Will Hall Dives Into Reasons Why Things Went Haywire Against Tulsa

After a loss like the Tulane Green Wave had to the Tulsa Golden Hurricane, there’s certainly a balance of how much to change and how feasible that is without throwing things out of whack with just three weeks left in the regular season.

A 60-10 deficit requires a long, hard look in the mirror. The answer to what went wrong might not be simple or even exist. You can’t exactly point to one defining error that won or lost the football game.

And you’re also not going to give every single one of those notes to the media when the focus is frankly pointed on fixing them.

Two of the things that head coach Will Hall said in his post-practice presser on Tuesday stuck out.

The first was that they tried to outsmart themselves and thought that surely, with a week of rest on their bye and time to scheme them up, that they needed to deviate from their usual game plan of what they do best.

Clearly that didn’t work, and it might explain a bit of why the offense looked so night and day from the success it started to show against the Charlotte 49ers.

Whatever they thought Tulsa had planned for them wasn’t worth throwing out what was working, and hopefully that lesson is learned.

The second thing was that he took responsibility alongside the director of strength and conditioning, Colin Kenyon, for looking at some data from practice tracking and realizing that they have been overtraining a little and intend to scale back.

All put together, it led to everyone looking dazed, confused, and slow for two reasons.

Certainly, exhaustion plays a factor when your bye week is all the way back in Week 5, and here we are at Week 11.

Then, if you overtrain and overprepare, that’s just unneeded tread on the tires.

Then, if you overprepare and overcomplicate things, that leads to a lot of “freeze” in the moment and overthinking things to the point of looking slow, because they were in diagnosing what was happening.

It’s not exactly problems that you’d like to have pop up this late in the season, but there’s no better time to fix them swiftly.

As said before, a lot of things went wrong, and overpreparing and overtraining aren’t anywhere close to sufficient reasoning for a 60-10 defeat.

But they are signs of self-reflection, and hopefully the basics will prove to be the right formula this weekend.