SFUC Week 5

Moral Hazard faced an extremely tough team this Tuesday against the Mudslingers, and unfortunately we ended up with our first L. After a quick perusal of their roster beforehand, I was pretty confident that we would be able to cruise. Unfortunately, there are apparently still a good number of Jam/Brass Monkey/Mischief players whose name I don't recognize. In addition to having a few of those guys, the Mudslingers had a couple Fury women as well.

The bad guys started the game on a quick run, getting 3 easy breaks with a simple zone that we made a few silly mistakes against (i.e. drops). We stormed back with a big run of our own to take a 6-4 lead. I was in my element, scoring a few easy goals on big ass hucks and assisting on another that I caught just on the goalline. I was doing a decent job on Mischief's Adam Leventhal, who killed us over the course of the game.

My decent job was not to last. I got broken up and down the field by his around backhand that he released just next to my right thigh, under my outstretched arm. He also surprised me with a few deep cuts that I released him on, thinking he was out of his thrower's range. They went on another run of their own, bringing the score to 10-8 Mudslingers. As Slap pointed out, it was a game of runs. Unfortunately, we couldn't uphold our end of the bargain by making a final run.

We scored to bring the score to 12-11 Mudslingers, and pulled. They slowly worked their way downfield, with us taking away the killshots but giving up the unders. Somewhere past half field, Leventhal got the disc and looked for that around break yet again. After being on the field with him on probably 80% of the points, I had finally figured out the throw and got all of the throw with my cleat for the D. I did my usual move of slowly trotting to the middle of the field to set a stack and then sprinting deep when I saw Shy pick up the disc out of the corner of my eye. But he holstered it!! Devastating. I didn't actually get too open on the cut, but knowing that he trusts me with that type of look in any game situation I figured the throw would come anyway. Somehow we turned the disc, and they punched it in for the game. Oh well.

Better to lose now than to roll into playoffs with the undefeated target on our backs. How's that for getting ahead of ourselves? Ha.

At any rate, this was definitely the poorest performance by the whole team in general and by me in particular so far this season. I wasn't getting anything on offense; my double moves that usually get me wide open deep weren't working for whatever reason, either because my defenders were fantastic or because my all my toes were literally numb... but I'll blame the former. Because my fingers were similarly frozen, I was hesitant to cut under when our stack was stagnant, as it constantly was this game. It was a frustrating game to look back on and realize that I could have made things a lot easier for the whole team by just running in a straight line to the thrower. Time for some author-reader interaction: How can I keep my fingers warm in the cold? Any cold weather players out there (Midwest, Northeast), I'm looking at you. Hand warmers? anything?

We were also hurt a lot by our roster makeup for the game. We were missing our best player, Jam's Kevin Buchanan (who I didn't realize was still playing for them until I just looked up their roster...), as well as Whit and Claire, two of our strongest players. The biggest problem was that with them all absent, throwing cutters were forced to handle, leaving a cutting corps without great downfield throws. Additionally, we had our best attendance yet from the bottom half of the roster.

All in all, it was a disappointing game, but still fun as hell. I was certainly not feeling down at any point in the game as I might if the Braineaters had been in a similar game.

Bonus feature: Those who know me know that I carry a handkerchief with me wherever I go out of necessity, even on the field. Well, it came in handy on Tuesday in a non-nose function, and I won't be using it again. Figure that one out.

Link I would be remiss in not sharing: Over at Shy's Blog, he has started an absolutely incredible feature called Best of my College Ultimate (lose the acronym, buddy) in which he goes back to some of the Braineaters' most significant and exciting games and recaps them all with the help of his videoographic memory (did I just make up a phrase?). Word on the street is when he regains access to the corpus of game footage that was partially lost in a hard drive crash, these recaps will be accompanied by the relevant footage. Awesome.