George Henshaw, who coached for two decades in the NFL as an offensive coordinator and position coach and also worked at the college level -- including seven years under Bobby Bowden at Florida State -- will offer insights to Warchant.com readers during the 2018 season.
Last week, Henshaw discussed season openers and how coaches don't know exactly what they have until they play a real game. In this week's conversation with Warchant.com managing editor Ira Schoffel, Henshaw talks about what went wrong for the Seminoles against Virginia Tech and how the team will move forward following an embarrassing defeat.
Warchant: Well, you said last week that it's difficult for coaches to really know how guys are going to play until you start keeping score. I can't imagine Willie Taggart expected what he saw on Monday night.
Henshaw: It’s amazing. When the scoreboard comes on and you start keeping score, things become different. And people react differently. But if you have not had a game like that happen to you as a coach, then you haven’t coached very long. Every once in a while, something like that is going to happen. The encouraging thing to me is that Virginia Tech did not beat us. We beat ourselves. And of the mistakes that were made, I would say pretty much all of them are correctable. And that’s a good sign.
Now let me just give you the other side of it. On Saturday, I was in Charlotte to watch West Virginia and Tennessee. I went to West Virginia and so did my wife. So West Virginia beat Tennessee pretty soundly (40-14). Tennessee had no turnovers and only a couple of penalties in the game. They played a very clean game and still got beat by over three touchdowns. Got beat like a drum. Now, a loss like that can be discouraging. Because how much better are you going to get when you didn’t turn the ball over and you didn’t make any mistakes in the kicking game, and you still get beat by almost four touchdowns? That can be discouraging.
But the bottom line for Florida State is we beat ourselves in that game. Virginia Tech does not have as much talent as we do, but we beat ourselves. And the thing everyone needs to remember is there have been some teams that have become great -- not good, but great -- that played terrible in the first game of the season.
Warchant: I was going to ask if you had any experiences like that during your coaching career -- where you thought you had a strong team, and they just had a really bad game to start the year.
