I chose to drive with the team to
Centex rather than fly because, hey, it's my last year of playing college ultimate and it seemed like a very college ultimate thing to do. It ended up being really fun (besides really loooong) and a worthwhile experience, although I spent most of the rest of my spring break recovering.
Saturday morning we awoke to horizontal rain blowing past our door and lightning bolts. We went back to bed, and I woke up every hour or so to check
Cultimate's twitter feed for updates. It was pretty clear we weren't playing that morning, but when and where we might play was up in the air. We finally rolled out of bed and went to get a late mexican food breakfast around 11. During breakfast, we got word that cultimate had found "super secret backup fields" near San Antonio, a mere 90 miles away. We paid our bill and booked it to the hotel so we could hit the road.
The fields were muddy, and the wind was absolutely brutal. 30-40 mph gusts made it almost impossible to throw more than twenty or thirty yards. We were scheduled to play Illinois, Florida and Kansas. Illinois won the flip, and we traded downwinders the entire game. We actually managed to almost score upwind twice, but both times we failed. We lost 6-7 at hard cap.
We won the flip against Florida, and put down our first W against them in school history. True, the conditions were terrible, but we did play terrific defense to stop them from working it up, which they were always threatening to do. We won at hard cap, 13-12.
Kansas decided not to play their Saturday games. We heard that they had found fields and had intense practice all morning, thinking that Saturday would be canceled. We got a forfeit win against them.
Saturday morning the conditions were actually decent for half of our pre-quarters game against Stanford. They didn't seem to be fully awake quite yet, and our guys were pumped up to play. Our D did a terrific job of stopping their dumps and forcing their throws upfield into waiting poaches and layout blocks. Bishop and DaVinci punched it in on their goal line again and again with break throws, and Arby was money with hucks to Flood and other people. By the end of the game the wind had picked up and game had devolved into zone in a strong cross wind. We still managed to punch it in for the last point at cap, 13-9. (Stanford went on to beat CUT 13-4 later that day. Baffling.)
In quarters we matched up against Oregon, the pretty unanimous #1 team in the country. Unfortunately, we weren't really playing ultimate by this point. It was more like throwing turnovers in a windy field. We basically traded hucks back and forth, both teams afraid to turn it in front of their endzones until someone brought down the swill. Their athletes were really good at bringing down their bombs and they went up to an 8-1 lead. I think we were a little too happy to be sharing the field with the #1 team and no one really expected to win. We picked it up in the second half and brought it 15-8, a more respectable score. It was more than UNC or Colorado scored on them in Semis and Finals, for what that's worth.
We lost our next game to Michigan 14-11 because they were slightly better at throwing in the wind than us. By our last game against Cal, our guys were gassed and we didnt want to put up much of a fight. I offered 40 oz of incentive to everyone who got a layout D, and the guys had some fun in the second half trying to earn theirs. We brought it back from something like 0-6 to a final of 9-13.
Overall, it was definitely worth our time going to Centex. We benefitted from the quality of teams we played, but the most important was the bonding experience for our whole team. I wish we could have stuck around for spring break on the beach somewhere, but I guess that is for future years of Smaug to do. We got some quality wins over nationals level opponents, and it should have been a boost for our rankings and region. I'm very confident that if the weather had been good, we would have had at a couple good wins for our region.
As it was, the results were just totally wacky. Tide had a really tough weekend, and their RRI rating went down and dragged us and the SW down with them. The wacky conditions created wacky results, and the hierarchy of teams was totally overthrown. Teams like Harvard, with at least one dominant thrower and one dominant receiver were able to beat almost everyone because everyone point had about 30 turnovers (not to take anything away from Redline, but normally they don't beat Cut and take Colorado to universe).
CSULB and SDSU just played Easterns this past weekend, and they both had some quality wins, SDSU especially. Hopefully they can gain some strength points back to the SW, but it looks like we're going to be getting 2 bids to Natties this year. I'll share my opinions on the ranking system and bid allocation process later.
We went into the tourney seeded somewhere in the 22-28 range, and we ended up finishing 8th. Not too bad.
