BGP: We Came. We Saw, We Went Home
Tom Szczerbowski
Nov 13, 2002
This
game may have lacked the offensive fireworks of Week 6 and the grudging intensity
of Week 5 when it seemed everyone on both teams was getting cross-eyed with
rage over claims of non calls and wrong calls, but Week 7’s game nonetheless
featured a banal stomping by the IP Stack on BGP’s hole-laden defense.
The 2002 season has been a Hindenburg-sized catastrophe for the 1-6 BGPers,
whose captain Pablo Frank
went on record saying, “Things would have to improve dramatically for us
just to suck!” Frank hasn’t said much in two weeks, but even when he speaks
he still doesn’t seem to say very much. Changes in the BGP front office
and locker room have been slow to happen, and until they do, BGP will remain
the last refuge of the shoddy and second-rate.
Defensively, BGP tried out a new soft-zone approach which, according
to experts, resembled Stonehenge: they didn’t move very much, and no one
could quite figure out why they were positioned the way they were. In Week
6, there was better defense exhibited at Pearl Harbor as the Stack wore out
the scoreboard with 7 TDs. However, in Week 7 the BGPers can take credit
for holding the explosive Stack to only 4 TDs, so maybe their newfound zone
strategy did pay marginal dividends.
Offensively, BGP QB moved the ball well in the early going and they jumped out to an early 1-0 lead on a rare TD by Pablo Frank.
On one strange play, before BGP could snap the ball, all its players girlishly
giggled out loud in unison prompting John Madden, in a rare Tuesday edition
of Monday Night Football, to grab the telestrator pen and start writing on
the television screen the words “NOT GONNA WORK.” He was right. For the
remainder of the game, BGP made too many miscues, dropped too many balls,
and did a poor job handling and returning kickoffs to have much of a chance
at victory. It wasn’t necessarily the passionate agility of Paul Bertels
or the laser-precision-guided strikes of Paul McRae or the surehandedness of Tom Szczerbowski
or the all-around solid play of Sean Hope(who managed an inteception) or
the clutch defense by Kirk Ireland and Don MacDonald that had won the game
for the Stack as much as it was the inability to finish plays and drives
by the Ciancibello-led BGP. For his part, Ciancibello worked quickly and
was effective putting the ball where he had to, but his teammates let him
down on many occasions, which has been an old refrain for the BGP crew this
season.
This contest will be remembered as a snoozefest of sorts, a veritable
bore of a game, which lacked the concussive passion of past weeks when, for
instance, the scrappy McRae eviscerated Ciancibello on one occasion, although
newcomer Dwayne did lay a hellbent block on the unsuspecting Szczerbowski
in Week 7. That was pretty much all the contact in Week 7, to which the
players did football a disservice: a brutish, physical game by its very nature,
yesterday’s game was played with hardly the same fire in the players’ Darwinian
underbellies. Perhaps this was one reason why McRae only accounted for
4 TD strikes. He is known for being at his best when someone has lit a
burr under his saddle. The only other time the Stack had such a weak offensive
performance was in their Week 3 loss when the usually combative McRae rounded
up his troops and gayly roused the following pathetic message, “Listen you
guys, it’s not about whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.
So let’s have fun.” Experts are predicting that if McRae doesn’t develop
more Ray Lewis-like aggression again, which has dimmed and shone, the Stack’s
winning ways may be in jeopardy. To his credit, BGP’s Frank was emotionally
fired up for this game after missing last week when undergoing surgery for
gonorrhea. He blasted the rough play of Szczerbowski and tried to ignite
a war of words in a pre-game interview with these bellicose comments: “I
often wondered what I’d do if I were in a room with bin Laden, Saddam, and
Szczerbowski, and had a gun with only two bullets – shoot Szczerbowski twice!”
Szczerbowski returned the favour by scoring two TDs. Bertels did the same and the Stack cruised to a 4-1 win.
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