SBNation.com User Blog: samich1262

Players reading social media

samich1262 — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 13:19:46 -0000

I guess I'm not surprised by this, but Tibesar says the players have been reading the blogs and social media this year and it has hurt their confidence. Check out this quote from Tibesar:

"The biggest thing is the loss of confidence and when you lose confidence you don't execute as well, you don't make the plays that come your way. I think that's been the biggest thing. It's hard to give back players confidence. I think confidence comes from within and can't come from other people. It's different now days, there's a lot of negativity around sports now with blogs and people and unfortunately our players read a lot more of that stuff than they should and let it affect them. It's one of those things that you wish they wouldn't read because if you're a human being and people are talking bad about you, it's hard not to have it affect you."

At this point in the season, I understand why fans are upset and I am too, but there was a ton of negativity toward some of the players and it started even before the Notre Dame game. At that point in the season, some of the other blogs and comments stated that they didn't believe the team was going to be any better. At that point in the season, it still looked like we had a competitive team, but there were some pretty brutal comments directed towards Terbush and some other players, especially on the live game thread. Terbush is the most obvious example I can think of because he took a lot from the fanbase on social media. On the extreme end, I saw posts from fans like "*insert name here* needs to die" or this guy should never play a down of football again. But even the stuff that I posted, in a light way about the QB situation I feel bad about if a player read it. If some guy reads that he shouldn't be the starter 50 times on the comments, he's probably going to be rattled. The fact is that my opinion isn't going to change who the starter is, so the only thing that my comments are going to do is potentially screw with the player's head if he reads it. I doubt that many players could deal with being blasted on social media without having it affect their performance a little. I think negative forms of motivation like that can only fuel somebody for a short period of time before they become drained. I remember the Colts defense a few years ago being similar to ours. They would do something like give up 550+ yards to the Denver Broncos and the newspaper would print an article stating how bad they sucked that game. The players said they cut the articles out and hung them in their lockers to use as motivation. They'd come out and be ridiculously awesome for one game, and then go right back to sucking after that. 2 or 3 games later, they'd get mad at the media, come out and be awesome for one more game, but it wouldn't last. It seems eerily similar to what happened this year against OSU and Minnesota.

I'm not saying that social media is totally responsible for these guys losing their confidence, they have had to deal with a lot this season, but it could have a significant effect. I think if I were a coach I'd rather my players stay off of social media and just focus on the team, but I'm sure it's nearly impossible to keep them off of it. I shouldn't be surprised that the players see some of this stuff, but I was. If it is affecting the players, it definitely will make me think a little more before I post. A really good team should not be so vulnerable, but these guys haven't hardly had any success at all, they don't really have anything to fall back on to bring their confidence up. They need every little edge they can get. I realize that it is too late to do much about that this season, but next year, or even for the upcoming basketball season, we've got a fresh start. So I'm going to be more conscious about social media for the sake of the team and hopefully some other people will be too. I'll rant to my TV or somebody else about players that keep screwing up, but I'm keeping that out of social media.

I guess I'm not surprised by this, but Tibesar says the players have been reading the blogs and social media this year and it has hurt their confidence. Check out this quote from Tibesar:

Player support/Theory

samich1262 — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 23:07:12 -0000

This week in an interview, Kawaan Short said that he thought Purdue definitely had the right coaches, and that it was on the players. Marve also commented on Thursday in an interview that he had Coach Hope's back. I have read a few other interviews recently, and it seems like the players still support Coach Hope. I don't mean to add heat to the argument about the coaches, I was scratching my head myself after the poor showing against Minnesota, but I did think those comments deserve some consideration coming from Short and Marve.

I really don't mean to reignite the head coach debate here, but I do want to bring up something else that I've been wondering about that I think puts Purdue Football at a big disadvantage. Personally, I think the program needs a bigger investment towards assistant coach salaries so we don't lose a bunch of them again at the end of the season. My theory is that since we horribly underpay our assistants (I believe we're last in the Big 10 and even significantly below IU), we have to get lucky and find assistants that are "diamonds in the rough." Then if they end up being really good, they get an offer at the end of the season at another school and we have to replace them. I think we lost like 4 assistants after last season, and the year before. I think no chemistry among the coaching staff really hurts the team. Think about what happened to Wisconsin this year. They had a terrible O-Line and replaced their assistant coach after the 2nd game. It got significantly better in just a couple of weeks. I think if we can't lure assistant coaches of that level to our program, we should at least pay the ones that we have competitively so they stick around. They would over time improve upon their own methods if they were in the same program, working inside of the same system for several years. If Hope gets rid of somebody like he did last year, that's one thing. But Tibesar came in this year and implemented his own techniques this year. They've been completely hit or miss, but at least when he's interviewed, Tibesar seems like he is constantly examining problems and I think with that approach, he will figure it out eventually. But if he brings in his system for one year and then leaves, and someone else comes in next year and does everything different, the players will have to adjust all over again. But once Tibesar or any other assistant does make a name for himself, we don't want them to take off for Wisconsin. In fact, the guy who recruited Ryan Kerrigan was one of our big recruiting coaches, and he left Purdue to go over to IU if you can believe that. Who knows if we have the right assistants right now, I think there's so much going wrong right now that I can't tell what the correct pieces are. But with more money for the assistants, over time we'd retain the good ones and if certain ones weren't performing, they could replace them if they needed to. Eventually we'd have a staff with better chemistry and a system that was constantly being improved upon instead of being replaced every year or two.

If you think about it, we've only been any good when we've had a really good QB who stays healthy. We've had one guy carry us on his back, and that's not good, but thinking about that, I'm not surprised that we are where we are this season. Pretty much every other area, special teams, defense, etc... has always been suspect. I do not know how much of an impact giving the assistants a raise would have, but it was important enough to Matt Painter to almost leave Purdue over. Danny Hope has been asking for that raise too, he just doesn't have a championship that he can use as leverage. Unfortunately the football team's assistant coaching staff is probably even more pivotal than the basketball assistant coaching staff. There are so many more people involved with a football team. The 10 players on the basketball team can get more personal attention and help from the head coach, whereas on the football team, players probably deal with the assistants more and the head coach just oversees a lot of stuff. Someone on the forum once commented that Hope is an O-line coach, therefore our O-line should be better. I thought about that, and he might have some impact there, but he's probably got so much responsibility as a head coach that his impact as an O-line coach is minimal. The O-line coach is probably dealing with those players most of the time.

A few people wanted Purdue to offer Urban Meyer a football coaching job last year. It wasn't going to happen, but think about this: Any program who goes after Meyer is putting significant cash into their football program. Money's probably not much of an issue. A guy with a reputation like Meyer also probably has a whole crew of high caliber assistant coaches who come with the package. Any school willing to sign Meyer is also going to give him enough money to hire whatever assistants he wants. He's got the reputation where if the school wouldn't give him those resources, he'd say heck no, and go somewhere else. That's also probably why we don't get big name coaches.

If anyone has the Football assistant coach salaries for the Big 10, let me know, I'd like to see the data again. I saw it at the end of last season, but I tried to find it recently and didn't see it anywhere.

Terbush or Marve

samich1262 — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 23:24:21 -0000

Did you guys see this quote in the article with Tim Newton (Purdue's play-by-play voice)? I've been reading a lot of people are upset about Marve not starting and found this interesting:

IndySportsLegends.com: Quarterback Robert Marve played well in the opener, but Hope named Caleb TerBush the starter against Notre Dame. Did that surprise you?

Newton: “I was able to get in and watch fall camp just about everyday and in watching practice everyday there was no question that Caleb TerBush was the best quarterback they had in fall camp.

“I would also agree with Danny’s assertion that he was the best quarterback by a pretty wide margin."

As somebody who wanted to see Marve start, this actually makes me feel a lot better about the QB situation for Saturday. Newton should have more in-depth football knowledge than the vast majority of us fans, so I'm going to give the coaches the benefit of the doubt. Sure it would've been favorable to get Terbush some live game reps going into ND, but I guess props go to the coaches for amping up the discipline.

The whole article is: http://www.indysportslegends.com/2012/09/05/purdue-play-by-play-voice-tim-newton-talks-notre-dame/

Did you guys see this quote in the article with Tim Newton (Purdue's play-by-play voice)? I've been reading a lot of people are upset about Marve not starting and found this interesting:

IndySportsLegends.com: Quarterback Robert Marve played well in the opener, but Hope named Caleb TerBush the starter against Notre Dame. Did that surprise you?

Newton: “I was able to get in and watch fall camp just about everyday and in watching practice everyday there was no question that Caleb TerBush was the best quarterback they had in fall camp.

“I would also agree with Danny’s assertion that he was the best quarterback by a pretty wide margin."

The whole article is: http://www.indysportslegends.com/2012/09/05/purdue-play-by-play-voice-tim-newton-talks-notre-dame/