ROAD TO GLORY
RTG-01 · Underdog Run · Week 0
ROAD TO GLORY
RTG-01 · Underdog Run · Week 0
This ran in The Fentonian buried on page 6 of the October 18, 2024 issue, beneath a headline the adviser at the time supplied over the writer's objection. Nine hundred words by a fifteen-year-old with no football background who had not been asked to write about a Fenton game and wrote about one anyway. We are reprinting it without corrections. The stiffness is his. The diagram is his. Every em-dash below is his own, and there are frankly a lot of them.
We are also reprinting a correction, two years late, to a story this paper helped spread.
Everyone at this school — including, I think, the author — believes some version of the sentence the coach read his article and called him in. I believed it. I have written it down in this newspaper. When I asked Coach Setzke about it this month for our cover story, he told me he has never read this column. He said he heard there was an article, that somebody mentioned it in a hallway, and that he does not read the school paper. I asked whether he had read it since. He said, "Why would I read it now."
So here is what this document actually is. It is not the thing that opened the door. It changed nothing, for two years, for anybody. What opened the door was three text messages and forty-one pages of unpaid charting, and you can read about that one page back.
We are running it anyway, in full, on the front half of this issue instead of page six, because a fifteen-year-old was right about something in October 2024 and this building took two years to find out. That is not his failure. It is ours, and I am the sports editor, so a decent share of it is specifically mine.
— H. Villeneuve, sports editor
Breaking down the one thing Linden did to us all night, and two adjustments that would have answered it.
Fenton lost 27-14 to Linden last Friday. Anyone who sat through Friday probably walked out convinced this offense simply cannot pass. That is not really what happened. The line was 11 of 21, which is mediocre, and mediocre is a long way from catastrophic. The actual story is 1 for 11 on third down, and ten of those eleven stalls were one identical breakdown repeating.
I want to lay out what that breakdown actually was, because everything I have heard about it since Friday has been wrong. More than a few people have told me Ben Haijcar played poorly. I went through the film snap by snap with a notebook, and the charting does not support that. What I see is a quarterback handed a problem with no available solution.
What Linden did. First and second down, Linden gave us nothing exotic — four rushers, two safeties over the top. Nothing unusual. On third and long they ran the exact same thing eleven consecutive times.
Their weak-side linebacker — 44, and he is a real player — crept down onto the line, stationed just outside our right tackle. They did not rush him. Nine of those eleven times he bailed at the snap and covered the flat.
The effect of that is an arithmetic problem for five offensive linemen. Our protection is coded to slide toward whichever side shows the extra body. So the line went right on every single one, because that is where 44 was standing. And the instant that slide went right, 55 — their three-technique — had our left guard isolated, a two-way go, and nobody arriving to help.
Seven times out of eleven, 55 won that rep outright. Not because our left guard is bad. Not because our guard is bad, but because he was abandoned against a good player and forced to guess.
Diagram drawn by the author. That average came off the film at quarter speed, timed six separate passes, so call it accurate within a tenth of a second.
Why the throws looked bad. Across those eleven snaps, Ben had roughly 2.4 seconds before somebody was on him. For most of the evening our third-down call was a dig route with a checkdown sitting beneath it. The dig breaks at about 3.1 seconds. That route was never going to exist. So his options were a checkdown thrown directly at a linebacker already waiting in the flat, a ball into the bench, or a hit.
Both picks came off the first of those three. Neither read strikes me as a poor decision so much as a poor menu.
The first fix. Stop sliding protection toward somebody who is not actually rushing. A linebacker who walks up and then bails nine times in eleven is not a pass rusher, he is bait, and respecting him is precisely the trap Linden set. Send the slide left at 55, assign the back to 44, and on the rare snap 44 actually comes, the back picks him up and the hot throw opens in the space he just left. That is not a complicated adjustment. This is a line-of-scrimmage check, not a scheme overhaul.
The second fix. Change the route, not the protection. When the heat arrives in 2.4 seconds, the answer is a concept designed to release the ball inside 2.4 seconds. Spacing, or a shallow cross with something sitting down behind it, gets you six yards without requiring any lineman to sustain a block for three full seconds.
I know perfectly well that all of this is simple on a Wednesday afternoon and nearly invisible under the lights. I also know I have never taken a snap in my life, and that a certain number of readers will finish this and decide a marching band kid has no business diagramming pass protection. That is a reasonable objection and my only rebuttal is that the film is the film.
One more thing. Linden did this eleven straight times. There was no disguise, no adjustment, and no reason for either. Which tells you they were certain we would not solve it before the clock ran out. Whether that falls on the staff, on the headset, or on how genuinely hard this is to diagnose in real time, I could not tell you.
What I can tell you is that it is fixable, that Holly shows the identical third-down picture on tape, and that Holly is on the schedule a fortnight from now.
Nothing. That is the honest answer and it took some doing to establish.
Fenton played Holly two weeks later, in the game this column had explicitly flagged, and did not slide the protection to the decoy. They won 21–17 anyway, on a night when Holly happened not to use the look. Nobody wrote about the protection.
Nobody on the coaching staff has any memory of discussing this article. Paul Shaffer says he read it "at some point, maybe that winter, maybe later," and that his honest reaction was that a kid had done a lot of work. Marty Sitko says he has still not read it and volunteered, unprompted, that he is not going to start now.
The one measurable consequence is indirect and nobody involved connected it at the time. Two students who had class with Mansour — Sam Metcalfe and Matt Balok — separately told Setzke that the kid in their third hour knew more football than anybody in the building. Both of them now say the article is part of why they said it. Neither of them told Setzke there was an article. Setzke, for his part, says two students telling him about a smart sophomore registered "roughly nowhere," which is a correct instinct that happened to be wrong.
So the chain runs: column → two classmates think a thing → two classmates mention the thing to a busy man → the busy man does not care. Then fourteen months of texts.
The author's own account, given this month and only after being asked directly:
"I thought that was going to work. Not like — I didn't think he'd make me the quarterback, that would be insane. I thought somebody was going to say something." He was asked whether anybody did. "Mrs. Grady said the diagram was good."
He was told, during that conversation, that Setzke has never read it. He was quiet for a second and then said, "Okay." Then: "That actually makes more sense than the other version." Then, after a while: "Don't put that in. Actually put it in, I don't care."
Number 55 for Linden, the three-technique who beat Fenton's left guard on seven of eleven third downs, is a senior this year. He is on the schedule September 11.
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