed because of his play calling. These are blowout games under Riordan and Prieto

At some point you have to start to think Willis has money on the game?

It doesn’t, Willis is just an idiot. Game should be a blowout

Three opportunities to turn it into the two score game and we come away with 0 points. Two in the high red zone and one 1st and 10 from the 11 yard line. Luckily Friendswood is big and soft so we’re able to be competitive with very mediocre play.

Well, luckily this is the worst futbol team Crosby has played since those New Caney teams of the early 2010’s. We’ll see what happens next week when we play kids who are willing to tackle and bigger than our freshman squad. That being said, Crosby at least gets to start 1-0 in district play.

Really disappointing tonight. Can’t help but to think this is probably a game Crosby could’ve won 35-17 with decent coaching. Just bad offensive play calling with a poor approach to personnel usage. Through three games against 5A-D2 teams Crosby is 0-3 and averaging 9.3ppg. Sucks for the kids and fans having to endure this because of our administration.

You would hope but I'm not really sure? I think both of his kid are juniors and he's from somewhere not too far from Crosby so taking this job was coming back closer to home for him. On the business side of it he may have more time left on his contact so if he doesn't retire Crosby's only option may be to reassign him? With him being reassigned and Crosby most likely having to retain the bulk of his assistants until he's fully out, I'm not sure the job would be as attractive as it normally is. Just a continuing domino effect of poor administrative management of the athletic department.

Crosby’s superintendent hiring Joe Willis is the problem. I was vehemently against it when we hired him because his approach to the game does not fit the personnel the Crosby community produces. There are a lot of people on this site who had no idea what they were talking about trying to correct me on that. If you get your butt kicked with multiple SEC kids on the roster then you have no shot with just BigXII and C-USA kids which he’s proven to be true. He runs a system that nullifies any athletic advantages we have at the skill positions. Instead he still takes the Cedar Park approach which relied heavily on being dominant at the line of scrimmage. That’s fine when you average 6’3” and 285lbs across the offensive line the way they did when Crosby played them in the semifinals, we don’t have that and never have. His system requires the kids to process a lot of information, especially on defense. This makes the kids play extremely slow and makes us look like “we don’t have the athletes we used to”. Willis calls plays and is terrible at it. With the system being bad I’m not sure it makes a lot of difference what he calls though? One example from last week is running the ball multiple times on 3rd and long yet choosing to call a pass play on 4th and inches which resulted in a goal line interception. He relies extremely heavily on his RB and now that Fontenot isn’t there to substitute in when we need a 3rd and short conversion his play calling looks even worse. I bet we already have close to 15 three and outs through the first two games. Practice is slow and boring and he doesn’t inject any excitement into the kids because he’s pretty low energy himself. As far as the staff my opinion is that there are only two real “football guys” on the sideline besides Willis. I think most of the guys he hired need a lot more seasoning. It’s just all around bad now, hopefully the superintendent makes a change after this year but her ego is so big that I’m not sure she will be willing to admit failure. Crosby's district isn’t very good so we might finish in 4th place at which time she may try to sell “improvement” to the interested parties and allow Willis to screw over another year of Crosby’s talent. Crosby may be 6A after next year, we need to get someone in here who has the ability to connect with our kids and the willingness to build a program.

You can sort of make that argument for Riordan leaving but I personally think it was something else, it just happened to coincide with the financial mismanagement timeframe. The superintendent and her ego ran off Prieto though. Prieto asked for things to improve the program and she balked at it, ego tripped and Coach P was gone. Then the genius hired Willis and gave him most of the stuff Prieto was asking for, smh. While we’re still not where we need to be, we wouldn’t be paying Willis the 6th highest salary in the Houston area if we were hurting.

I think whoever wins FBM’s district will play PNG is the title game. Right now I still think FBM probably win it. Their QB play is usually mediocre most of the time but this year I think they have “good mediocre” QB play. I like Randle because of that sick RB but FBM has like 7 D1 kids on defense so I for now I lean them. I think schools like Anna and Melissa are a lot better matchup for PNG personnel wise, they’re line of scrimmage teams and PNG excels there in 5A-D2. Maybe they struggle with Lovejoy’s passing game but them being a defensive team now I would still lean PNG. SOC would be the most obvious out for them but them only mustering 12 points this year kind of makes me wonder how good their offense really is since they can’t hand it to Green anymore? We’ll see this week against Longview though, kind of tough to judge them off of games with the two best teams in the state. Right now I got PNG’s defense though.

Man, imagine what all these people are about to witness on homecoming Friday night? We’re probably talking about some 52-7 type action. The 6th highest paid coach in the Houston area will be 2-11 heading into district play. I hate it for the kids but glad all the administrators will be there to watch it.

Dallas Skyline used to be one of the elite programs in the DFW before Reginald Samples left for Duncanville but has struggled since ever since. That being said, they’re still one of the more talented teams in the state and that’s a nice win for FBM. I don’t expect their game with Crosby this week to be close at all. They’re playing out of what’s maybe the best 5A-D2 district in the state this year so I expect them to be battle tested by the time they meet PNG in the playoffs.

24-0 Iowa Colony. Final. Hopefully only 8 more games left of this

17-0 Iowa Colony at the half. Calling this bad offensive football would be a compliment. I don’t even see Willis on the sideline tonight?

Iowa Colony is a poor man’s Fort Bend Marshall right now. A couple alignments from now they’ll start to look a lot more like the Manvel teams during the Jalen Preston era. IC has a ver good sophomore RB but offensively they struggle to throw the football at a decent percentage and their offensive line is average at best. However, they do have sophomore QB who already has several power 4 offers to play WR at the next level. He’s going to be a problem running the football for Crosby all night. With the weather being what it is, the talent of IC’s two main ball carriers and Crosby defensive alignment which allows for lots of running space, I wouldn’t be surprised to see IC put up 300 yards on the ground tonight. Lots of RPO’s with quick shows out to the flat to get their guys in space is probably what we have to look forward to tonight. Crosby also helps the opponent’s defense with our offensive play-calling which keeps us in the field most of the night as demonstrated in the Dayton game. I hope win so the kids can get some confidence but Iowa Colony has a lot more talent than Dayton and after a week of watching film I can’t point to any reason we would? Rough times on 2100

Seeing as how this s the easiest non-district schedule Crosby has had in a while it’s going to be disappointing to go 0-3 against it due to our inability to score in Willis’ system. It’s something that permeates all levels of the program. There will be games that the kids make more plays than the others but until we change our fundamental approach in relation to our personnel Crosby is going to struggle to be any more than a .500 program. I didn’t think it would get this bad but these are the results of the concerns I voiced on this board when we made this hire.

Well, the statistics back up the awful offensive performance. Luke Wheeler was the leading passer for Crosby with 25 yards. Yarbrough had an overall good night with 189 yards on 27 carries but if you look into it that's also pretty concerning. 89 yards came on the two TD runs in the first half but after that it's 25 carries for 100 yards or 4ypc. Crosby has a sophomore who I mentioned earlier in the week had Austin Walter-like ability but Dayton would have to deal with him because Willis was going to line him up in the slot. I believe he had two carries for zero yards and one catch for 11 yards. I mentioned Willis compounding his poor play-calling with questionable personnel decisions. The Crosby receiver that dropped the TD pass has consistently done so in practice as well as game situations but he's a senior and Willis continues to play him over kids who have repeatedly demonstrated the ability to make those plays. Willis constantly rotates the QB's at practice, I didn't think that was something he was going to carry over to the game though. Neither QB could get into a rhythm running windsprints over to the sideline after every play. Mediocre to bad QB play is something that has been consistent with Willis' offenses the last few years. Kids that were solid in Prieto's system look like they've neve played QB under Willis. I'm not sure that Crosby has ever had anybody on campus that knows more football than Joe Willis and he may be a great coach but he just doesn't fit the personnel at Crosby. He's an old school guy stuck in his ways and he's getting the brakes beat off of him by younger coaches with less talented teams running more dynamic systems. I think Coach Willis is a great teacher of the game and the kids love him but two weeks from now you're probably talking about a coach who's 2-11 through his first 13 games at Crosby after coming off of a 2-8 season at his previous stop. At the end of the day it's not Willis' fault, Crosby was desperate and probably paid a nice asking price. It's certainly not the kids' fault as they're still signing scholarships and going off to play college football. When somebody gets hurt at work we always look for the "root cause" of the injury. The root cause of Crosby's injury is their administration and particularly the superintendent. They say stuff rolls downhill and right now Crosby fans are standing at the bottom of a mountain. Hopefully we can finish with some type of respectability for the seniors and the admins. make the needed personnel moves after the season.

Coach P and Coach Poth were probably over there looking across the field thinking “We could beat us by 30 with our old kids”. Not surprising to me though, Willis couldn’t even move the ball on Baytown Lee in the scrimmage.

I fully expect Crosby to be blown out the next two weeks and head into district play 0-3. It’s a shame there’s already nothing to look forward to but this is the price you pay when your athletic program is hampered by arrogant administrators.

Congrats to Dayton. One thing for certain about Coach P is that if Dayton can produce a performance this solid in the opener he’s going to have them looking twice as good by the middle of district play. That used to be nice to look forward to.