Rod's Monday Ramblins for August 31

The Governor football team looked pretty good on Saturday and should have beat S.F. Lincoln. The Govs led 14-7 at the half and were down only 21-20 with half of 4th quarter to go, but couldn't up with the defensive stop, Lincoln scored and Pierre loses 27-20. Last year, Pierre won their opening game 13-12 over Spearfish. So why is everyone excited about this year's team and last year after starting 1-0 it was guarded optimisim? Let's be sure about this, this year's Lincoln team is nowhere near last year's. They play O'Gorman, who gets beat by Aberdeen, this week and then Roosevelt. Unless they do a huge turnaround, they will return to the bottom of the 4 Sioux Falls team's rankings. Now, let's not push under the rug what the Governors did. Twice, they gave up drives for scores in that game, and twice they came back and scored themselves. That is something last year's team could of done, but didn't for what ever reason. Depth is still the main question and it showed on Saturday. We wore down towards the end because we had to many guys going both ways. It tells in big school 11 man football. You can't get by with the same things in 11AA that you can in the other 5 classes, which is why schools like Pierre, Huron, Mitchell, Spearfish even Sturgis struggle with every year. It's all a numbers game. And it's a numbers game that could be taken care of at the early levels. I know that coach Kramer would like to start school football at the 7th grade level and have a 7th grade team to go along with the 8th grade. That would be a start. Here is another idea from another former coach in Pierre. At the freshman level, play to win obviously, but forget about the win-loss record. How about if a kid plays defense, he doesn't play offense and vice versa. You don't have to do it every game, but get the number of kids playing, a reason to continue to come out. History shows that the drop off level between freshman football and sophomore football is the biggest in the school. If you can keep 5 to 10 more boys per class coming out your going to have 25 kids per class competing instead of 15. Thus, when your at the varsity level, you have numbers and the opportunity to build some depth!!!!! It's what the Sioux Falls schools do, it's what Watertown, Yankton and Brandon Valley do! They also have seperate JV schedules from their sophomore schedule. Pierre has two games that are listed as JV-Sophomore. The rest are sophomore games. Would school budgets prohibit this addition if the numbers were there at the junior level? That is another question for another time.