I’m Just Saying, But Did Milford Cover the Spread?

All action – well, almost all action – today as Milford dominates Tilden. Tom “Don’t Call Me Butt” Muench is all over the field, stripping oversized footballs and causing Theismannesque leg injuries.* Chance Macy, perhaps the most realistically drawn player we’ve seen in some time**, racks up the yardage and probably scores some points. Quick cut to the sidelines where a lineman who appears to be part flounder makes an aside to a young Sylvester Stallone that maybe the Mudlarks should have run up the score.

The Chekhov’s guns left strewn about over the past few strips are leading us to a logical conclusion that the Valley title will boil down to point differential. Either out of a sense of sportsmanship or of continued punishment, Gil will keep Stallone Rappson on the bench when his free-wheeling style of play would be more likely to help Milford obtain those margins of victory necessary to win the Valley. Someone will have learned a lesson, though I’m not sure who will learn it or how valuable that lesson will be.

In any event, it’s more entertaining than watching Corinna be a bitch to everyone she meets.

*Thirty-five years ago today. What a coincidence.

**Sticking with the NFC East theme, whenever I see a running back wearing #31 and an OPO-DW style face mask my mind goes immediately to Wilbert Montgomery.

Soggy Milford Breakdown

I was out of town yesterday so wasn’t able to get a post up until now. Mea culpa. I spent most of the day in Delaware, where I didn’t find a Wing-T but I did find a Milford. Doesn’t look like Gil found a Wing-T either.

Thankfully Whigham cut away from Marty’s bukkake video on Friday to show us this grind. Wing-T or no, the run-heavy Mudlarks should have thrived in these conditions, no? No! One has to wonder if this was due to fallout from Gil’s little reaming out of his QBs last week. Team Rappson may have thrown lookout blocks when Thayer was under center while Team Thayer did the same for Rapp. The Jeffs laying a WWE-worthy body slam on either Rappson or Thayer is just icing on the cake.

Doubtful we’ll hear any analysis on the bus ride home, not with it raining inside the bus like it is. (Nice of Weird Al to body double for Rapp so he wouldn’t have to make that trip.) Monday-morning quarterbacking will come on Monday, if it comes at all. With a second conference loss, winning the Valley is out of reach for Milford. How will Gil save face, salvage the season, and stifle the controversy? I wouldn’t bet against emergency QB Leonard Fleming starting from here on out. Then the Mudlarks can truly be called Leonard’s Losers.

Rainy Day Mudlarks

Doing this post on my birthday– so why not sing a song?

Rainy day mudlarks

Rainy day mudlarks always seem to know when it’s time to fall

Rainy day Marty don’t talk
He just sits in his wooden stall

Rainy day Gildo don’t lie when he tells you
He cant coach at all
Rainy day fans in the stands don’t mind if you’re cryin’ a tear or two

Jefferson players just slide as they tackle

Theyve been down there too.

Gil hasnt had a QB since he had a dude named True.

Martys crate leaks like a boat thats sinking in the blue

Rainy days call for an annual Mudlark losing crew.

Dueling Bad Jokes

Hard to believe there could be a worse team than Milford in the Valley, innit? Yet here we are. Wonder why we never see anyone else in the conference use some archaic formations, defensive schemes or kung fu treachery to make up for their shortcomings against Milford. Most likely because Gil hasn’t updated his playbook for this century and would be equally ready for those plays.

How will this play into our blossoming quarterback controversy? Easily. The Thayer-led Mudlarks will open up a big lead on Central, then Gil will relent and put Rapson in to mop up. Still trying to convince Gil he’s the better talent, Rapp will again defy Gil, call an audible and run a big-yardage play for a score. Gil benches Rapp permanently, Central’s coach accuses Gil of running up the score after the final whistle, and things get ugly.

At least that will offer up more excitement than Friday night at Casa Karenna, where mom and daughter are caught up in a high-stakes game of gin rummy or Uno or something. Probably Uno, since Corina might want to keep mom away from the gin and rum and steer her toward the Yoo-Hoo. Hiyo! (Calling it “a duel of their own” implies that the Milford-Central game is some kind of duel which seems kind of off given Marty’s description of the game turning into a blowout.) Corina cares more about her mom’s mental health than Milford football, which is certainly understandable given this past summer’s backstory. Now if only she could allude to that without being a jerkface to everyone she meets…

Keep it down – I couldnt

So the QB battle is on as Thayer cant get it done when it counts- although gee, he did put up 37 points. What happened to that defense? Good ol Air Jimmy, thats what. Hogwash.

Football is a team game, plain and simple. Yards gained by the offense is mostly a product of field position. If your defense hands you the ball 10 yards away from the end zone, instead of 80, you dont look like you move the ball much, but bottom line is scoring and preventing scores, not yards. And many defenses play softer on the other side of the 50, then knuckle down in the red zone, and even more so inside the 10, where bodies get congested and space to throw is limited. There’s a reason why Canadian football is so wide open- the end zones are 25 yards long. Way more space in the red zone. Plus the field is wider and 10 yards longer to boot.

At any rate, Milford had plenty of other chances to win this game besides one overthrow (which may not have mattered; how do they know whether a completion there would lead to the go-ahead TD?) and Gil needs to identify and fix the several problems the team has on both sides of the ball. It appears both signal callers are competent at this point, so defuse any tension between them asap and move on to the next game which likely wont feature an air show like this one.

I’m already betting the team scores Less points next week, but wins. And someone will be bitching about the quarterback again.

How Is the Milford Offense Like a Diesel Engine?

Neither of them have spark plugs!

This Milford-Madison game reminds me in a way of this past Saturday night’s supposed college football game of the year of the week. The team with a ground-and-pound offense takes an early lead then falls behind, its defense unable to slow down its opponent’s big-play offense. Tasked with orchestrating a rally, the game manager QB commits errors, throwing picks and getting his passes stuffed back in his face at the line of scrimmage. Despite all this, the coach sticks with his game manager, keeping the QB with more raw talent and game-breaking potential on the bench. Run the color version of today’s strip and the Mudlarks even start to look the part. Forgive me if I start referring to Will Thayer as “The Mailman.”

News flash: amateur football has turned into a track meet and defense no longer wins championships. Does Gil stick to his principles and watch his team slip down the standings in the Valley? Or does he decide he has doled out enough punishment and go with the guy that can make things happen? Pity that Gil dismisses everything Marty says out of hand; even a stopped clock sitting in his parents’ basement is right twice a day.

The Surprise Factor

The thrust of today’s strip is that cagey Gil is employing multiple formations to keep the Madison defense guessing. We aren’t shown the results of Madison’s defense getting wise to the I-formation. We just have Marty’s commentary from inside his little packing crate, spinning everything to sound suspicious of Gil’s game plan.

Was Madison surprised by the I-formation or did Milford just execute it well enough to grab a two touchdown lead?

We also haven’t seen the Air Jimmy spread offense employed by Madison. Milford held Madison once and then Madison struck quickly. Sometimes I wonder why we crave the actual action strips. The storytelling in them is even worse than the overheated team drama in the other 70%* of the strips.

*ballpark estimate with Moon level credibility.

Excuse Me, But Where Can I Get an Air Jimmy Hat?

Well I’ll be. Faithful TWIMer hitorque was right. It is a James Madison reference. Madison QB Alex Sanborn is a shoutout to a capital management exec and former Northwestern U tennis player.

Should be fun to see if the Mudlarks can hang with a team that runs a modern offense, no? To be fair, the spread has its antecedents in a formation developed by Rusty Russell, the coach at an orphanage high school in Fort Worth, Texas, and built on by Dutch Meyer at TCU (another Fort Worth school) in the late 1930s with Sammy Baugh and Davey O’Brien at quarterback. Later variants were developed by Howard Fletcher at Northern Illinois and Jack Neumeier at Granada Hills High School in Los Angeles.

Will Gil whip out that Delaware Wing-T in retaliation? Hell, Delaware doesn’t even run the Delaware Wing-T anymore. (It’s worth noting that the last time Delaware made the FCS postseason, they lost in the first round to… wait for it… James Madison.) How about the flying wedge?

As long as were talking about Air Somebody-or-other, how’s about a tribute to the original “Air” offense – one that never failed to entertain but somehow always came up frustratingly short. Seems appropriate to cap off a week in which we lost Fred Dean.