[QUOTE=rsvman;1341380]You are a star. Board rules won't allow me to comment further.
That was tacky, and a reach for sure!
“I love it. Coach, when we came here, we had a three-hour meeting about the core values. If you really represent the core values, it means diving on the floor, sacrificing your body for your teammates, no matter how much you’re up by or how much you’re down by, always playing hard.” -- Zion
"We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world." --M. Proust
“I love it. Coach, when we came here, we had a three-hour meeting about the core values. If you really represent the core values, it means diving on the floor, sacrificing your body for your teammates, no matter how much you’re up by or how much you’re down by, always playing hard.” -- Zion
We likely cannot match that physicality in practice for the simple reason that we don't have players that are that mature. We have athletes who are giving away 10-30 pounds of effective and trained muscle mass and hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of neurological conditioning due to their youth. The only player on the roster plays significant minutes that would meet the necessary development criteria would be Goldwire, and he's not that big nor terribly athletic (not to demean Goldwire - he's done as good a job maximizing his abilities as any player at Duke.) Roach and Steward, compared to Goldwire, are wafer-thin and still skinny on their frames, as Hurt was last season.
So, we take under-developed youths, pit them against grown men, and then we amp up the intensity from practice levels to game levels. This leads to the second shock - the equivalent, if you will of the rude awakening that first hit during a football game. It's a sudden change in psychology and matching the change of intensity of do-or-die game pressure in practice is probably not possible. I'm sure the coaches try, but there's only so much they can teach, and the kids can learn, in a single disrupted season.
Not really trying to make excuses but counseling patience.
A wise man said, everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.
My favorite "knocked back" is even better than the Tyson quip. Our own CWell said of NC State, "They came out all rah-rah. We knocked them back. After that, there was no more rah-rah."
Game recap and five observations. This one was painful.
https://bluedevilstop.com/duke-loses...-georgia-tech/