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Change for Penguins comes with a price
By Joe Scalzo
YOUNGSTOWN
The excuse was just dangling out there, and Eric Wolford knew it.
His defense had just been gashed for 34 first-half points and it would have been easy to point to the four starting freshman and the nine newcomers and mumble something about growing pains.
He didn’t.
“Being young,” Wolford said, “is not an excuse.”
No. But it is a reason.
Wolford’s two-year tenure at Youngstown State has been marked by a lot of things, but none bigger than this: change.
Change of attitude. Change of approach. Change of expectations. And, more than anything else, change of personnel.
Of the 11 defensive starters in Saturday’s 37-35 loss to Indiana State, only two were with the team during the Jon Heacock era: senior DE Obinna Ekweremuba (who didn’t play a down until last season) and senior CB Josh Lee (who was a reserve wide receiver under Heacock).
Four of Saturday’s defensive starters were freshmen, including two making their first starts: LB Teven Williams and CB Jimmy May.
Only two of those starters, Ekweremuba and senior co-captain Andrew Johnson, entered this year with more than a half-dozen starts.
The other defensive co-captain, John Sasson, came off the bench for the first time in Wolford’s tenure, the result of the coaching staff valuing athleticism over experience and leadership.
That approach may pay off in the long run but it seemed to hurt on Saturday when a more senior-laden team might not have let a bad start turn into a nearly-insurmountable deficit. The Sycamores scored on their first offensive play — a 62-yard TD run by Shakir Bell — and added four more TDs in the next 25 minutes.
By the time the defense regrouped, it was too late.
“We’re four games into this thing and we cannot continue to use youth as an excuse,” Wolford said. “If you’re in there, it’s because we believe you’re the best player.
“I’m not going to accept that you’re not mature enough to go on the road and be playing. We need to get better.”
The Penguins (2-2, 1-1 Missouri Valley) have an open date this weekend and Wolford said he’ll spend this week working on fundamentals.
“It’s a good time for us [to have an open week],” said Wolford, whose team hosts South Dakota State on Oct. 8. “It’s a good time to work on some fundamentals and get healthy. We’re a bit banged up, which is not an excuse by any means.
“We need to work on some basic fundamentals like blocking and tackling so we can get better as a football team.”