I know that sounds funny but I have a theory here. Can teams that are extremely good suffer from just that? I believe that in some ways it hurt GSU last year.

Because of GSU's high scoring offense the first team played very little in the second half of its game. That really concerned me throughout the season. I remember going to the Citadel and us jumping out to a big lead. Sewak pulled the first team pretty early. The Citadel then started moving the ball on our D pretty well and put a few points on the board and our second team O really couldn’t move the ball on the Citadel. My father then made the comment to me that he thought Sewak pulled the first team two early.

A fan behind us took offense to this and started telling us that we would be happy next year when these guys are the starters and they have lots of game time experience. While I am happy that our second and third strings were able to get a lot of experience, I still to this day stand by thoughts that Sewak pulled the team to early and it hurt us in the end.

Our first string didn’t play in a close game against a good team all year until Furman. We know the outcome of that game and I blame it on our first stringers not knowing how to finish a game. They hadn’t had to do it all year and when we came across a truly good team that we needed to finish the boys were a little lost.

The same thing happened against New Hampshire. We jumped out to a lead and if we would have performed the second half the way we did in the first then that game would not have been close. But we didn’t perform the same and I believe it’s because of the lack of second half experience our first team had.

Now I do not believe that a team should leave in its first team just to run up the score and I do believe that you need to get your second and even third teams game experience when capable. But I do not believe that you should do this at the cost of the current season like I believe happened last year. If your team has a good shot at the playoffs and a good shot at contending for a championship then you need to think in the now, not the next year.

Do you guys know of other teams you feel that have suffered from this?