LAST year's Youngstown State University football team lost its last seven games by 10 points or less.
This season, second-year coach Eric Wolford knows his team had a problem late in games - either holding onto a lead or finishing a rally.
As the Penguins enter the 2011 spring practice, Wolford wants to remedy the crunch-time situation.
Things began so well in 2010's Missouri Valley Football Conference slate with a 14-point rally over Southern Illinois, but went quickly went south for the then 3-1 Penguins.
The 35-25 loss at Missouri State a week later was an eye opener for the youthful YSU squad as the Penguins blew a 17-7 lead late in the third quarter.
The reason for this year's sense of urgency may have stemmed from the following North Dakota State game. Down 28-20, YSU quickly scored twice on a touchdown and a field-goal - giving the Penguins a one-point edge with 51 seconds left. If the Penguins simply held, they'd improve to 4-2. Instead, YSU surrendered a 45-yard touchdown reception.
The secondary was torched throughout the 2010 season and, for that fact, the defense, as a whole, was a sore spot in the Penguins' seven-game skid.
"We'll have a fourth quarter at the end of the day, every day," Wolford said. "I've picked out certain things I want to dwell on for that day. We'll work on a lot of 2-minute situations. We'll work on a lot of 4-minute situations."
Those four-minute situations stem from the Western Illinois game where the Penguins could not hold onto a four-point cushion with more than 5 minutes remaining.
"For you guys who don't know what 4 minutes is, it is when you have an opportunity on offense and you have the ball, and there is 4 minutes left in the game and you've got to run the clock out - stay inbounds, don't turn the ball over," Wolford said. "We had that opportunity in the Western Illinois game. At the end of the day, we didn't convert. We had a chance to run the clock out there and we didn't. You guys all know what happened at the end of that game.
"Those are the kind of situations we're going to work on the end of 2 minutes, when the other team has the ball - all we've got to do is stop them. We've got the lead, 38-34. We need to do that."
In that Western Illinois game, the Leathernecks had the ball with 2:13 left at their own 20. After two incompletions, it seemed Western Illinois was in dire straits on third-and-10. Leathernecks quarterback Matt Barr, in John Elway fashion, scrambled for 20 yards - eventually leading to the game-winning score a minute later.
"We need to work on third down," Wolford said. "We'll have a winner and loser (in practice), and that group will run. There will be stakes for a winner or a loser. We'll have that at the end of practice, in the last 2 minutes, when we're working on a specific situation. You've got to embrace it. You can't shy away from it. It's the end of practice, you're tired. We're going to work them. And, I want to see who is going to step up. That last segment, the fourth quarter, I call it. Get the job done. Can you get us a couple first downs, run the clock out? Can you make a play when the ball is in the air?
"We're going to find out."
This season, YSU and Wolford will find out if this preparation leads to much different results than in 2010.
jvargo@tribtoday.com
