Central Arkansas

 When a slow drip becomes a flood...As many of you know, I travel quite a bit for my job. Usually not for too long, and because my boss is awesome, it is always on my schedule. When I was younger and a good looking sideline stalker for the boy, we always built my work trips around the kids. Well, on this particular week, Debbie had taken both little ones out of town, so I was returning at night to an empty house. I pulled up into the driveway just after dark, and immediately saw what I thought was an unusual shadow just outside of the front door. Nope, that was not a shadow as my shoes heavily squooshed up my walk. Indeed, that was water lifting my welcome mat oh so gently off the porch. Team Sickmon are not huge door lockers, so I opened the heavy front entryway and was greeted by a very healthy foot wave of surf as the escape hatch was finally released. Before you ask, yes our entire downstairs was all hardwood floors - or now more softwood. Two years prior, my daughter’s pet hamster had bitten though a quarter inch plastic refrigerator line that ruined $25k of flooring, so to afford insurance, we macrocharged our deductible before our brand new installation. Oops. Apparently, in this instance of a slow leak temporarily stopping our lives, just before they all left the house, someone made a last trip to the facilities and upon leaving, the tiny little hose on the back of the toilet that refills the tank popped up. This tiny hose leak gave a 2500 square foot house an active foot of water inside and who knows how much into the lawn. Two tiny hoses, two spectacularly damaged homes…

The above diatribe came to my mind as I think about how we got to this mutual frustration point with our own garnet and gold Love Shack. The toilet flushed at the end of the 2023 season, when ESPN and the CFP decided for the first time in football history that an undefeated team was not good enough for the postseason games that matter. That rightfully triggered a top three national recruiting class to bounce to teams that - um - could win all their games and compete for a title. That led to a regrettable decision to play Georgia with our scout squad; all of which broke the forever confidence of our head coach. He went from Polly Positive on the sideline to a before Pepto still shot. Losing the recruits forced a last minute roster invite for a cadre of countrywide castoffs. These culture killers were supplemented by a nonexistent front office of evaluators who specialized in quarterbacks. All of this triggered the Hiroshima of 2024, a full assistant coaching reset and we entered the pillow soft Tony White era. Just don’t open the door on Stadium Drive right now. You are going to get soaked. 

When you win by almost 30, you normally feel just soft butterfly kisses all evening. But, this was more of a lovebug on my F-150 windshield feeling. This was not only a division below us FCS team, it was a very bad FCS team - one that got boatraced by West Florida this year. West Florida! They kept the ball twice as long as we did and we now can definitively say that this edition of Seminole defense is 1974 bad. The defensive line was pushed around all game by guys two thirds their size. Couple new Tony formations got me excited this week. We had our three lineman, two linebacker set where we line up our second level about 15 yards apart. This special 7 db look was often on early downs and invariably gave up 5-8 yards. I know you are stunned that 8 on 5 could yield success on a running play. So, we have added our back up beyond the sticks zone with a nobody in the middle run defense that delivered a 57 yards qb run against Bama as regular White specials. This is beyond fireable, and into Vegas fixer territory. 

The stars on this offense are real, and maybe just maybe they can be enough to deliver some real magic moments this season. All three starting wideouts could be playing on Sundays and poor Ousmane must do his schoolwork in the hot tub. He gets repeatedly hung out to dry but still gets almost a hundred yards a contest. When you have this much firepower all over, you would expect a fiftyburger every week, but alas, we have no mustard, ketchup or cheese because our sous chef is a slow twitch Rachel Ray. One play late in the game, he had his helmet locked on Jayvon Boggs who was 15 yards behind the hapless Bear secondary. Ashton stared and miraculously pumped before finally letting it go as Boggs reached the end zone and waited as the ball mercifully finally got to him. Since our defense did not allow hardly any second team players to get on the field for parents night, we will probably never know if Kevin Sperry is good enough to ever lead this team. So, let’s hope low and slow Daniels can cook up a sweet bbq pork shocker very soon. 

How about that fun special teams play we roll out on the opening kick? It gave me Keith Ross to Dexter Carter 1986 Orange Bowl vibes. I also love how comfortable our true freshman punt returner is. I know we are all beginning to think in horrible modern terms of “Geez, I hope we can keep him”, but I really do. He is going to to be special. Someone asked me this week who my favorite player is. Well, my definition of an answer always starts with someone who chose FSU originally and if they stayed despite outside noise, you might be in the drivers seat. This is why I was such a Sam Singelton fan. Hopefully, we see him back in a Nole uniform before the end of this mess. 

So, my loyal readers, it comes down to the three pack of games we knew it would when the SMU game went toes up. In my opinion, we win two of the next three, Coach makes it to Thanksgiving with an outside shot of more to follow. We lose two or good grief all three, and the buy week is bringing the Noles back to the front of Sportsenter for all the wrong reasons.  C’mon offense carry us past the Hoos this week!