Mardi Gras

The Pimpdags rolled to Mardi Gras this past weekend.

First off, we were lucky to get down there in the first place. A snowstorm dropped about 8 inches of snow on Illinois while we were driving down Thursday night/Friday morning. The car I was in had a couple close calls with other cars and ditches, but we were able to slowly make our way through it, stopping every hour or so to clean the ice off the windshield. A Hodag car did end up in a ditch, and I head two ISU cars had to be towed, but otherwise I didn't hear anything about accidents, which is amazing considering the number of teams going to this tournament that had to drive through that mess.

We arrived in Baton Rouge late Friday afternoon, with enough time to enjoy happy hour at our hotel before heading into New Orleans to experience Mardi Gras on Bourbon Street, which was an amazing experience, one of those once in your life things. Apparently Hulk Hogan was there, but I didn't see him. I was too busy throwing beads at people on the balcony.

Saturday arrived with a day-saving first round bye (we had returned from New Orleans at around 3am), followed by a very tough power pool C that would end up producing two of the semis teams. There's no need for me to give a recap of each game as every game went basically the same way: the other team would score, usually on a huck, we'd try a retalitory huck, turn it over, the other team would work it up and score, we'd try to work it up, get pressured into a throw away, they'd work it up and score. With no time to work on our problems from last weekend, they perpetuated themselves this weekend. We were consistently broken and burned deep. We made bad decisions throwing deep and had a lot problems getting open for the dump. The difference between this weekend and last weekend in terms of results is that at Mardi Gras we were playing teams that punished us severely for our mistakes. We lost to North Texas, Minnesota, Georgia Tech, and Notre Dame by anywhere from 6 to 12 points. This gave us a cross over 5th game under the lights against Ole Miss, whom we had lost to 13-10 in Alabama. This time the game wasn't even that close as their one stud cutter consistently hosed us. Saturday record: 0-5, 70 points for them, 31 for us. Ouch.

Sunday was sort of better. We came out and beat LSU 13-8, which felt really good, and confirmed to us that we were a decent team. We then had yet another opportunity to play Oklahoma, but in that game the same problems from Saturday haunted us and we lost 15-10. With a .500 record for the second day and a 19th place finish, we set off towards home.

I think this tournament showed us very clearly where we stand as a team and what things we need to work on before we can compete with the teams of the caliber of those we played Saturday. We now have 5 weeks until our next tournament (I think), and with a couple turf practices and many track workouts between now and then, we should be in good shape, both physically and mentally. We'll see how it goes.