Youth shouldn’t be an excuse for squad
The Frogs shot themselves in the foot on a consistant basis with stupid penalties last season. This year, we’ll find out if that was caused by inexperience — or just lack of talent.
COMMENTARY
Brandon Ortiz

One statistic defined the 2001football team: 86 penalty yards a game.

Opponents, by contrast, were only penalized 57 yards a game.

It wasn’t just the lost yardage that hurt the Horned Frogs — it was the lost opportunities. The stalled drives. The long first downs. The shifts in momentum.

That was what crystallized most clearly when the Frogs lost to a Division I-AA team last season.

Clinging to a seven-point lead, the Frogs stopped a surging Northwestern State offense on third down. But on the next play, they were penalized for encroachment. Now only needing a yard for the first down, the Demons gambled and got four. Four plays later, quarterback Craig Nall was trotting into the end zone to tie the score.

It was the consequence of one of the 15 penalties for 114 yards that led to the Frogs most embarrassing, back-breaking, disheartening loss of the season.

Inexperience, and the penalties that followed, killed TCU last year. For the Frogs to be better than a .500 team, they will have to avoid mental errors.

This season, they have no excuses.

Having lost 28 seniors from the year before, coaches were quick to point out TCU was a young team at the beginning of last year. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“We might have talked a little too much about the guys that had left,” head coach Gary Patterson said during the team’s annual preseason press conference. “I’m not going to give our guys a back door this year. I’m going to make them back up a statement for a change, and that is, ‘Bring it on.’ ”

With that statement, Patterson has made it clear he will not tolerate excuses this time around.

Nor should he.

The offensive line isn’t young anymore. Three seniors will start next year, and the line’s youngest starter, sophomore Chase Johnson, got decent playing time for a reserve. Not too many freshmen start their first game in Lincoln, Neb.

Sean Stilley has only started two games in his career, but he is a fifth-year senior. He may lack game experience, but he knows the offense better than any quarterback on the team.

Only one underclassman will start in the secondary this year, but he might be the defense’s most exciting player not named LaMarcus McDonald. Sophomore Marvin Godbolt was a freshman All-American, and now moves to the critical weak safety position.

This is a more experienced team. Only 13 lettermen were lost, 48 return.

The penalties that plagued last year’s squad should not happen. If it does, then a deeper issue than inexperience will be the cause.

It might be this just isn’t a good team.

Sports editor Danny Gillham contributed to this report.

Brandon Ortiz is a junior news-editorial major from Fort Worth.