We can't win with this personnel.

A really poor performance tonight from A&M. Vandy is a below average team and giving up 2 goals to them is borderline criminal. I thought the team looked lost tonight and the concentration level wasn't there at all. The playing surface was very slow and our girls had a tough time dealing with the slow speed on the game because of it and therefore didn't time their passes correctly. I don't remember many 3 pass or more combinations all night and we couldn't get settled on the ball to do anything useful with it most of the time. Right now A&M has absolutely no offensive rhythm or attack and simply cannot create enough chances to score goals with this current lineup. Tonight was a complete failure across the board from the coaching to all three levels of the field. It was embarrassing.

Obviously we are playing with about half a roster right now and we're now down about 6 starters from the beginning of the season, which included Harvey missing the first half. That's just not something you can recover from realistically, but I do expect the team to give great effort and hustle and want it more than the other team. That didn't happen tonight. Vandy outhustled and outplayed A&M for enough stretches of the game to put itself in position to win the game. It really is mind boggling to see how many players are now out with injury or redshirt. As most predicted, the loss of Bates just devastated the offense and with Pounds our only real weapon, A&M is pretty easy to defend. We got a nice preview of what life might be like in the midfield without Harvey when she is gone in '18 unless we develop some more midfielders as we had absolutely no possession to speak of in the first half. It was ugly. Also, I've hesitated to mention this before, but it's now clear to me that something is going on with Harvey either mentally or off the field because she cannot control her temper this season and has had a few shouting matches with teammates and coaches on the sideline at times. That can't be good for team chemistry. She's obviously frustrated with having so many inexperienced players around her, but she needs to lead by example and battle through this tough stretch until she gets some help with returning players. And I actually thought the defense had their worst outing of the year with many blown assignments, continually getting beaten on the edges, and poor marking on set pieces. Rice did have a solid game and made a few great saves or it could have been much worse. Schmidt and Wright really struggled out there and even the usually reliable Piper was not in good form tonight.

I was worried about the road games this year because we have looked bad in every game so far away from home. And with a depleted roster it just magnifies the glaring weaknesses of the team. The good news is that even a good team like Florida has struggled mightily lately and had a terrible loss tonight at home to Auburn. It looks like South Carolina and Arkansas might be the best teams right now, but let's see how it plays out. A&M will get its shot against SC next week at home. But A&M needs to get better at the fundamentals of the game and complete more passes to feet instead of just kicking long every time we have the ball. That's not a winning strategy.