Making the Right Calls

First of all I’d like to congratulate Coach Tiller and Cory Sheets on their record-breaking performances over the weekend. What an exciting win for Coach Tiller to break the record on and an even more exciting touchdown run for Cory Sheets. That juke move that he put on was ridiculous. Also, it was a great play call by the coaching staff as everyone in the stadium was thinking pass and they decided to run it right down the middle for a 40 yard score. I don’t often agree with Coach Tiller’s play calling and decision-making, but on Saturday he made several decisions that I was pleased with.
The first decision was Tiller choosing to kick that long field goal right before the end of the half. A lot of people probably would have just threw up a Hail Mary and hoped for the best, but seriously when do you ever see that work? Instead of a Hail Mary Tiller chose to let freshman kicker Carson Wiggs attempt the field goal. When he came in I was like, “Who is this guy? There’s no way he can make this.” He eventually missed the kick, but not by much. He was right down the middle, but a few yards short and even though he missed I was thoroughly impressed. Coach Tiller had faith in Wiggs and showed it by letting him attempt the field goal. This was the first decision I was happy with.
The second decision Tiller made was one that I didn’t find out about until Monday when I read about it in the paper. With the offense was stalling out in the fourth quarter of Saturday’s game Coach Tiller went to senior starting quarterback Curtis Painter and told him he had one more series to get things going or he would be replaced by backup quarterback Joey Elliot. Painter responded with a simple, “OK.” and ended up leading the Boilermakers down the field with a productive drive, capping the drive with a touchdown pass to Desmond Tardy. Why do I like the fact that Tiller threatened to remove Painter from the game? I like it because it put a little pressure on the easy going Painter and got some productivity out of him. If you treat Painter as if he can do no wrong, there’s no pressure on him to perform. I don’t want him to be in fear of losing his job whenever he throws an interception, but a little pressure here and there definitely can’t hurt things.