September 11, 2014
By Skip Myslenski
NUsports.com Special Contributor
Collin Ellis, the middle linebacker and a Wildcats captain, remembered this late Thursday morning. “I remember he (head coach Pat Fitzgerald) asked me on Sunday what he should do, what his message to the team should be. I told him, 'You should just kick our asses.' That's exactly (what I said), verbatim. I was like, 'We need to toughen up. We need to get better.' Coach's idea going into this week is people who aren't tough are going to be revealed.”
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EARLIER THIS THURSDAY MORNING, for the third consecutive day, the 'Cats held a punishing practice. This had not been the original plan for their bye week. It had included some time off for their rotation players. But after a second consecutive loss, and after hearing out Ellis and other team leaders who delivered a similar message, Fitzgerald appreciably altered that plan. So came those practices, which were punctuated with all of the 'Cats doing up-and-downs whenever any one of them made a mistake. “It's been fun. I've enjoyed it,” Ellis will say of them. “We all come into the locker room and talk about how it reminds us of high school and about how much fun it's been even though it's been terrible.
“You've been out there. I don't know how many up-downs we've done. And every mistake is accounted for. We're not getting away with anything. If you're doing up-downs the wrong way, we start over. We're doing up-downs again. So the accountability is awesome. The structure is awesome. The up-downs, while they suck, they're awesome. I'm enjoying practice right now because I know it's making us tougher. I know my progress from day one to day three, I feel better on the field. After up-downs, I'm not as tired. I'm getting in better shape, and we're able to concentrate better in the moment too.”
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THE WHIPSAWING the 'Cats have endured this week does not end when they leave the field. It extends, in fact, all the way into their meeting rooms, where their position coaches have themselves heeded the message the players delivered to Fitzgerald. So the linebackers are watching film with Randy Bates, who tutors them, and “If you're only running 80 percent to the ball he's like, 'That's not good enough,'” Ellis explains.
“He's calling out the older guys, me, Chi Chi (Ariguzo). It's, 'How're you going to be All-Big Ten if you're doing that?' Stuff like that. So the accountability's gone way up. I felt we had decent accountability before, but we were trying to take over a lot of that as players. But coaches are now (stepping in) as well. I'm excited. It's been fun. It's been tough. But it's what we needed.”
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THE 'CATS, of course, needed this transfusion after opening their season with a pair of losses. In the first, against Cal, they fell behind early; pressed; abandoned their fundamentals; dropped passes; looked for (to quote quarterback Trevor Siemian) “a 24-point touchdown at a certain point” and fell by seven. In the second, against Northern Illinois, they lacked discipline; lost their poise; committed nine penalties; surrendered five sacks; failed to fight for one pass that resulted in a Huskie interception; failed to make a play on another pass that resulted in a Huskie touchdown; failed to catch a third pass that would have given them a touchdown and fell by eight. In both, as Fitzgerald said Wednesday, they had shown themselves to be “Not very tough.”
That is why the 'Cats have been pushed through three days of punishing practices, why there has been such an emphasis on curtailing mistakes, why the aim has been to transform them into a collective bar of annealed steel. “Getting back to punching people in the face and not taking it, no matter what,” center Brandon Vitabile had said on Wednesday when asked what he wanted the offensive line to get out of this week. “A lot of that's mental. If you think you're the baddest dude in the room, you're the baddest dude no matter what. That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to be the baddest guys in the room, the baddest guys on the field. That's what we're getting back to.”
“Our team as a whole, from the way we've been playing, anyone can see that once we got punched in the face, we didn't necessarily punch back all the way,” Ellis will echo on Thursday. “I still think we have a lot of tough individuals. We just have to play more collectively tough and execute better together. Then I think you get that toughness-- toughness in the sense that if you execute and do everything correctly, you're a stout force. So while we have tough individuals, we need to get that toughness about us that, 'You're not going to run the ball on us. You're not going to pass on us because we're going to execute so fundamentally perfect that you're not going to have areas to do it.'”
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Pat Fitzgerald, on Thursday, when asked how his players reacted to this week: “I'm not looking for a reaction. I'm looking for us to respond. I'm looking for us to get back to the standards we have on the field on Saturday. Everything else is just talk and nonsense. We need to perform the way we expect to perform. That's consistently. That's fundamentally sound. We use practice to create the right habits. For the most part, our guys have practiced with the right habits. We've made way too many mistakes on Saturdays. So we make a mistake, it's got to get fixed, and it's got to get fixed right away. That's what we're trying to get corrected.”
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Pat Fitzgerald, on Wednesday, when asked if he was surprised by his team's poor performances since he had extolled its leadership all through August: “I don't think there's been a lack of leadership. There's been a lack of guys performing the way they're capable of. That's not leadership. That's performance, right? I promise you right now nobody's getting a vote from any coach in our conference as being All Big Ten. I'm not getting a Coach of the Year vote right now. Enough said. That's not a lack of leadership. It's a lack of performance.
“So why is that happening? I think that's the better question. That's the things we've looked at hard over this weekend and this week as a coaching staff. Number one, when they're in position to make plays, they've got to do the same things we do every day in practice. That's trusting themselves to do it. Framing the ball. We do a circle drill, we probably throw a-thousand balls every day it seems like and to have those drops is inexcusable. We block the same damn plays every day. We block the same protections every day. There wasn't a look we saw from (Northern Illinois) that we didn't prepare for. So why? Guys aren't trusting themselves. They're guessing.
“ When you guess, you're 50 percent right, 50 percent wrong before you even start the play. And then you've got to go out and execute the technique and you've guessed and, 'Oh, shucks. I'm wrong.' Now what do you do? You panic. Right now, we've got too many guys guessing, especially offensively. . ,. That's got to get fixed.”
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Collin Ellis, on Thursday, when asked if he's anxious for a game to gauge the results of this week: “Yeah. Yeah. I'm ready to go out there and get a win, just execute. It's funny. You see it in practice, you see when we do it right that it can be beneficial, and that doing it the right way produces. You make big plays. So whenever we go out there and don't do it the right way-- maybe I'm not 100 percent to the ball every rep and I could have made a certain play there, that just puts a chip on my shoulder. 'Why did I do that?'
“So I go to bed at night thinking, 'Tomorrow I've got to get better.' I've felt that this week and I feel the team has felt that too.”
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