Forum › Forum › Lehigh Sports › Lehigh Football › Brad Mayes › Reply To: Brad Mayes
First:
QBDad, you are welcome on here, and I understand that you are representing your son and your knowledge of him. I respect you’ll go to the mat for your son, and your posting of your cell # was proof of that, but nonetheless I edited that out (keeping your comments otherwise unedited).
Second:
I think everyone on here feels like this season is not going as planned. I don’t think Brad thought he played the perfect game. However, as hawktalker said, in the post-game presser he owned up to his mistakes. The same, by the way, was true of Jimmy Mitchell after the Yale game. He took responsibility there for what was happening as a unit, something a team captain is supposed to do. He didn’t throw anyone under the bus. As far as I’m concerned, both kids have displayed admirable traits as men in those press conferences. Things haven’t gone as planned, but despite that, they owned up to the fact that the outcomes are not acceptable and that their play needs to improve.
You can tell these two kids are going to be alright in life in the way that they stood up like that. In a way, though, it makes it more painful, because you want these kids to succeed. I didn’t want them to come to Lehigh to experience this.
I have thoughts about how things might be improved, however, I am not a coach, and I realize 1) this isn’t Madden and 2) I’m not in the business of telling someone how to do their job. What I do know is giving up 276 yards and 3 TDs to a 2nd string tailback is unacceptable, but also, if you get the ball first in a game and there is a turnover – whomever is at fault – that’s unacceptable, too. You aren’t ever going to achieve your goals if you do things like that, and a lot of them are happening week to week. Too many of them. In all phases. I also believe you can’t try to pass off a performance like last week’s as “improvement” in a post-game presser. Like the Yale game, I saw mistakes in all phases, and all those mistakes contributed to losing the game.
This is a place with high expectations. Every year Lehigh is expected to compete for a championship, bar none. This is not Austin Peay where winning a game or two and taking baby steps to contention is something to be celebrated. Lehigh is a team where even with an 0-4 start and giving up 65 points to Penn and 56 points to Yale the team and coaches are expected to compete for a Patriot League championship in November. You can’t win a championship every year – that’s understood. But you have to be close, or pretty close to getting there. Nobody called 2015 a failure when Lehigh was ten yards away from taking out Colgate.
I think it’s on the coaching staff to get this thing turned around this week, so that the Colgate game is competitive, and from there, everyone can move forward. It will be immensely hard. There will need to be success against Wagner, and a lot of it, to get the confidence to a level that we can think of the Colgate game as a chance for victory. In the end, that is the coaching staff’s responsibility. I hope they appreciate how difficult a spot they have put themselves in.