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Priced as a set so that you can purchase all five DVDs for less than the cost of buying four  separately.    THE DVDS ARE $39.95 EACH, BUT $150 FOR ALL FIVE - A SAVINGS OF $49.75! TO BUY - http://www.coachwyatt.com/prod.h

FINALLY! 

THE  NEW DOUBLE WING PLAYBOOK IS BEING SHIPPED!

This book represents the knowledge and experience I've accumulated in my more than 25 years of running and teaching the Double Wing.  (Those who've already ordered it and have been waiting can tell you how long it's taken me to put it together.)  My intent is to show how I build the offense with "blocks" - teaching the linemen just 8 "Building Blocks." Each building block enables your backs to run dozens of plays.

It's the most detailed "how-to" book on the Double Wing ever published.

It's 250 pages long,  with more than 150 plays, and more than 150 photos of drills and plays.

CONTENTS

I also include and explain my wristcard-based play-calling system -  it streamlines teaching and makes memorization obsolete, eliminating as much as it's humanly possible the need for kids to memorize plays.  For those coaches who might want to adopt my system, the playcards are already in the book, prepared and ready to go.  It would take you hours if you had to prepare them yourself, but all you have to do is copy them, print them on  card stock and cut them to size.  (In my opinion, this alone is worth the price!)

$39.95

TO ORDER - http://www.coachwyatt.com/DYNAMICS3.html

We hear a lot about white privilege from liberals, but no one on the Left wants to talk about the most glaring privilege infesting our nation today: celebrity privilege.

Let’s start with football players who use company time to protest — what? I’m not quite sure what they’re protesting and what it has to do with football or the flag, but they’re out there raising their fists and bending their knees. While they’re being paid by their bosses to play football and abide by team rules, they inject their politics into the sporting experience and alienate customers.

Only someone with celebrity privilege could get away with that. The lowly office worker can’t speak his mind whenever and however he wants. The cashier at Chipotle can’t spout off about his political views and drive customers out the door. The assembly line worker can’t walk off the job to protest his latest beef with society. If he did, he’d get fired in a heartbeat — justifiably so.

***
Our culture is riddled with celebrity privilege, from sports to publishing. Actors, singers, and athletes who know nothing about a particular topic get to publish books while unknown writers with stellar skills and expertise are passed by because they don’t have a “platform” — another word for a pre-packaged marketing strategy so lazy, cheap publishers don’t have to create one.

When Kendal and Kylie Jenner, Madonna, Snooki, and Nicole Richie — to name a precious few — get to publish drivel while talented writers resort to self-publishing on Amazon or nothing at all, you know you’re in the midst of cultural rot.

***
Ironically, these idols of fame are often the first to complain about "white privilege" or "male privilege," completely ignoring the fact that they are the ones benefitting from actual privilege. They can snap their fingers and industry dogs will come running no matter their qualifications — that’s the essence of elite privilege.

We shouldn’t blame the celebrities, though. It’s not their fault that grotesque privilege lines their pockets and expands their already inflated egos. We have only ourselves to blame. If our culture didn’t reek of celebrity worship and society weren’t littered with celebrity suck-ups, we wouldn’t have this problem.

TUESD

Teams will have 20 seconds to clear the ball. The shot clock would start after the ball crosses midfield, the story said. Any reset, whether it's a shot on goal or a loose ball push, will reset the clock back to 60 seconds.

Currently, officials can start a 30-second shot clock if they rule that a team is stalling. But teams can generally avoid a stalling call by firing shots over the net and getting in position to retain possession.

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He later worked as a golf pro at a course in Illinois and founded a hockey school for the hearing-impaired in Northbrook, Ill., at which teammates were fellow instructors. A son of a friend of his was partly deaf.

“These kids have been rejected so many times in their lives,” Mikita was once quoted as saying by The Chicago Tribune. “You know how cruel kids can be. We like to think we can help them believe in themselves.”

Lilly set out about photographing his teammates, and games that took place at the Hula Bowl in Hawaii and the Shriners' All-Star game in San Francisco. By the time he became the number-one draft choice of the Dallas Cowboys, he was hooked on photography. He shot candid photos of the Cowboys and their coaches, and generally had a camera with him wherever he went.

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FRID

*********** Yes, yes, I know - it was only an exhibition (make that "pre-season") game.  The Bears scored with 2:44 left in the game to pull within one at 17-16. But then, rather than risk tying it up and maybe sending the game into overtime, they went for two.  Didn't make it. 

Whew. For a minute there, I'll bet the guys were worried they might  have to keep playing the GAME. Until somebody WON.

Yes, it's a GAME   But those a&&holes treat it as if it's work - something to be avoided at all costs.

And the point of a game is to WIN - unless it means having to play overtime.

And they wonder why  they're losing their audience.

*********** It was 85 in Camas, Washington on Wednesday, bringing an end to a stretch of nine straight days of 90-degrees or more in the Portland area.  July set a new all-time record with 15 over-90 days.   Damn, I hate hot weather. 

High temperatures are (or used to be) rare in the Pacific Northwest.  Seattle is the least air-conditioned city in the lower 48; even with all the newcomers that have been pouring in, no more than 30 per cent of its homes are air-conditoned.  Portland is the second-least.  Although only about 170 miles south of Seattle, its average temperature is a bit higher than Seattle’s, and more than half of its homes are air-conditioned.

Our house,  built in 1950, is like most of the houses built in that era, and doesn’t have air conditioning.  (Retrofitting it is not an expense we care to take on.)  It is, however, fairly well insulated, its large picture windows are double-paned, and it’s fairly well shaded by trees.

Because humidity is generally low all over the West, temperatures drop dramatically at night, so even after a 90+ day,  it’ll be down in the 60s at night.  When hot weather is expected,  we open all the windows and doors first thing in the morning to let the cool air in (no worries about bugs out here, either!).  We turn on our ceiling fans,  and around 11 or so, when the temperatures inside and out are about the same, we close everything up tight. 

Then, as long as we don’t open the doors too often, the place stays very comfortable, even on high-90 days. 

(Thursday’s high was 71.)

*********** As soon as you heard that colleges were considering adding esports (video games) teams, you just had to know what was next: parents hiring personal coaches for their little darlings.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, parents cited two main reasons for doing so:  (1) they wanted to help their kids become winners in some game (of which I confess ignorance) called Fortnight; and (2) they hoped that it might earn their kids college scholarships.

(Does anyone realize that once, parents hired tutors to help their kids academically?  Does anyone still pay for piano lessons when they could be using the money to pay for esports coaching?)

The saddest part of the Journal article told of fathers who were paying for esports coaching for themselves so they could keep up with their kids - imagine paying to learn how to use a glove and a ball so you can play catch with your son.

https://www.workinsports.com/blog/the-rise-of-coaching-in-esports/

*********** Faced with declining turnouts for football, at least seven  Virginia private schools are planning to make the move from 11-man to eight-man football this year.

The plan calls for all teams to play eight-game schedules over 10 weeks, with a four-team playoff at the end.

*********** Hi Coach, I recently moved to another team that runs Markham’s dblwng and feel right at home.    Any advice when melding  to Don Markham’s system would be greatly appreciated.

Coach-

I don’t have a lot of experience in converting a Don Markham system, so I wouldn’t know where to begin.  Although the formations are virtually the same, there are significant differences in the systems.

For me, the difference in numbering systems and terminology would be the biggest obstacle to merging, and for someone who wants to get into my stuff and needs help, it’s essential that we speak the same language.

My best advice, though, would be that if you feel “at home” where you are and things are going well, it’s probably best not to tamper with what’s working!


*********** Rather than try to make sense of the Urban Meyer situation, I chose instead to disgorge the following not-necessarily-related thoughts…

Point Number One:  Everywhere he’s been a head coach, he’s won.

He ran an ugly program at Florida, recruiting bad people and - provided they were good enough players - excusing their behavior. 

Florida has yet to recover from what he did to win games there.

The poisonous culture he allowed - if not promoted - at Florida would ordinarily have made a guy untouchable by a top-notch progam like Ohio State, except for Point Number One.

The good name of Earle Bruce, a man who died not long ago with a good reputation, has been tarnished.

If Meyer’s wife didn’t tell him what she knew about Zach Smith’s marriage, it could only be because Meyer cleverly told her not to tell him anything he shouldn’t hear.

Police in Ohio evidently look out for the Ohio State football program the same way the police in Florida do for Florida and Florida State.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Meyer are employees of THE Ohio State University (can we finally put an end to that pretentious nonsense?), and under Title IX had mandatory reporting obligations.  Now, if he didn’t know, but she did - does this mean that she takes a federal rap to protect him?

If there’s proof that all the assistant coaches knew (since we are told that their wives did) would Ohio State fire the entire staff  for failure to report domestic abuse?  Could they retain Meyer but fire all his assistants?

Zach Smith is going to have a hell of a time finding a job that pays like this one did.  His 2017 contract called for a base salary of $300,000; if Ohio State had won the Big Ten East (8.5%)and then the Big Ten Championship (4.25%) and participated in the Playoff semifinals (21.25%) he would have received $105,000 in bonuses. 

Ohio State’s loyal followers, who’ve been through this twice before in the last 40 years, have to be looking for the slightest possible reason to avoid having to go through it for a third time.

Watch someone try to blame Zach Smith’s (“alleged”) violence  on concussions he suffered as a player.

At some point football will take a hit: enemies of the game will seize on the case as what naturally results  from the testosterone-fueled violence - the misogyny -  that is the football culture.

The Ohio State administration, already envisioning a season of #MeToo demonstrations outside the Shoe on fall Saturdays, will decide there is no way they can keep Meyer.

They will not hire Meyer’s successor yet.  They will do as they did when they had to let Jim Tressel go and appointed Luke Fickell as interim head coach.  This is Ohio State.  It’s one of the great jobs in college football and nobody is out of the running at this point.  Not even Saban.

My early guess is that they will hire Bob Stoops.  And he will step in and beat Jim Harbaugh’s ass.  After Ryan Day does it this year.

Big-time college football, flush with TV money, won’t miss a beat.  It will continue to pay its coaches and assistants - more and more of them every year - outgrageous sums of money that they couldn’t make any place or any way else legally, and they’ll do anything necessary, legal or not, to maintain their bloated lifestyle.  Which means using any  means possible to recruit people who have no business taking up space in any self-respecting college.

There still won’t be a single women’s sports program with a sign in its locker room exhorting its athletes to “TREAT MEN WITH RESPECT”

*********** I came across some article ridiculing Urban Meyer for  playing the “I’ll be a father to your son” when he’s out recruiting.

I agree.  Actually, shame on any of today’s big-time coaches who try to pull that crap.

Ever seen a team phootgraph of a modern-day big-time team?  Look at all the guys dressed up as coaches - they’re assistants, GA’s and “analysts,” and it looks like there’s 50 of them.

Then there are the players, 120 or so.

That’s one bigass family.

Are you telling me that any one of college football’s self-proclaimed father figures has ever, in a single player’s college career, spent more than five minutes alone with the kid, giving him “fatherly” advice?

They’re coaches and that’s what they’re paid to be. Why pretend otherwise?  In fact, some of them are so busy recruiting other people’s kids that they don’t have time to be fathers to their own kids.

In short:  Any time you hear one of those guys talking about being a father figure to his players he’s most likely a phony.


*********** MIke Lude and I had lunch Tuesday.  It’s become an annual event over the past ten years or so, when Mike’s in Portland to visit family.  Mike knows - and remembers - more about football, and college football in particular, than any three of us. He’s in great shape physically and, at 96, able to recall with amazing clarity events of 60 and 70 years ago - or things that happened yesterday. 

Although we talk frequently on the phone, these lunches are extra special because we have a lot of time and  because I never know where our talk is going to go.  Will it be to the Wing-T?  Mike, as Dave Nelson’s line coach, was its co-inventor: he was charged with adapting Fritz Crisler’s unbalanced single wing line blocking rules to Dave Nelson’s balanced line attack.  Many of the things that we do today are Mike’s translations of Fritz Crisler.

Will it be college football?  Mike still knows his subject.  He was a head football coach at Colorado State, and AD at Kent State, Washington and Auburn.  And he stays active in NACDA, the National Association of College Directors of Athletics.

Mike thinks that the college football structure is economically unsustainable.  He believes that the TV money won’t last, and he thinks it’s idiotic the way colleges spend the TV money as fast as it comes in.

He can’t believe the amount of money that college coaches - and not just the head coaches - are paid. (How about Iowa paying its strength coach $750,000 a year?)  We talked about how today’s salaries are NOT market-driven - that there are dozens of qualified applicants for any coaching opening, which blows up any argument about supply and demand - and said if he were an AD at a major college and looking to hire a head coach, he’d take a shot at one of the “really good” coaches at the non-Power 5 colleges.  He said there are plenty of them who wouldn’t need $3 million a year.  I said to him, “But if he wins, you’ll only keep him three years, and then he’ll be off.”  Replied Mike, “Yeah - and that would prove it was a good hire, wouldn’t it?”

Although in his entire career as AD he hired just two coaches, he did hire two pretty good ones.

At Kent State, he gave Don James his first head coaching job.  And when Coach James left for Washington, Mike joined him a year later as the Huskies’ AD.

At Auburn, he hired Terry Bowden, who went 47-17-1 before he lost out, after Mike left,  in a head-knocking contest with a powerful booster.

We got on the subject of the growth of 7-on-7.  Mike hates it.  Compares it to AAU basketball in its potential to undermine high school coaching.

We got on the topic of Hillsdale College, of which Mike is a strong supporter.  Hillsdale is where Mike got his education, where he met his wife, Rena, and where he played football for Dave Nelson, the only coach he ever worked for.  It’s fair to say that Hillsdale is a conservative college - it doesn’t take a dime of government money, which means it doesn’t have to comply with a single government order, including Title IX. 

We talked about more, of course - and then it was time to go.  Mike had to catch a flight to Tucson.

*********** Hugh,

This latest email is coming from "Slapdick" Texas (aka Austin).  Could you imagine the confusion and chaos if lefty parents decided to start changing THEIR names?  Including FIRST names and LAST names?  Or even "blending" their names?  Austington?  Columberson?  Jackstin?  Hmmm.

Your comments on "I'll get back to you" prompted me to share this with you.  As you know, at one time I was interested in coaching in Europe.  My resume is registered with Europlayers.   I received a message from my Europlayers account saying if I'm interested in a head coaching job I would have to contact the club directly.  I viewed the site and there were a number of head coaching jobs and assistant jobs available in Europe.  For kicks I inquired about a few of them.  Had never heard back from any of them, and found out that most of them are now looking for coaches again.  Hmmm.

I've utilized the wrist band-no huddle method, AND, the huddle.  I actually combined the two when I found out I had a couple of kids who were hard of hearing.  Worked pretty well.  If or when we would get behind we would go no-huddle OR do it just to change the tempo and catch the defense sleeping.  When we were ahead we would always use a huddle and take our sweet time. 

The increase in rugby injuries can be directly attributed to the increase in size and speed of the players.  It would seem to me that physics has a lot to do with it.  When there's an increase in mass and an increase in velocity the result is in an increase in the impact.  Which results in an increase in damage.  It would then seem logical why American football came up with protective equipment to minimize the damage.  Hmmm.

Imagine if that openly gay Air Force cadet DID save a drowning child!  The other cadets would likely start doing backflips off of fighter jets!

I would be concerned if the Yale Bowl replaced the natural grass surface with a different type of natural "grass".

Have a great week!

Joe Gutilla
Austin, Texas


*********** A few years ago I wrote about a visit to Chappell’s after a Kansas City clinic.  Chappell’s, in North Kansas City, is/was one of the nation’s best sports bars - except that it should be in a category all its own, as a sports museum. 

Along with a treasure trove of Kansas City sports memorabilia, owner Jim Chappell has at least 1,000 different football helmets - high school, college, pro - hanging from the ceilings.

Now comes news from Coach Sam Knopik at KC’s Pembroke Hill School that owner Jim Chappell has sold to an outside group.

They say they’re going to keep things as they’ve always been, but I doubt it.

For sure, they won't be able to replace jim Chappell and his special affection for all things regarding Kansas City sports.

http://www.chappellsrestaurant.com/


*********** Dwight Clark, hero of “The Catch,” is gone, dead of ALS.

In his eulogy, Joe Montana said, “Catch you on the other side.”

God, what a dreadful disease ALS is.  It’s right there with Alzheimer’s as the cruelest of diseases.

With Alzheimer’s, the patient can maintain physical health, while losing it all mentally; with ALS (aka Lou Gehrig’s disease), the patient remains mentally alert,  well aware of the maddening and frustrating fact that  he or she continues to decline physically.

https://theathletic.com/455229/2018/08/01/joe-montana-to-his-fallen-friend-dwight-clark-i-will-catch-you-on-the-other-side-i-love-you-i-miss-you/

The Army football family has been hit hard by ALS, with former linebacker Chuck Schretzman now dealing with it.  He and teammate Greg Gadson, who lost both legs in Iraq to an explosion, were fellow linebackers, such close friends that they were in each other’s weddings; Chuck Schretzman was the one Greg Gadson’s wife turned to for strength when her husband was hospitalized after his injury.  Now, it’s Chuck fighting to keep his strength.

Chuck’s wife, Stacy, a former Army basketball player, is a tower of strength herself as Chuck fights the ravages of ALS.

https://www.nhl.com/bluejackets/news/blue-jackets-elk-and-elk-honoree-chuck-schretzman/c-296785324

https://youtu.be/u8rhtF2ESEY

*********** Funny how the NFL, that great bastion of Constitutional law, defends kneeling during the national anthem as the players’ exercising their freedom on speech, while imposing a gag order on Jerry Jones.  They could have cracked down on Kaepernick in the first place, and avoided all the ugliness since, but no…

*********** I was reading an article in the paper about the jersey numbers that have been retired by the Boston Bruins, when I saw, “Aubrey Clapper, Edward Shore, Milton Schmidt.”

WTF?  Wait, I thought.  They did NOT attain their Bruins’ immortality as Aubrey, Edward and Milton. 

They were Dit Clapper, Eddie Shore and Milt Schmidt. That was how they were known to the people who loved them.

But those people are all gone now, and today’s keepers of the torch couldn’t care less about the old timers.  Don't even know who they were, obviously.

So Aubrey, Edward and Milton they will remain, lost to history.

Applying the same disdain for the past to baseball:

George Ruth, Joseph DiMaggio, Louis Gehrig, Lawrence Berra

Or football:

Richard Butkus, Michael Ditka,  James Brown, Raymond Lewis


*********** A baseball player found to have texted objectionable things (“I hate gay people,” “KKK”) seven or more years ago, back when he was a dumbass teenager, is now required by Major League Baseball to cleanse himself of sin by undergoing sensitivity training.

Meanwhile, a woman “of color” who just four years ago was busily texting ugly racist things about white people - when she was 26 - won’t have to attend training.

She’ll be too busy.   She was just hired as an editorial writer by the New York Times.

https://twitter.com/ArminNavabi/status/1025015489729196032/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1025015489729196032&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nationalreview.com%2Fnews%2Fsarah-jeong-new-york-times-hires-writer-racist-past%2F

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2018/08/02/new-york-times-stands-by-new-tech-writer-sarah-jeong-after-racist-tweets-surface.html


*********** QUIZ ANSWER  -  Billy Shaw grew up in Vicksburg, Mississippi and played his college football at Georgia Tech, where despite weighing just 220, he was an All-America lineman (in the days of two-way play).

At the 1960 College All-Star Game he was switched  from defense to offense when a starter got hurt, and he spent his entire career on offense.

He was drafted by both Buffalo of the AFL, which planned to play him on the offensive line and by Dallas of the NFL, which wanted to look at him at linebacker. He chose Buffalo on the advice of his college coach, Bobby Dodd, who advised him that he’d have a better chance if he didn’t have to change positions.

Those Buffalo teams were good.  Although he was undersized at 6-2, 250, with him leading the running game as a pulling guard, the Bills won back-to-back AFL titles in 1964 and 1965.

From 1963 though 1966 he was a first team All-AFL guard, and in 1968 and 1969 he was named to the second team.  He is a member of the All-Time All-AFL team, and was named to the All-Decade All-Pro team for the 1960s.

How’s this for trivia: Billy Shaw is the only player in the Pro Football Hall of Fame who never played a down in the NFL.

CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING BILLY SHAW
KEN HAMPTON - RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
JOSH MONTGOMERY - BERWICK, LOUISIANA
JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
TIM BROWN - FLORENCE, ALABAMA
JOE GUTILLA - AUSTIN,  TEXAS
GREG KOENIG - CIMARRON, KANSAS
OSSIE OSMUNDSON - WOODLAND, WASHINGTO
KEVIN MCCULLOUGH - LAKEVILLE, INDIANA
MARK KACZMAREK - DAVENPORT, IOWA
MIKE BENTON - COLFAX, ILLINOIS
ADAM WESOLOSKI - PULASKI, WISCONSIN
CHARLIE WILSON - CRYSTAL RIVER, FLORIDA

*********** A look at Billy Shaw,  sent by Greg Koenig, in Cimarron, Kansas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4RRUhZmHhg

*********** QUIZ - He is one of the greatest football players to come out of the state of Connecticut. 

A native of Ansonia, he attended Notre Dame High School in West Haven, where he helped establish the school’s reputation as a state power.  In his senior year, 1954, Notre Dame went undefeated, outscoring opponents 332-12.  Big (6-2, 220) and fast, he scored 23 touchdowns in nine games, and would undoubtedly have scored many more had his coach not rested his starters in the second half of most games.

Heavily recruited, he chose Notre Dame (the university) and for three years (1956-1958) he was their starting fullback.  As a junior in 1957, he recovered a fumble on defense, and threw the block that enabled the Irish to score the game’s only touchdown as they beat Oklahoma 7-0 and ended the Sooner’s 47-game win streak.  He was named third team All-American that year.

As a senior in 1958 he was Notre Dame’s leading rusher and was named first team All-American fullback.

He was the Lions’ first draft pick - the sixth pick overall - and rushing for a league-high 5.9 yards per carry, was named the 1959 NFL Rookie of the Year.

In 1960, he was named the Lions’ MVP, and was named to the Pro Bowl team for the first time.  In 1961 he was once again named to the Pro Bowl.

In all, from 1959 through 1965, he played in two Pro Bowls, and set a franchise record of 3,933 yards rushing.

Placed on waivers before the 1966 season, he played sparingly for two seasons with the Browns before retiring.

In 1988 he died of prostate cancer.  He was 50.

TUESD

Although he played solely in the American League, Lumpe grew up a St. Louis Cardinals fan, and his father, W. J. Lumpe, gave him his middle name to honor the star Cardinal pitcher Dizzy Dean. Father and son listened to Cardinal games on the network of the team’s flagship radio station, KMOX, in St. Louis. But it took some initiative to find a spot where the signal would come in clearly.

“We got the station in Sedalia, but it didn’t go very far,” Lumpe told The Springfield News-Leader in 2011. “But there was a hill about five miles north of town, and we’d sit up there in the car listening to the game, my dad and I. You tell the kids that now, and they think you’re crazy.”

NINE GAMES WITHOUT A HUDDLE

By Pepper Rodgers
Head Coach, Georgia Tech

We went to the no-huddle offense last spring.  We thought that we would experiment with the no-huddle.  We would stay at the line of scrimmage.  We would run without a huddle, except that we would “huddle” just by standing at the line of scrimmage just as we would stand in the huddle.

Now, it did several things for us in terms of practice organization in that every player on the team watching the play being run knew the play.  You know how difficult it is at times to have a play called and the other players are standing around not knowing the play - not being able to observe what’s happening so they can learn by watching.  So when the automatic system goes in at the line of scrimmage, all the players who are watching that particular play being run know the play.  The coaches all know the play.  So that helped  us in that area.

Then, as we went through the no-huddle offense, we found that our players began to like it.  They liked what was happening because they actually could look at the defensive man while the play was being called, as opposed to going back into the huddle, then turning around and going back up there to the line. And they made calls at the line of scrimmage, like you do all the time.  They would know the play.  The play would be called by the quarterback, we’d go down, and we’d snap the football.

We went the entire spring without a huddle and we didn’t know, because we had no experience, whether in a game we could hear when we got to the line of scrimmage, and whether we could hear the entire ball game.

So we opened the season using the huddle against South Carolina and lost the football game.  Now that had nothing to do with losing.  They played better and deserved to win.

But what happened was that we didn’t know whether the no-huddle would work or not.  So now we read in the paper where a team that had been to our place and had watched our spring practice and picked up our no-huddle had used it and had been successful.  Said how many yards they made, how great it was, and so forth.  So we decided then and there that we would go into the no-huddle with the next ball game.

Well, we did, and we had a very successful no-huddle offense for the next nine football games.  And it was very effective.  And then for the last game of the season we had injuries that hurt our football team as far as the number of experienced players we had and we wound up playing with a lot of freshmen. We had not not had spring practice with them.  We lost. (To Georgia, 42-26.)

Our record using a huddle was 0-2.  Our record without a huddle was 7-2.  (Those two losses were to Auburn and Notre Dame. HW) So we did have some success without a huddle.  It was a different approach to the game for us, and I think because we used the wishbone we were able to do it because we had all our backs behind the QB.  We have not broken our wishbone.  We used two tight ends, although one of them was basically a split end.  Our ends lined up where they could hear the quarterback at all times and they could move in and out according to how the quarterback would signal to them.

So that was the concept of the no-huddle offense.  It was effective for us at Georgia Tech as we again established new rushing and total offense records.

"Everyone can see that rugby, at the top end, is becoming an ever more extreme sport. They know it demands particular resilience. What they still don't know is what physical shape the first generation of pro union players will be in when they hit 60. Hence the dark shadow of the concussion debate, which increasingly hovers over every contact sport.

"It's good that players are a bit more aware about concussion but it is definitely the biggest issue facing the game moving forward.”

It allows for the development of venues, academic support, psychological support, travel. So if you’re a fan of a Big Ten institution, typically fans support not only football and basketball but to a lesser extent Olympic and other sports ... I think it allows us to recruit nationally. It allows us to have financial aid packages to the maximum allowed by NCAA. It allows us to have the broadest base programs in the country. We have nearly 10,000 students participating and $250 billion of financial aid.

So it simply allows for a platform that provides high-quality educational and athletic opportunities. They’re really unequalled among the major conferences in the country. Without those resources, we’d be unable to have a presentation and an opportunity set that I just described.

Bradley Kim, a defensive back at the Air Force Academy, announced on Friday that he is gay. Kim, who shared his story on his Instagram account and through an interview with OutSports, is the first active player at a service academy to publicly come out.

"The biggest reason I want to share this is to be able to reach people who are in similar situations struggling with the same things I have struggled with," Kim told OutSports. "I want to be that example for kids that you can be gay, you can pursue your dreams, and you can have an athletic career.

Before going public with his story, Kim, a safety for the Falcons, informed his fellow defensive backs and received a standing ovation in response.

FRID

Our results suggest that public sector unions are most likely to be successful not when they stress the political “voice” that unions provide, nor when they stress narrow job protections. Rather, unions looking to energize their members need to provide clear benefits that members value related to their identity as professional employees — benefits that those members can’t get elsewhere and that members have to pay dues to get.

For teachers, we found, that meant training (classes, conferences, and workshops) and classroom support on issues central to their jobs, like the use of technology and how to help students with mental health issues. Other public employee unions might offer similar benefits tailored to the jobs and skills held by their members; for state social workers, it might be trainings to better help their clients. The key seems to be assistance that helps people do their jobs better.

Linemen couldn't use their hands to block
The penalty for holding was 15-yards
There was no such thing as hook sliding; if you ran, you were fair game
Intentional grounding was intentional grounding; there was no such thing as a "tackle box" outside of which one could intentionally ground the ball with impunity
Spiking was unheard-of. If you wanted to stop the clock, you threw an "out" pattern over a wide receiver's head
Defensive linemen could use a head slap
Quarterbacks were routinely hit - anywhere on their body - well after they'd thrown
Defensive backs could hit receivers anywhere on the field until the ball was thrown
Hashmarks still divided the field into thirds - there was a definite short side and wide side
With the conspicuous exception of Otto Graham, NFL quarterbacks called their own plays

“A Soldier Never Forgets North Platte”
By Bob Greene
July 22, 2018

‘We were overwhelmed,” said Lt. Col. Nick Jaskolski. “I don’t really have words to describe how surprised and moved we all were. I had never even heard of the town before.”

Col. Jaskolski, a veteran of the Iraq war, is commander of the 142nd Field Artillery Brigade of the Arkansas Army National Guard. For three weeks earlier this summer, the 142nd had been conducting an emergency deployment readiness exercise in Wyoming, training and sleeping outdoors, subsisting on field rations. Now it was time for the 700 soldiers to return to their base.

A charter bus company had been hired for the 18-hour drive back to Arkansas. The Army had budgeted for a stop to get snacks. The bus company determined that the soldiers would reach North Platte, in western Nebraska, around the time they would likely be hungry. The company placed a call to the visitors’ bureau: Was there anywhere in town that could handle a succession of 21 buses, and get 700 soldiers in and out for a quick snack?

North Platte said yes. North Platte has always said yes.

During World War II, North Platte was a geographically isolated town of 12,000. Soldiers, sailors and aviators on their way to fight the war rode troop trains across the nation, bound for Europe via the East Coast or the Pacific via the West Coast. The Union Pacific Railroad trains that transported the soldiers always made 10-minute stops in North Platte to take on water.

The townspeople made those 10 minutes count. Starting in December 1941, they met every train: up to 23 a day, beginning at 5 a.m. and ending after midnight. Those volunteers greeted between 3,000 and 5,000 soldiers a day. They presented them with sandwiches and gifts, played music for them, danced with them, baked birthday cakes for them. Every day of the year, every day of the war, they were there at the depot. They never missed a train, never missed a soldier. They fed six million soldiers by the end of the war. Not 1 cent of government money was asked for or spent, save for a $5 bill sent by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The soldiers never forgot the kindness. Most of them, and most of the townspeople who greeted them, are dead. And now, in 2018, those 21 busloads from the 142nd Field Artillery were on their way, expecting to stop at some fast-food joint.

 “We couldn’t believe what we saw when we pulled up,” Col. Jaskolski said. As each bus arrived over a two-day period, the soldiers stepped out to be greeted by lines of cheering people holding signs of thanks. They weren’t at a fast-food restaurant: They were at North Platte’s events center, which had been opened and decorated especially for them.
“People just started calling our office when they heard the soldiers were on their way,” said Lisa Burke, the director of the visitors’ bureau. “Hundreds of people, who wanted to help.”

The soldiers entered the events center to the aroma of steaks grilling and the sound of recorded music: current songs by Luke Bryan, Justin Timberlake, Florida Georgia Line; World War II songs by Glenn Miller, the Andrews Sisters, Jimmy Dorsey. They were served steak sandwiches, ham sandwiches, turkey sandwiches, deviled eggs, salads and fruit; local church groups baked pies, brownies and cookies.

Mayor Dwight Livingston stood at the door for two days and shook every soldier’s hand. Mr. Livingston served in the Air Force in Vietnam and came home to no words of thanks. Now, he said, as he shook the hands and welcomed the soldiers, “I don’t know whether those moments were more important for them, or for me. I knew I had to be there.”

“It was one soldier’s 21st birthday,” Lisa Burke said. “When I gave him his cake, he told me it was the first birthday cake he’d ever had in his life.” Not wanting to pry, she didn’t ask him how that could possibly be. “I was able to hold my emotions together,” she said. “Until later.”

When it became time to settle up—the Army, after all, had that money budgeted for snacks—the 142nd Field Artillery was told: Nope. You’re not spending a penny here. This is on us.

This is on North Platte.

Mr. Greene’s books include “Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen.”

TUESD

“The money is out there,” Edsall says. “You take a look at what’s happened, and they don’t get anything. You can put in there that student-athletes get a (larger) stipend. If you’re a full scholarship student-athlete, you get this. If you get a percentage, you get the percentage. And football should get more, because that’s the one where all the money is being made from. If you’re going to use their likeness and jerseys, people should get things from that. In this day and age, don’t sit there and call it ‘student-athlete’ when you’ve made all these changes and you’re making all this money. To me, it’s professionalism.”

Who has time to crack down on the louts who are littering the streets with hypodermic needles or defecating in public?

Someone, somewhere might be using a plastic straw!

Priorities, people!

*********** A writer on the Internet who calls himself metallicman, is not high on the average American…

Somehow, this land of rugged individuals has become populated with scared children. Tiny babies with the outside appearance of an adult, but with the emotional needs of a five year old. They are taught from an early age not to deal with conflicts. They are taught to be coddled and to hide. They are taught to be sheltered. Their ability to deal with interpersonal relationships and conflict is shot, and as a result they are now a nation of crybabies that demand that their feelings be preserved and not hurt.

These fellow citizens now expect to be cared for, fed, protected, and made to feel good about themselves, all by government mandate.

What this is, it is a manufactured reality. It is a reality where only a small handful of people control the entire nation, the wealth and all the power. The rest of the people are but serfs (at best) and mostly indentured slaves, forever conditioned to behave like children reacting to their overlords with awe. It’s manufactured INTENTIONALLY.

Now, he is attempting to educate those same American people about the nature of our constitutional republic and why our constitution came to be.

It’s a fool’s errand, of course, because those most in need of understanding what he’s written have already decided that our constitution, drawn up by old white males, is outmoded and no longer appropriate to govern America in the Twenty-First Century.

https://metallicman.com/laoban4site/how-they-get-away-with-it---the-manufactured-ignorance-of-the-state-constitutions./


***********  Hugh,

Outstanding work on the updated playbook!  Thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and discovering some of the changes, improvements, and new terminology.  All that's left now is to get your DVD's on the Open Wing and I'm all set!

As a Cubs fan, I don't follow Mike Trout too closely, but IF he ever becomes available I know the Cubbies would LOVE to grab him, and that a lot of us Cubs fans would be thrilled to have him.

Staying with baseball...I missed the All-Star game...again.  Apparently so did a lot of other Americans.

The NFL backed off its "anthem rule".  The monster is quickly devouring itself, and with it, the game we love.

I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt I will not be going to see "By Reason of Sex" whether it is based on a true story or not.  Just sayin.

Whether Larry Fedora is a big-time college coach or not, I have to agree with his intention of bringing the topic to the attention of those who either don't pay attention to what's happening to our game, or those who refuse to believe it's happening.  I do agree with you that it will take a greater effort from organizations like the NFFHOF, and similar groups, to provide positive reflections on the game.

Hate to admit it, but @$$hole parents aren't exclusive to soccer.  I've seen my fair share of them in football.  Both my daughters were athletes (gymnastics and softball) and I ran into a number of clueless jerks in those sports as well.

It's hella hot here too!  Temps in the 100's all week.

QUIZ:  Frank Varrichione Another of my paisanos.

Have a great weekend!

Joe Gutilla
Austin, Texas

Joe,

I remember that Irish team - they were REALLY good - and I remember the Varrichione incident.

Notre Dame was loved by its fans and hated by everyone else (not unlike the Yankees) and Leahy was not a very likeable coach.  He was humorless and he was a whiner and a complainer and the Varrichione incident just confirmed his detractors’ opinion of him.

Growing up a Protestant in a Philly Irish neighborhood, I was surrounded by Irish Catholics who LOVED Notre Dame. They were obnoxious.   I saw several Penn-Notre Dame games, and those damn drunk ND fans were everywhere.  Leahy’s teams were REALLY, REALLY good. Johnny Lattner remains one of the greatest players I have ever seen in person.

Weather Alert:  It barely made it to 70 here yesterday!

Interesting how the most successful ND coaches were EITHER, not very likable, humorless, whiners, or complainers.  As Jay Leno would say...Hmmmm.

I grew up in a mixed north side Chicago neighborhood (Italian, Polish, German, Irish).  The Catholics outnumbered the Protestants, so most of our neighbors and my friends were huge ND fans.  I can still remember not only watching the Irish play on live TV (in Chicago the ND games trumped all the other college games); we would also watch a replay of the game on Sunday listening to the great Lindsey Nelson.

My dad knew Johnny Lattner in high school.  Dad was the starting HB at Chicago Austin High when Lattner was at Fenwick.  Back then Chicago was a bit smaller than it is now, and many of the neighborhood kids still "hung-out" with one another even though they attended different schools.  I don't believe they ever played against one another in high school, but my dad's team did play in the Prep Bowl in 1947 at the old Soldier Field in front of 90,000 fans.  Austin beat Leo HS 13-12.  Lattner's Fenwick team went to the Prep Bowl the following year.  The Prep Bowl pitted the Chicago Public School League champs against the Chicago Catholic League champs.  They still play the game today but it is a much watered-down version compared to the glory days of the 40's, 50's, 60's.


One exception - Ara was personable and had a good sense of humor.  While he was there, I actually found myself rooting for ND  because I grew to admire him so much.

The strange one was Lou.  He proved your point.  The minute he took over at ND he went from being a laugh-a-minute comic act to Mr. Sobersides the Philosopher.  From a guy that I’d drive three hours to hear to one who caused me to turn down the volume whenever he came on the tube.

I had a teammate at Yale named Art LaVallie, from Fenwick.  Needless to say he was quite proud to say he came from Johnny Lattner’s high school.  The Chicago area has always had great Catholic school teams.

*********** One of my favorite TV shows is Barnyard Builders, a group of West Virginians who make their livings acquiring and tearing down old cabins and barns all around Appalachia, and “repurposing” them - building things that range from little cabins to large chalets using the wood they’ve recovered.

Having travelled through West Virginia, and sold packaging  in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, and having once lived in Western Maryland for almost ten years, I’ve come to love the regional  drawl and patterns of speech.

“Over there” will come out, in speech, as “Over ‘air.”

An example from Sunday night’s show: “You ever used one ‘em?” (“One of them?”)

*********** Q. HOW DO YOU COACH THE WINGBACK’S “FBI” BLOCK?

Since the blocking technique is the same technique we teach every day, nothing special there. The trick is in getting to the FBI (First Backer to the Inside). Since there is usually a defensive lineman between the wingback and the FBI, he has to get there without hitting (or being hit by) that DL. He is seldom able to go in front of that DL without hitting him or being hit, so I advise going “over the top” to get to the FBI.  (This is one of the reasons why our Wing is split one man wider than the TE.)

*********** Bad enough that Charlie Weis has been paid more for not coaching than most people will make in their lifetimes.

But the condition in which he left Kansas is almost criminal.

Essentially, he went so heavily for Juco transfers  that when he was fired he left his successor, David Beaty, with just 38 scholarship players.


https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/ncaafb/after-inheriting-only-38-scholarship-players-david-beaty-hopeful-kansas-is-up-to-70-in-2018/ar-BBKUoQo


*********** It has been so hot here in Alabama I saw a squirrel soaking his nuts in Gatorade.

Tim Brown
Florence, Alabama

*********** Think baseball doesn’t have a problem?   30% of at-bats this season have resulted in strike outs or walks.

*********** QUIZ: Frank Varrichione  grew up in Natick, Massachusetts,  the son of Italian immigrants, and the youngest of ten children.

After graduating from high school in Natick, Massachusetts, he was a teammate of Don Holleder for one season at Aquinas Institute, in Rochester, New York.  Aquinas was something of a national power, travelling hundreds of miles to take on the best competition it could find.

(In the East,  there was nothing comparable to California’s junior college system, and it was not that unusual in those days for promising high school graduates to spend a year as a “P-G” (post-graduate) at a prep school.) 

His one season at Aquinas brought him to the attention of Notre Dame’s Frank Leahy.

At Notre Dame, he quickly earned a starting position at offensive tackle, and earned notoriety - and a nickname - his junior year when, just before halftime against Iowa, with time running out and Notre Dame out of timeouts, he faked an injury. The clock was stopped, the Irish managed to score a touchdown, the game ended in a 14-14 tie, and Notre Dame went on to finish the season - Leahy’s last - with a 9-0-1 record and a piece of the national championship.

He received flowers from sarcastic Iowa fans; he received an “Academy Award” for Best Actor from his teammates; on a television show, he explained, “If you were on the ground and looked at the scoreboard and saw you were trailing and running out of time,  wouldn’t you feel hurt?”

And he received a nickname - “Faintin’ Frank” - one that would stick with him through an 11-year career in the NFL.

An All-American at Notre Dame, he was a first-round draft pick of the Steelers, and was named to the Pro Bowl after his rookie season.

After six seasons in Pittsburgh, he was traded to the Rams for Lou Michaels because the Steelers needed a defensive lineman and a kicker - and Michaels gave them both.

He was durable - he missed only two games in 11 seasons.  And he was good - he was named to five Pro Bowl teams.   Steelers Hall-of-Fame teammate Ernie Stautner remembered, “In all the years Frank played for the Steelers,  he was very seldom beaten outright. He had the respect of all the defensive linemen who played against him.”   Baltimore Colts’ Hall of Famer Gino Marchettti said, “Frank was among the best I ever faced.”

Frank Varrichione is a member of the Steelers’ All-Time team and in his 11th season he was the Rams’ offensive captain.

Probably the highest praise he ever received came from the great Paul Brown.

From an interview with Pro Football Researchers’ Jim Sargent…

“Probably the best game I ever played came with Pittsburgh in 1957, when Buddy Parker was coaching and we beat the Colts, 19-13.  A guy by the name of Gino Marchetti was tearing everybody up.

“Johnny Unitas was passing everybody crazy, and they had Alan Ameche and Lenny Moore as running backs.

“Buddy Parker was so worried about stopping Marchetti that he had two or three linemen alternate at right tackle in practice that week  That was my position, and I was required to block Marchetti.

“To make a long story short, it became quite a challenge to me to block Marchetti. I had a terrific day. Marchetti didn't touch our quarterback, Bobby Layne, once. I got a pretty good writeup in the Pittsburgh paper after the game.

"Later on, I heard more about it at the 1958 Pro Bowl game, from one of the Cleveland players, tackle Mike McCormack.

"’Frank,' he said, ‘We were playing Pittsburgh the Sunday after you played the Colts.  When Paul Brown got out the film to show us that week, he said, ‘Gentlemen, I'm going to show you one of the greatest exhibitions of blocking I have ever seen in my life. I want you to watch the right tackle of the Steelers, the kind of job he did on Gino Marchetti.'

McCormack said that was the first time Paul Brown ever announced, before a game film was shown, to watch the performance of a particular player. I'll never forget that."


*********** CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING FRANK VARRICHIONE…
GREG KOENIG - CIMARRON, KANSAS
JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
MIKE FRAMKE - GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN
JOE GUTILLA - AUSTIN, TEXAS
JOSH MONTGOMERY - BERWICK, LOUISIANA
TIM BROWN - FLORENCE, ALABAMA
KEN HAMPTON - RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
ADAM WESOLOSKI - PULASKI, WISCONSIN
KEVIN MCCULLOUGH - LAKEVILLE, INDIANA
OSSIE OSMUNDSON - WOODLAND, WASHINGTON
TOM WALLS - WINNIPEG, MANITOBA

*********** Former Ram Merlin Olsen, a longtime friend of Varrichione, recalled his favorite story about the former  Notre Dame star, which occurred late in the 1962 season.

"Coach Svare was berating the team and it became an ugly kind of situation" Olsen said.

"Svare was saying, ‘You're a bunch of quitters  and cowards,'  when an ash tray sailed by his head, and Uncle Frank said, ‘Are you calling me a coward?'

"Svare quickly replied, ‘Not you, Frank.”

http://www.profootballresearchers.org/archives/Website_Files/Coffin_Corner/21-05-814.pdf


*********** Mark Kaczmarek writes…


I don’t have the ‘53 program, but I inherited the ‘59 program from my in-laws...this too was close loss for the Hawks...I was 8 yrs. old rooting for Milt Bruin’s Badgers with Dale Hackbart & Jim Bakken that went to get creamed by Washington in the Rose Bowl...The 1st time I ever saw a color TV was the parade & game

Interestingly, that was just about the time that programs stopped showing players without face protectors of some sort. HW

*********** Greg Koenig passes along a great story by an Iowa Hawkeye writer about the Faintin' Frank incident…

Good morning. "Faintin' Frank" Varrichione is the answer to today's quiz. His faint was quite a headline story. It appears that Varrichione wasn't the only Irish player to have a questionable injury in that game. The second link below is a fun read.

https://coachreese.wordpress.com/2014/09/30/the-fainting-irish/

http://nealrozendaal.com/2013/01/04/hawkeye-flashback-1953-notre-dame/

This was the first time I had ever heard that Leahy’s subsequent missing of games for “health reasons” might possibly have been tied to the embarrassment that his win-at-any-cost antics was causing a university whose president, Father Theodore Hesburgh, was determined would one day be known as much for its academics as for its football. HW




*********** QUIZ: He was the last of the full-time head-on/toe-punch placekicking specialists,* and the only kicking specialist ever to be named NFL MVP…

He grew up in Livingston, Texas, and played for two years at Texas A & M and two years at Stephen F. Austin.  Originally a quarterback, he didn’t become a full-time placekicker until his senior year at SFA.

He was drafted but then cut by the Eagles and cut the following year by the Oilers, and was out of football for two years - installing septic systems in his hometown - until re-discovered and signed as a free agent by George Allen’s Redskins.  He kicked for the Skins from 1974 through mid-season 1986. He finished the season with the Browns and then retired.

He remains the Redskins’ all-time leading scorer.

*One lone toe-punch kicker, Dirk Borgognone, was on an NFL roster for two games in 1995, but he never attempted a kick in the NFL.

FRID

“Mike is a great, great player, and a really nice person, but he’s made certain decisions with what he wants to do and what he doesn’t want to do, and how he wants to spend his free time and how he doesn’t want to spend his free time.  That’s up to him. If he wants to engage and be more active in that area, I think we could help him make his brand really, really big, but he has to make a decision that he’s prepared to engage in that area. It takes time and effort.”

“Hopefully he’ll have much more going on that he’s going have to deal with and should deal with and must deal with than worrying about what NFL players do,” Tisch said. “He has no understanding of why they take a knee or why they’re protesting. When the new season starts, I hope his priorities are not criticizing the NFL and telling owners what to do and what not to do.”

Canada-based agent Jason Staroszik told TSN that his client "absolutely 100 percent" wants to play in the CFL.

"He still feels like he has some football years left in him," Staroszik said. "He just loves the game and wants to get back to playing whether it's the CFL or NFL."

The CFL's Edmonton Eskimos added the retired wide receiver to their negotiations list in June, giving the team his exclusive rights in the league. Owens then activated his 10-day clause with the Eskimos on July 14, which will give Edmonton until July 24 to either offer Owens a contract or release his rights.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/more-sports/terrell-owens-absolutely-wants-to-play-in-cfl-next-season-agent-says/ar-AAAd7X2?li=BBnb7Kz

*********** I’m beginning to think that T.O. is staying away from the Hall of Fame festivities because he knows he’d get booed.

Or, worse yet - for him -  ignored.

It’s customary, when guys get inducted, for large contingents of their city’s fans show up to honor them.  That’s the way it will be this year when Bears’ fans show up to cheer for Brian Urlacher and Ravens’ fans show up to cheer for Ray Lewis.

But think about it for a minute - who the hell would take time off and spend good money to go to Canton to honor Terrell Owens?  For what?


*********** The classic  illustration of the Yiddish word “chutzpah” was a guy murdering his parents, then asking the court for mercy - because he was an orphan.

Steve Sarkisian, ex-USC coach,  had chutzpah.  He didn’t murder anybody, but after being fired for some embarrassing drunken incidents, he  sued USC for wrongful termination because, well, the “drinking problem” that caused him to be fired was - I am not kidding - a disability.

That's chutzpah.

Actually, it was a well-publicized profane, drunken speech at a booster affair, and the suspicion that he might have been a bit tipsy during a game against Arizona State, that, among other things, led to his being fired by USC.  (In spite of his disability.)

So Sark sued USC for $30 million, claiming that USC didn’t allow him to get treated for his alcoholism (which, believe it or not, considering the insanity of our givernment, really is considered to be a disability).

No mercy for this orphan, though. An arbitrator ruled in USC’s favor.

http://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/24052127/arbitrator-rules-favor-usc-trojans-wrongful-termination-lawsuit-former-coach-steve-sarkisian

*********** An analysis by the Portland Oregonian found that in 2017 homeless people, while making up less than three per cent of the population, accounted for 52 per cent of all arrests.

In response, the powers that be are investigating the way the police have been “interacting” with the homeless.  The Mayor, bless his terminally liberal heart,  has suggested  that there might be “profiling” going on.

*********** Brian Barlow, an Oklahoma youth soccer referee became so disgusted with abusive parents that he set up a Facebook page - called Offside - and offered people $100 for videos of outrageous incidents.  He’s received plenty of them, and he’s posted them.

The idea was to shame the f—king fools, and to some degree it seems to be working.  When some idiot parent starts in on a ref,  those aware of Barlow’s project tend to move away, lest they become co-stars on a video clip.

It’s just one example of ways that leagues are trying to cope with the fact that officiating youth sports is more than thankless - it can be downright dangerous.

Most of the anecdotes in a New York Times article about a&&hole parents seem to be about youth soccer, but in fairness to the Beautiful Game, it may simply be because there are so many kids playing the game.

One method used by leagues in Virginia and Massachusetts deals with the irrational belief by so many parents that the time and money they invest in their little darlings will be repaid someday by a college scholarship.  Organizations in those place have posted signs at the entrance to their sports complexes reading:

“No N.C.A.A. scouts are looking at your child today”

and

“No N.C.A.A. scholarships will be awarded on this field today”

https://www.facebook.com/youreoffside/

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/sports/referee-parents-abuse-videos.html?emc=edit_sp_20180719&nl=sports&nlid=2369637720180719&te=1

*********** How you can tell it’s hot at our place…



*********** QUIZ ANSWER - Paul Christman is a member of the College Football Hall of Fame.

He played at Missouri from 1938 through 1940. He was a two-time All-American at Mizzou, leading the nation in passing in 1940.  His school passing record stood for 36 years until it was broken by Steve Pisarkiewicz.

Interestingly, after losing him to graduation, his coach, Don Faurot, introduced his “Split T” in 1941, and after he refined it and shared it with other coaches through wartime football, it became the dominant offense of the post-war era.

For five seasons following World War II  he was the quarterback in the Chicago Cardinals’ “Dream Backfield,” along with Pat Harder, Marshall Goldberg and Charlie Trippi, and he led the Cards to the only title in their long history.

Following his career, he became one of the first ex-players to become a broadcaster, and he was so good - he attributed his abilities as a color analyst to his having had to call plays as a quarterback - that he rose to the top of his new profession.  In 1962 he teamed with legendary Curt Gowdy to announce AFL games after NBC bought the AFL rights  for enough money to assure the survival of the new league.  Together, he and Gowdy called Super Bowl I (which was telecast on both NBC, which had the rights to AFL games, and CBS, which had the rights to the NFL games).

For the next two seasons Paul Christman moved to CBS and worked NFL games with another legend, Ray Scott,  but in 1970, with a bright career ahead of him, he died of a heart attack.  He was just 51.

*********** CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING PAUL CHRISTMAN
JOSH MONTGOMERY - BERWICK, LOUISIANA
KEN HAMPTON - RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
CHARLIE WILSON - CRYSTAL RIVER, FLORIDA
ADAM WESOLOSKI - PULASKI, WISCONSIN
MIKE FRAMKE - GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN
MARK KACZMAREK - DAVENPORT, IOWA
JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
TIM BROWN - FLORENCE, ALABAMA
JOE GUTILLA - AUSTIN, TEXAS
KEVIN MCCULLOUGH - LAKEVILLE, INDIANA
OSSIE OSMUNDSON - WOODLAND, WASHINGTON

*********** When I was an NFL fan I always looked forward to watching games Paul Christman was broadcasting.  Consummate pro.  And teaming up with Curt Gowdy made all of it even better.

Joe Gutilla
Austin, Texas

*********** Paul Christman was Mizzou's record-setting QB in 1940. Check out this video from YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFxL7HgIKaI.

Greg Koenig
Cimarron, Kansas

*********** I remember when CBS replaced Tony Canadeo with Paul Christman when they paired him with the great Ray Scott...kinda sad day for us Cheeseheads...

Mark Kaczmarek
Davenport, Iowa

(Tony Canadeo, long a favorite in Green Bay both when he played and then afterward as an announcer, was known as “Mister Packer.” HW)

*********** QUIZ: He  grew up in Natick, Massachusetts,  the son of Italian immigrants, and the youngest of ten children.

After graduating from high school in Natick, he was a teammate of Don Holleder for one season at Aquinas Institute, in Rochester, New York.  Aquinas was something of a national power then, travelling hundreds of miles to take on the best competition it could find.

(In the East,  there was nothing comparable to California’s junior college system, and it was not unusual in those days for promising high school graduates to spend a year as a “P-G”  - post-graduate - at a prep school.) 

His one season at Aquinas brought him to the attention of Notre Dame’s Frank Leahy.

At Notre Dame, he quickly earned a starting position at offensive tackle, and earned notoriety - and a nickname - his junior year when, just before halftime against Iowa, with time running out and Notre Dame out of timeouts, he faked an injury. The clock was stopped, the Irish managed to score a touchdown, the game ended in a 14-14 tie, and Notre Dame went on to finish the season - Leahy’s last - with a 9-0-1 record and a piece of the national championship.

He received flowers from sarcastic Iowa fans; he received an “Academy Award” for Best Actor from his teammates; on a television show, he explained, “If you were on the ground and looked at the scoreboard and saw you were trailing and running out of time,  wouldn’t you feel hurt?”

And he received a nickname - “Faintin’ Frank” - one that would stick with him through an 11-year career in the NFL.

An All-American at Notre Dame, he was a first-round draft pick of the Steelers, and was named to the Pro Bowl after his rookie season.

After six seasons in Pittsburgh, he was traded to the Rams for Lou Michaels because the Steelers needed a defensive lineman and a kicker - and Michaels gave them both.

He was durable - he missed only two games in 11 seasons.  And he was good - he was named to five Pro Bowl teams.   Steelers Hall-of-Fame teammate Ernie Stautner remembered, “In all the years Frank played for the Steelers,  he was very seldom beaten outright. He had the respect of all the defensive linemen who played against him.”   Baltimore Colts’ Hall of Famer Gino Marchettti said, “Frank was among the best I ever faced.”

He is a member of the Steelers’ All-Time team and in his 11th season he was the Rams’ offensive captain.

Probably the highest praise he ever received came from the great Paul Brown.

From an interview with Pro Football Researchers’ Jim Sargent…

“Probably the best game I ever played came with Pittsburgh in 1957, when Buddy Parker was coaching and we beat the Colts, 19-13.  A guy by the name of Gino Marchetti was tearing everybody up.

“Johnny Unitas was passing everybody crazy, and they had Alan Ameche and Lenny Moore as running backs.

“Buddy Parker was so worried about stopping Marchetti that he had two or three linemen alternate at right tackle in practice that week  That was my position, and I was required to block Marchetti.

“To make a long story short, it became quite a challenge to me to block Marchetti. I had a terrific day. Marchetti didn't touch our quarterback, Bobby Layne, once. I got a pretty good writeup in the Pittsburgh paper after the game.

"Later on, I heard more about it at the 1958 Pro Bowl game, from one of the Cleveland players, tackle Mike McCormack.

"’Frank,' he said, ‘We were playing Pittsburgh the Sunday after you played the Colts.  When Paul Brown got out the film to show us that week, he said, ‘Gentlemen, I'm going to show you one of the greatest exhibitions of blocking I have ever seen in my life. I want you to watch the right tackle of the Steelers, the kind of job he did on Gino Marchetti.'

"McCormack said that was the first time Paul Brown ever announced, before a game film was shown, to watch the performance of a particular player. I'll never forget that."

TUESD

*********** In case you  didn’t hear, France won the World Cup.  (That’s a soccer tournament that takes place every four years, see, and in most nations in the world, including all the sh—hole countries, it’s a very big deal.)

The French celebrated the win, of course - perhaps even overdoing it slightly, to the point where the gendarmes (French for PO-lice) had to step in and show a bit of force.

But deep down, they’re still not happy.  Not truly happy.

See, they won because their team played ball control - stayed in that damned tight, Double-Wing formation and ran the ball. Over and over. Ran it, and ran it, and ran it, seldom passing it, while monopolizing possession and relying on a tough defense.  All the while, French fans urged them to “open it up!” (in French, of course).

Okay, I lied.  They didn’t run the Double Wing.  Or the Wishbone.  Or the split-back veer.  They were, of course, still playing soccer.

But they weren’t playing it the way the French insist it be played.  As they headed into the final game, their coach was repeatedly criticized for his team’s stodgy play, with its heavy emphasis on defense.

One reporter, accusing him of wasting all the talent at his disposal,  compared him to a man driving a Ferrari at the speed limit.

Just like many American football fans who’d rather see an incomplete pass than a ten-yard run off-tackle, seemingly preferring to lose 42-40 than win 7-6, the French aren’t happy with just winning.  They insist that a French team - a real French team - must play with élan - with style, flair, dash.

“Three yards and a cloud of dust,” does not translate into French.

Perhaps this explains their lack of success in war.

*********** Gerald Eskenazi, long-time New York Times sportswriter and author of 16 books, wrote in The Wall Street Journal,   “I chuckle when I hear an American announcer give the result of a 1-0 soccer game as “1-nil.” Does he take a “lift” instead of an elevator in his office? The “tube” instead of the subway?”

*********** Our local newspaper, the Vancouver Columbian, is a poster child for why American newspapers are dying.  Its news is politically slanted (and to the left, it goes without saying); at least half of its front sports page typically consists of photographs - usually one large one - no doubt because it saves them from having to pay writers;  the writers they do pay seem to have slept through the part of journalism school where they taught about sentence structure; and they are severely lacking in judgement when it comes to what to write about.

Consider…

This past Saturday night, the annual “Freedom Bowl Classic,” a local all-star football game featuring the graduates of our county’s 17 high schools, took place.  But you’d never have known it if you depended for your news on the Columbian - which, unfortunately, most people in the county do.

Until Friday - the day before the game - not a thing was written about the game.  In other years, there would be a story or two every day about this kid or that kid and where he was going to college, blah, blah, blah.

But this year, nothing until Friday, when they chose to write a large article about one kid for whom the Freedom Bowl would be his last game.  (With a large photo, of course, accompanying the story.)

His last game?  Right.  Sure as hell, true to the standards of today’s journalism, the topic of that lone pre-game story, was concussions.

The story was about a kid who’d suffered three of them since eighth grade, and had finally decided that that was enough. Now, according to the story, he “got proactive about his health and well-being.”

He decided to turn down a scholarship to play football at NAIA Montana Tech.   No more football for him. 

Now, I was pretty pissed  at the idea that with maybe 70 kids, each with stories of their own, they had to go negative.  They just had to imply that football was dangerous, but this kid had come to his senses and decided not to play any more.

But to show how clueless the writer was, she totally whiffed on two great ironies in the story:

1. Two of the three concussions the kid had suffered since eighth grade occurred in one single “lacrosse match.”  In other words, he suffered not one concussion attributable to football during his entire high school career.

2.  If he’s through with football - if it’s so f—king dangerous - then how come he was taking his chances, playing in this “one last game?”

*********** “One of the secrets of Trump’s success is having really, really stupid enemies, enemies who are so tone-deaf and out-of-touch that they simply cannot adopt commonsense positions that resonate among normal Americans. The establishment instead insists on telling Americans that up is down, black is white, and girls can have penises. Nope. No wonder the Normals have gotten militant…”

Kurt Schlichter, townhall.com

***********  The University of Louisville, a proud academic institution - if you overlook the occasional use of whores to recruit illiterates to play basketball -  has taken the high road and removed the name “Papa John’s” from its stadium. 

If you hadn’t heard, John Schnatter, founder of the Papa John's pizza chain, dared to use the “N-word” - in quoting someone else who used the word.  Did you get that?  No one is saying that he said it!   Whew! That's it for me - No more standing on street corners and  reading aloud the lyrics of popular hip-hop “songs."

Zap!  Just like that, the guy’s a racist,  which means anything and anyone having anything at all to do with him becomes radioactive.

Racist, did I say?  To show you just how racist the guy is - why, he even objected to NFL players’ kneeling during the national anthem. (Which I suspect is what made him a target of the “who’s a racist?” crew.)

Louisville, being the proud academic institution that it is  (oh, wait - isn’t Bobby Petrino their football coach?) will no doubt offer to return the money they took from Papa John’s for the naming rights to the stadium.

*********** My son-in-law, Rob Love, an attorney in Durham, North Carolina, went to Duke, where he met my daughter.

He’s originally from Montclair, New Jersey, where one of his classmates, whom he visited while he was in Portland recently,  is the daughter of the great Jerry Izenberg.

A sports writer for the Newark Star-Ledger since 1951, Mr. Izenberg has won the Red Smith Award, presented by Associated Press sports editors in honor of the legendary sports writer, and he’s a member of both the National Sportscaster and Sportswriters Hall of Fame and the Boxing Hall of Fame.

He is one of only three people to have covered every single Super Bowl.


*********** Strange fact: An agent named Jimmy Sexton represents 11 of the 14 SEC coaches.

*********** In World Cup Soccer, they call it the Third-Place Match.  In Suomen Amerikkalaisen Jalkapallo (Finnish American Football) they call it the Bronze Medal Game.

In the NFL, they called it a lot of things.  From 1960-1969,  a time before playoffs, when the NFL championship was played by the champions of the two divisions, the second place teams met for the supposed third place in what was originally called the Playoff Bowl.

As with its European counterparts, there was never a lot of interest in the game - among players, coaches or fans. Despite the NFL's best efforts, it came to be called the “Runner-up Bowl.” 

Or worse:  In a team meeting, Vince Lombardi expressed his lack of interest in playing in it by calling it “A sh— bowl… a loser’s game for losers.”

With the merger of the NFL and AFL and the establishment of a championship game between the two leagues (which came to be known as the Super Bowl) interest in a game between runners-up declined from slim to none.

The game actually served a noble purpose.  At a time when there was no pension for the players, the  proceeds of the game went to establish a small pension plan from which has grown today’s rather generous plan.

Interestingly, the first three Playoff Bowl games were won by the Detroit Lions.  They were the last “championships” won by the Lions, a once-proud franchise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playoff_Bowl

http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2017/06/22/nfl-playoff-bowl-garbage-time

*********** Shelby Steele is one of my intellectual heroes, and I think that if we could shut down all the politicians and two-bit race hustlers for 24 hours and put him - non-stop - on all TV channels,  listening to him could personally make America better by reducing the racial tensions in American and helping black urban citizens improve their lot in life.

Sunday night, Mr. Steele, a conservative author, columnist and speaker, and a fellow at Stanford’s respected Hoover Institution, spoke with Mark Levin.  Here are some excerpts…

LEVIN: Among other things you said, "It's not surprising then that these black football players would don the mantle of protest," because you say protest is something that black Americans have had to do for Civil Rights. You look at Martin Luther King. You look at Jackie Robinson in sports, and so forth and so on, and you say, the surprise was that it didn't work this time.

"They had misread the historic moment, they were not speaking truth to power, rather they were figures of pathos, mindlessly loyal to a black identity that had run its course," so you say in the article, "Look, protest is a good thing." Protest sometimes is necessary, right, to get vote, to get equal rights, to draw the attention of society and so forth, but this one fell on deaf ears. Explain.
 
STEELE: Well, protest is central to the evolution of black American culture. It was protest that really finally won our freedom for us. Beyond that, it's always interesting to note that it expanded the idea of democracy. Democracy had all of the theory, all of the thinking - before had never dealt with the clash between race and racism and democracy. Well, it was the Civil Rights Movement, it was Martin Luther King who said, "You have to take and go beyond race even, that democracy is universal."

So that is a big part of the black American identity, and it is sort of seen as the test of your authenticity as a black, yet this protest in the NFL made the point that this was kind of fruitless at this point, and I think that central issue behind what you are talking about is the fact that the oppression of black Americans is over with.
 
LEVIN: It's over with.

STEELE: It's over with. I grew up, I mean, it was - we never thought there would be an end to oppression. I remember being a teenager, I never thought that I'd live in a society that was not segregated. It happened. Now, are there exceptions? Yes, there are a few here and there. Will racism every completely go away? No, it is a part of the - as I say in that article, it is endemic to the human condition just as stupidity is endemic to the human condition. And so we'll always have to be on guard about it.

But we are at a point where the old fashioned method of protest is obsolete. We need a lot of things, but we don't need that any more. We're at a point now where we can - we are a free people and can pursue our lives as we would like to.

LEVIN: You point out in the article in your thought process is that, that's part of the issue. We are a free people. We are all a free people.

STEELE: Yes.

LEVIN: We are not an oppressed people. Blacks are not an oppressed people quite frankly, Jews are not an oppressed people and so forth. This is America now. There is a history where there is oppression, obviously, slavery and segregation and so forth, but that is gone. And you say - and so some people are having difficulty coping with liberty. What do you mean by that?

STEELE: Absolutely. Well, when you think about it black American culture evolved over three and a half centuries. Every minute under which they lived under oppression and they adapted to dealing with the fact that those freedoms were going to be cut off. They had to somehow make a life within all of those restriction, and they did. Part of the - one of the - I think black American culture is nothing less than heroic. I mean, they evolved - look at the - you know, the contribution like music and so forth. They achieved great things.

The one thing we never had to do was to deal with freedom. That was precisely the thing that we denied, so that's not in our culture, in a vivid clear sense as it would be if we had been free - truly free. Well, we now are free. Freedom is, as the existentialist I think rightly say, a burden, it's a difficulty. It puts the individual in a position of being much more responsible for themselves, their own development as individuals and that is new for us.
 
The idea is still that black unity, we just can't be unified. That is the way ahead. Not anymore. You take yourself ahead. That's the new and stunning really fact of American life that we're now facing and having to deal with.

LEVIN: How about social justice? And equality? And the phrases like that? I hear that is what people say they are protesting.
 
STEELE: You've got all the social justice you need. Again, I lived through segregation. The freedom we have today is absolutely remarkable. We, as a people have not yet absorbed that. We have not absorbed the fact that our problem is no longer racism, our problem is freedom. We have to learn to deal with freedom, and only way to do that is to - it's going to have to be grounded in individual responsibility. That is the only chance you have with freedom, it's to take charge of your life and make a life for yourself.

http://www.foxnews.com/transcript/2018/07/15/author-shelby-steele-on-race-relations-equality-in-america.html

*********** For the better part of a week, we were blessed with having our four kids and their spouses and our 11 grandkids visiting us in Camas. They came from Colorado and North Carolina, from Boston and Seattle, from Australia and Japan.  (In all, my wife and I made 14 airport runs.)  There was one brief time during which everyone was there, and we managed to take advantage of it with a family photo. (Having been through at least 30 team photos over the years, I confess to being the anal one who staged it.)


There was plenty for them to do: hiking on the trails nearby, exploring Portland, kayaking and paddle boarding on the nearby lakes, fixing dinner when it was their turn, and then playing all sorts of games outside our house after dinner (this time of year, it doesn’t get dark out here until 9:30 or so).  And socializing - damn, it’s fun watching those cousins and the fun they have when they get together -

as evidenced by the photo below,  they've inherited my love of  beer.  (The multi-colored label is - I think - not intended to be the dreaded rainbow flag, but instead, since it's a "Mexican lager"  brewed by the Full Sail Brewing Co., of Hood River, Oregon, and named "Sesion" as a takeoff on their popular "Session" lager, it's the red and green of the Mexican flag.  I think.  I hope.)





*********** What is it that Terrell Owens is best known for?  If you said, “catching passes,” you must have been watching soccer for the better part of his 15 NFL seasons, because anyone who was paying attention during the T.O. Era knows that most of his name recognition is due to his being the biggest a$$hole in the game.

But he hasn’t played since 2010,  and with the exception of a few announcements from time to time that he was thinking of making a comeback, he’s been pretty much out of the public eye.

And then came his election to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. I wasn’t the only one who was surprised - and disappointed - at the news, but I can’t say I was surprised when he then announced that he wouldn’t be attending the Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Canton, preferring instead to have his own personal induction ceremony in Chattanooga (where he’d played his college ball).

It didn’t surprise me because it was vintage “T.O.” - all about being the biggest a$$hole he could possibly be.

And it certainly wouldn’t surprise me to learn that this latest stunt came on the advice of an agent smart enough to realize that while receivers - even Hall of Fame receivers - are a dime a dozen, T.O., even in a league full of a$$holes, is in a class all his own.     

His football career is over;  he can’t do anything further to advance his image as a receiver. But being an a&&hole is the essence of the T.O. brand, and his shunning of the Canton festivities ought to cement his status as the GAOAT (Greatest A$$hole of All Time) -  which means we should prepare ourselves to see him on TV soon, endorsing products.

*********** The Good Old Summer Time…

Baseball gives us ball games.

The NHL sends the Stanley Cup around to the hometowns of the players on the championship team.

The NBA gives us the Las Vegas Summer League.

The NFL, with training camp just weeks away, gives us Jameis Winston in Sexploits 2.0, LeSean McCoy and his brutish efforts to evict his live-in girlfriend , Terrell Owens turning his back on the greatest honor that can be bestowed on a professional football player, Julian Edelman - and a host of other drug abusers, performance-enhancing and otherwise - being sat down for parts of the season.  No use even mentioning the social activities of NFL alumni, the most recent of which was  last week’s attempted murder charge against Brandon Browner.

Not even the vaunted NFL PR department can get the subject back on football.


***********   QUIZ ANSWER - Steve Worster may be the greatest college running back who never played a single down in the NFL.

In his junior year of high school, his Bridge City, Texas team made it to the Class 3A state final game (Texas had only 4 classes at the time)  before losing to perennial power Brownwood, 14-0.

But in his senior year, he rushed for 2210 yards as his team went undefeated, winning the state title with a 30-6 win over McKinney.  In the title game, he sat out the second half after putting the game away with four first-half touchdowns.

All told, in his three seasons as a starter for Bridge City, he rushed for 5422 yards.  He was all-state all three years, and he amassed what was then a state-record 38 100-yard games.

One of the most highly-recruited players in the history of Texas football, he finally settled on Texas.

It was a good choice, because shortly after he arrived, Texas adopted an offense that would use his power running ability to revolutionize the game of football.

His historic significance is that was the first in a great line of fullbacks - the first fullback around which Texas coach Darrell Royal and his offensive coordinator Emory Bellard built their innovative triple-option attack.  Originally called the “Y” formation because of the alignment of its backs, it became much better known by the name it goes by today, the wishbone, a name given it by - most people believe - a Houston sports writer named Mickey Herskowitz.

Based on the threat of his running up the middle, the new offense produced back-to-back national titles for the Longhorns in 1969 and 1970.  As Texas fans shouted “Woo! Woo!” (his name was pronounced “WOO-ster”) every time he carried the ball,  he rushed for 2313 yards and 36 touchdowns, and  was a three-time All-Southwest Conference selection and a two-time All-American. He was voted Texas Amateur Athlete of the Year, and finished fourth in the Heisman voting after his senior season.

In the 1971 NFL draft, he was chosen fourth by the Los Angeles Rams, but he would up signing with the Hamilton Tiger Cats of the CFL, where he played just one season before hanging them up and returning to school to get his degree and embark on a career in sales.

CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING STEVE WORSTER:
MIKE FRAMKE - GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN
GREG KOENIG - CIMARRON, KANSAS
JOSH MONTGOMERY - BERWICK, LOUISIANA
JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
KEN HAMPTON - RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
TIM BROWN - FLORENCE, ALABAMA
CHARLIE WILSON - CRYSTAL RIVER, FLORIDA
OSSIE OSMUNDSON - WOODLAND, WASHINGTON
MIKE FORISTIERE - TOPEKA, KANSAS
ADAM WESOLOSKI - PULASKI, WISCONSIN


***********  Charlie Wilson, of Crystal River Florida, my resident expert on All Things Belly - Veer - Wishbone, found some great stuff on Steve Worster in the Beaumont Enterprise…

"A professional football career never came to much. The Los Angeles Rams picked him in the fourth round of the 1971 NFL draft, but they could never come to an agreement on a contract.

"Just every underhanded trick they'd play," Worster said. "To the point they even took me out to get me drunk to sign a contract... I just finally told them I wasn't interested."

FRID

University of Alabama freshman linebacker VanDarius Cowan has been dismissed from the team for violating team rules, coach Nick Saban said in a statement on Monday.

“VanDarius has been dismissed from the team and is no longer a part of our football program due to a violation of team rules,” Saban said. “Each of us has a responsibility to represent The University of Alabama in a first-class way, and failure to meet those standards can’t be tolerated. We wish VanDarius the very best in the future.”

Last week, Cowan was charged with misdemeanor assault in relation to an incident at a Tuscaloosa bar last month. He was charged with third-degree assault and turned himself in on Thursday.

According to Tuscaloosa News, Cowan was accused of punching a 26-year-old man in the face on the morning of June 23, resulting in broken teeth and nerve damage for the victim.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/ncaafb/alabama-freshman-linebacker-dismissed-from-team-after-bar-fight-arrest/ar-AAzO90S

*********** Presidential advisor Kellyane Conway was at a Baltimore Orioles game when a stranger came up to her and took her photo and said something about her being famous “for all the wrong reasons.”

She walked over to him and said, “I’m fluent in ignoramus.  What did you say?”

She then took a photo of him and said she planned to add it to her “collection of underachieving men.”

*********** Found this on texassports.com…

Diron Talbert, who was an All-Southwest Conference selection as a junior defensive tackle in 1965 and a preseason All-American in 1966, was a three-year letterman (1964-66) and a tri-captain in 1966. A fifth-round draft choice of the Los Angeles Rams, he played four seasons there before moving to Washington in 1971. In his 10 years with the Redskins, Talbert played in a Super Bowl (in '73) and was Redskins’ captain for nine seasons, playing in more than 200 games.

On the 70th anniversary of the Redskins, Talbert was named one of the 70 greatest who played for the Skins.

He admitted he is not a regular in Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium each fall.

He said he does get to one game a year.

"But, you have to remember," Talbert said, "between playing college football at Texas and playing 14 years in the NFL, well, that's 19 years of hunting seasons that I missed.


*********** NFF - New Programs added


IRVING, Texas (June 28, 2018) – The National Football Foundation & College Hall of Fame (NFF) highlighted today that seven college football teams will take the field for the first time this season. Including the five other colleges and universities that will take the field in the coming seasons, the number of schools among all NCAA divisions, the NAIA and independents offering football has increased to an all-time high of 778.
 
Since 1978 when the NCAA changed its method for tracking attendance figures, the number of schools playing NCAA football (FBS, FCS, DII and DIII) has steadily increased by 182 schools from 484 in 1978 to 666 in 2017, or an average increase of 4.7 schools per year. Adding NAIA and independent schools playing football and schools launching programs in the coming years, the number of colleges and universities offering students an opportunity to play college football has been increased to the all-time high of 778.
 
In the past six seasons alone (2012-17), 35 football programs have been added by NCAA or NAIA institutions. Only 11 football programs have been dropped during the same span, including two at schools that closed and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, which returned to the gridiron in 2017. All 778 schools that offer football will be represented on the three-story helmet wall at the Chick-fil-A College Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta.
 
Universities and colleges are adding football at all levels, and administrators have developed sound plans, ensuring the new programs address the unique financial, academic and long-term objectives of their respective schools. The 74 institutions listed below, who have implemented firm plans during the past decade, coupled together with the more than 20 schools with exploratory committees, create a clear and undeniable trend that presidents and trustees nationwide see the value of a football program as part of their overall academic mission.
 
“No other sport contributes more to the vibrancy of a college campus than football, and we are very pleased to highlight those schools that have added our great game,” said NFF President & CEO Steve Hatchell. “University and college presidents clearly see the value of having programs on their campuses, and we applaud them for understanding the role football can play in the educational experience of all their students.”
 
The rationale for adding football varies at each institution, and all of the decision makers who helped develop a plan for launching a program explain that an in-depth study played a critical role in finding the right level of play and the proper financial balance. Small colleges may cite increasing enrollment and addressing gender imbalances while larger universities might highlight the role of football in raising the institution’s profile and its ability to attract research grants. All mention creating a more vibrant on-campus community and connecting with alumni.
 
“With more than one million high school students playing football and more than 75,000 spots on college teams, there is plenty of room for expansion,” said NFF Chairman Archie Manning. “Many of these colleges clearly recognize that football can play an important role in encouraging students to continue their educations by enticing them to enroll.”
 
According to a 2015 study of five small universities published in College Planning & Management by Virginia Wesleyan College President Dr. Scott Miller and former Carlow University (Pa.) President Dr. Marylouise Fennell, adding sports teams and facilities, especially football and marching bands, can fuel an enrollment boost. According to the study, each of the five institutions experienced a six-year increase of 26 percent or more, with one school doubling its enrollment during that period.
 
The schools have added programs at every level of play and in every region of the country, experiencing successes that run the gamut. In all, the 62 programs that have added football from 2008-17 have combined for two national championships, 36 conference championships and 49 postseason appearances.
 
In 2017, UAB went 8-5 and earned a trip to the Bahamas Bowl in its first season after a two-year hiatus. Georgia State, which launched its program in 2010, won its first bowl game after a win in the AutoNation Cure Bowl and had its first NFF National Scholar-Athlete selection in Chandon Sullivan. At the FCS level, Kennesaw State (launched in 2015) claimed its first conference title in 2017 and reached the quarterfinals of the FCS Playoffs.
 
West Florida, which launched its program just two years ago in 2016, reached the Division II National Championship Game. Berry (Ga.), which kicked off its inaugural season in 2013, claimed its first conference title and first perfect regular season in its history and reached the second round of the Division III Playoffs. Reinhardt (Ga.), which also launched in 2013, posted a perfect regular season, won its conference division title and reached the NAIA National Championship in 2017.
 
These are just some of the impressive achievements at schools that have recently added football. Others include notching impressive attendance figures; attracting increased enrollment; garnering national publicity; expanding their donor bases; and receiving invitations to join conferences at the next level.
 
The planning and preparation of seven programs will come to fruition as they begin intercollegiate play this fall: Allen University in Columbia, S.C.; Alvernia University in Reading, Pa.; Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Ind.; Keiser University in West Palm Beach, Fla.; Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, Mich.; Ottawa University-Arizona in Surprise, Ariz.; and the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine.


Allen University in Columbia, S.C., which had previously dropped its football program following the 2005 season, is among the new schools this season. The school announced in January plans to reinstate the program and that Teddy Keaton would be the team’s head coach as it begins its inaugural season this fall. The Yellow Jackets will compete at the NAIA level and will announce its 2018 schedule in the near future.  Allen also announced it would be bringing back its marching band program after more than 50 years. Administrators believe both programs will attract more students to the university, which has a current enrollment of around 600.
 
Alvernia University in Reading, Pa., will begin its inaugural season while competing as a member of NCAA Division III’s Middle Atlantic Conference under the direction of head coach Ralph Clark. Since announcing the addition of a football program, the school has changed its mascot to the Golden Wolves and made significant upgrades to its stadium.
 
Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Ind., which announced the launch of its program more than two years ago, will see its hard work pay off this fall as the Wildcats begin their kick-off season. A member of the NAIA’s Mid-States Football Association, Indiana Wesleyan will be playing its games in a brand new on-campus stadium. “We are really looking forward to competing in 2018 and this schedule will be a great test for our football program in our inaugural season,” said head coach Jordan Langs in March.
 
Keiser University will begin its first season in West Palm Beach, Fla., behind the leadership of head coach Doug Socha. Earlier this year, the Seahawks joined the NAIA’s Mid-South Conference as an affiliate member in football.
 
Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, Mich., will return to the gridiron after a 70-year hiatus this fall and compete as an independent before joining the NAIA’s Mid-States Football Association in 2019. One of the university’s main objectives with the football program is to create an active student body.
 
“[Our student section, ‘The Pointe,’ will] give us that 12th man,” said Lawrence Tech head coach Jeff Duvendeck. “It’ll give us some extra support and make the stadium louder. It’ll bring the campus together, which I think is a big part of why you start an athletic program at a school is to bring the campus community together, and having that student section is a huge part of it.”
 
Ottawa University Arizona (OUAZ), a second campus of Ottawa University in Kansas, opened its doors in Surprise, Ariz., last fall. The school will kick off this season as a member of the newly formed Sooner Athletic Conference in the NAIA, and it will play its games at the brand new, state-of-the-art Spirit Field on campus. Veteran head coach Mike Nesbitt will lead the Spirit and is “extremely excited for this upcoming season.”
 
The University of New England in Biddeford, Maine, which announcing the addition of football in 2014 and played a junior varsity season in 2017, is prepared to play its first varsity season. A member of the Commonwealth Coast Football conference, head coach Mike Lichten’s UNE Nor'easters join Alvernia as the two NCAA Division III football programs kicking off their maiden seasons this fall. The two schools will conclude their 2018 regular seasons with a game against each other in Biddeford.
 
The number of football programs across the nation continues to grow, with four additional schools announcing the launch of future teams since last fall: Allen University in Columbia, S.C. (which was previously highlighted as launching this fall); Barton College in Wilson, N.C.; Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, N.H.; and Keystone College in La Plume, Pa.
 
In January, Barton College in Wilson, N.C., announced the addition of an NCAA Division II football program with the goal of an inaugural season in 2020. The private, liberal arts college’s decision to integrate football into its athletics program is based on its mission of providing programs and opportunities to encourage the intellectual, spiritual, social and cultural development of its students.
 
According to the college’s announcement release, football will enhance campus vibrancy, community engagement and institutional growth while helping balance the current gender ratio of 70/30 women to men.
 
“This is an exciting time for Barton College,” said Dr. Douglas N. Searcy, president of Barton College. “We know that we also have to make choices institutionally that will continue to expand our footprint and provide new and exciting opportunities for our students as well as positively engage our friends and partners in the community. Bringing football to campus is exactly that kind of bold choice. Football will undoubtedly create a tremendous surge of energy and enthusiasm among students, as well as faculty, staff, alumni and the Wilson community.”
 
Like all colleges and universities that add football programs, Barton came to its decision on the heels of an in-depth feasibility study and detailed analysis. On June 19, the school announced Chip Hester, who coached the past four seasons at North Carolina A&T State, as the program’s new head coach. The next steps will be solidifying the timeline.
 
With an enrollment just under 2,000, Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, N.H., has fielded a sprint football team (all players weighing less than 178 pounds) since 2012. In February, the university announced it would begin transitioning to an NCAA Division II program, and the Ravens will join the Northeast-10 Conference in the sport beginning with the 2019 season.
 
“Moving to NCAA Division II Football is a significant step for the University, and one that makes sense, given the growing similarities to rules governing our existing Sprint Football program,” Franklin Pierce President Dr. Kim Mooney said in a university news release. “In terms of eligibility and expenses, the gap between Sprint and NCAA Division II Football has never been so close. Now is the logical time for Franklin Pierce to make the transition to Division II with our football program, allowing us to capitalize on the enhancements to our on-campus student experience which will come with such a transition.”
 
The changes were the result of analysis by Franklin Pierce that aimed to ensure its athletics program “continues to grow in reputation and impact, regionally and nationally.”
 
“It’s exciting to be part of something new,” head coach Rashad Watson told The Keene Sentinel. “We want people to know we’ve got a football team over here, we have a great campus and a great school that people (in the region) can enjoy.”
 
Keystone College, a 1,400-student institution in La Plume, Pa., announced in January it was bringing back its football program after a 71-year hiatus. The program will operate as a club program and play a limited schedule in the fall of 2019 before switching over to a full-varsity schedule in 2020 as a member of NCAA Division III’s Eastern Collegiate Football Conference. The Giants will play their home games at the school's athletic field and track complex, which opened in 2014, and plans call for the construction of a new field house.
 
Keystone previously sponsored the football in the late 1800s through the 1947 season, and the college believes the new program will reinvigorate the proud tradition the sport once held on campus. Notably, Hall of Fame baseball player Christy Mathewson was a member of the Keystone football team from 1895-97.
 
“We are so excited to reintroduce football as our next varsity sport,” Keystone President David L. Coppola said in a news release. “This will be a wonderful experience not only for the student-athletes who come here to continue their education and compete on the NCAA Division III level but for our entire student body and alumni as well. We can’t wait to get started and we look forward to the day when we cheer for the Giants as they take the field for the very first time.”
 
According to the college, the success of other recently added sports made football the next logical step to continue the growth of the Keystone student-athlete experience. In addition to the benefits to the players, the college stated that football will provide an enjoyable and uplifting experience for everyone associated with the college, bringing people together to socialize and share common experiences. In March, the college announced that Justin Higgins would serve as the head coach of the revived program.
 
“My family and I are thrilled to be at Keystone College,” Higgins said in a news release. “I can’t wait to get started as we work to build a football program that reflects the values and traditions that have made Keystone what it is today. We are so very proud to be part of the Keystone community.”
 
The addition of a football program often entails a long, calculated process that frequently begins with studies conducted by task forces. Schools are more likely to begin the football feasibility process if there is significant support from the community.
 
Last year, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock announced it would conduct a football and marching band feasibility study following a student-created petition calling for the sport’s addition at the school. Already a member of the FBS’ Sun Belt Conference in all other sports, the university last fielded a football team in 1955 when it was known as Little Rock Junior College.
 
In October 2017, Little Rock chose a firm to conduct the study, which is evaluating whether a football program and marching band would be a fiscally responsible and meaningful addition to the university and the central Arkansas community. The study is examining every aspect, including costs, staffing, playing venue, facility construction and economic and enrollment impact. The study will put exact figures on both a startup and annual cost for Little Rock football, helping the university determine if it will move forward with the program.
 
In May 2018, Little Rock athletics director Chasse Conque updated the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees on the feasibility study, which he said would be completed by July 1.
 
“It’s all part of the bigger vision for the athletics department to compete at the Division I level,” Conque said, according to the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
 
Another school taking a real look at adding football is the University at Texas Rio Grande Valley in Edinburg, Texas, which boasts an enrollment of more than 28,000 students after the consolidation of the University of Texas at Brownsville and the University of Texas-Pan American.
 
The football feasibility committee at UTRGV was created in 2016 with legendary coach Mack Brown, a 2018 College Football Hall of Fame electee, as its chairman. The committee has been looking at how other universities have set up football programs in recent years to determine best practices, including the University of Texas at San Antonio, which launched its program in 2011. The UTRGV feasibility study is expected to be released soon.
 
Rick Anderson, UTRGV’s executive vice president for finance and administration, explained to the Rio Grande Guardian in April what would happen after the study is released.
 
“We do expect a student vote coming this fall,” Anderson told the outlet. “If we assume that is positive it would go to the board. It would require student approval and then board approval sometime this fall. And then, of course, it takes several years to get up and running.”

http://footballfoundation.org/News/NewsDetail/News/record-778-colleges-and-universities-now-offering-football



*********** While old friend Mike Foristiere works to turn things around at Highland Park High in Topeka, Kansas, his son Randy, a senior (first classman) to be at West Point, is spending his summer as an officer-in-training at Fort Polk, Louisiana.

Fort Polk happens to be the site of what’s called the Joint Readiness Training Center, designed to provide “highly realistic joint and combined arms training across the full spectrum of conflict.”

It is one of only three of what the Army calls “Dirt” Combat Training Centers, conducting realistic training exercises in order to prepare infantry units for actual combat operations.

And the Commanding General of Fort Polk happens to be Brigadier General Pat Frank, who just ten years ago was Lieutenant Colonel Pat Frank, the Battalion Commander of the Black Lions, at Fort Riley, Kansas.  He’s the guy who developed a working relationship with the Kansas State football program, and as a result, I’ve come to know him.

When he learned that Randy Foristiere was headed to Fort Polk, he arranged to have a picture taken with him, and that’s what you see.

If General Pat Frank looks like he’s in shape,  take it from Mike Foristiere, telling of Randy’s first morning at Fort Polk:

“Randy said he and the other cadets had PT (Physical Training) with General Frank this morning. Said the General is in great shape.”

When I passed along Randy’s compliments to General Frank, he wrote back…

We had a great PT session - wanted to ensure the Cadets knew how critical that first event with their Soldiers every morning is - got to attack PT, it sets the tempo for the entire duty day!Thanks for the note - BLACK LIONS!

Sure sounds to me like he’s saying, “LEAD FROM THE FRONT!”

http://www.jrtc-polk.army.mil/cg.html

*********** Coach,

Your commentary on eye contact is very timely. We decided at our coaches meeting last week that “listening with your eyes” would be this year’s character focus. Two years ago it was handshakes (before and after practice- perhaps the best and easiest teaching technique I have learned), last year it was grit (what it looks, sounds and feels like) and this year it is the mental toughness that constant eye contact develops.

Please communicate to your friend Joe Gutilla that his new HC’s son, Bryan Bennett, has a standing invitation to a home cooked meal or any other assistance that a young man in Winnipeg might need. You can provide him with my email. The end zones do take some getting used to, but the presnap waggle causes at least one offensive offsides per game. We don’t think it’s worth the risk.

Tom Walls
Winnipeg, Manitoba

*********** QUIZ ANSWER -  As a  college football player at Yale, Amos Alonzo Stagg was an end on the first-ever All-American team.

At that time, former Yale football players were in great demand as coaches, and he spent two years as head coach simultaneously at a Massachusetts prep school and  at Springfield College.

Then, for 40 years - from 1892 to 1932 - he was head coach at the academically elite University of Chicago, then a member of the Big Ten.  He was also the baseball coach for 19 seasons and the basketball coach for one season. At the age of 70, he was forced to retire by the university president, who in 1939 would discontinue football entirely at Chicago, and pull out of the Big Ten. 

After leaving Chicago, where his record was 244-11-7, he took the head coaching job at the College of the Pacific (now University of the Pacific) where he stayed for 14 years.

When he finally retired as a head coach, his overall record - at Springfield College, Chicago, and Pacific - was 314-199-35.

For the next six years, from 1947 through 1952, he assisted his son, who was head coach at Susquehanna University, in Pennsylvania, and from 1953 through 1960, he assisted at Stockton College. He finally called it quits at age 98.  He died in 1965 at the age of 102.

His contributions to the game, for which he is credited either as an innovator or a collaborator, are too numerous to list, (and some of them are attributed to others) but they include…

the center snap… the spiral snap… the onside kick… the short punt formation… the forward pass… the statue of liberty play…  the line shift… the place kick… the lateral… the tackling dummy… the unbalanced line… the Notre Dame box formation… the idea of varsity letters… the idea of numbers on uniforms… the T formation… the man in motion… the position of linebacker… the numbering of plays by players and holes

He is a charter member of the College Football Hall of Fame as both a player and a coach.

Two high schools - one in Illinois and one in California - are named for him, as is the annual game to decide the Division III National Championship.

A deeply religious man who had countless good influences on our game, was for good reason called the Grand Old Man of football.

CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING AMOS ALONZO STAGG:
KEN HAMPTON - RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
GREG KOENIG - CIMARRON, KANSAS
JASON MENSING - WHITEFORD, MICHIGAN
MIKE FRAMKE - GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN
JOHN BOTHE - OREGON, ILLINOIS
ADAM WESOLOSKI - PULASKI, WISCONSIN
MARK KACZMAREK - DAVENPORT, IOWA
JOSH MONTGOMERY - BERWICK, LOUISIANA
TIM BROWN - FLORENCE, ALABAMA
TOM WALLS - WINNIPEG, MANITOBA
JOE GUTILLA - AUSTIN, TEXAS
JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
TOM DAVIS - SAN CARLOS, CALIFORNIA
KEVIN MCCULLOUGH - LAKEVILLE, INDIANA
MIKE FORISTIERE - TOPEKA, KANSAS
JOSH COLE - ODESSA, NEW YORK
OSSIE OSMUNDSON - WOODLAND, WASHINGTON


*********** On the subject of Amos Alonzo Stagg, Adam Wesoloski sent along a link to action between College of the Pacific and San Jose State.

Adam Wesoloski
Pulaski, Wisconsin

P.S. You will get a kick out of this game.

San Jose State vs College of the Pacific Football Game Oct 20, 1939 - 1st Half

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgAHaNpNPJY&t=623s

One of the teams - I think it’s COP - is running from Short Punt formation.




*********** Just like all of us, Amos Alonzo Stagg was young once.  That’s the Yale team of 1888, and that’s Mr. Stagg at the left of the back row.  The big guy in the middle of the back row is Pudge Heffelfinger, considered to be the first professional football player in America.  The coach of that Yale team was Walter Camp, the man whose innovations - such as the line of scrimmage and the concept of downs - created what became American football from the rugby that they had been playing.


*********** I learned about Coach Stagg in high school. My high school coach played in a couple of Stagg Bowls and won it in 1991 playing halfback for Jim Butterfield’s Ithaca Bombers.
Josh Cole
Odessa, New York

*********** As a former d3 center and a son of a long time Coach todays quiz is in my wheelhouse Amos Alonzo Stagg...   I grew up hoping to some day to get to the Stagg Bowl. The one year we had a shot - ’97 -  we fell one slot short of qualifying for the playoffs despite finishing 8-1 and winning our league (MIAA oldest in america) title...    Just prior to that I went to the University of Chicago to watch our (Adrian College) women’s Basketball team in the NCAA tournament (my father was also the athletic director) and I remember him showing me around the key historical spots of University of Chicago Football and Amos Alonzo Stagg.

God Bless,
Jason Mensing  
Whiteford, Michigan

TUESDAY,  JULY 10,  2018 -   "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." George Orwell

From 2013 to 2016, the number of competitive swimmers in the 10-year-old age group dropped by almost 10%, according to USA Swimming, the sport’s governing body. While sports leagues nationwide are facing overall declines in youth participation, nearly half of the swimmers who quit said they left swimming to play other sports. More than 40% said swim team was too much of a time commitment.

“We know that swimming can be perceived as an all-or-nothing type of sport, and we know that today’s families are busier than ever with activities,” says Matt Farrell, USA Swimming’s chief marketing officer. “So we were facing a choice: Do we want to fight that culture, or decide to own it?”

In early June, USA Swimming launched its new ad campaign showing young swimmers doing other sports, in a move to position itself as a home for multisport athletes and gain back some of the kids it has been losing. It is rolling out a new, entry-level membership program called FlexSwim for young swimmers ages 5-18 who want to try competitive swimming but can commit to only a few days of training a week and two swim meets a year. In contrast, traditional training for competitive swimmers often means practice every day—before school, after school or both, depending on the age group—plus swim meets many weekends.

TUESDAY,  JULY 3,  2018 -   “So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.”  George Orwell

The usage and overuse of Abel over the past week was borderline abuse by Beavers head coach Pat Casey.

Abel pitched three times in a five-day span, including two starts in high-pressure elimination games. He threw a total of 247 pitches during that five-day span.
– 95 pitches in a win over Mississippi State on Saturday to reach the CWS finals against Arkansas
– 23 pitches during an inning of relief against Arkansas on Wednesday to keep it a 1-run game
– 129 pitches in Thursday’s shutout win over Arkansas

Abel is only 19 years old and still was asked to do that much.

Casey showed that he was more interested in winning a national title than protecting the health of a valuable, young pitcher who has a promising future ahead of him. Unfortunately this is a story that is all too common in the world of selfish college baseball coaches.

Oh is that, so, “Larry Brown?”  Who are you, really?  Are you that basketball coach who can’t hold a job?

http://larrybrownsports.com/cbaseball/oregon-state-kevin-abel-pat-casey-abuse/451851


*********** I didn’t watch the first game of last Friday night’s CFL double-header, but since Jeremiah Masoli played an outstanding game in the Hamilton victory, I have to assume that Johnny Manziel isn’t pressing him very hard for the starting quarterback assignment.

A malcontent Manziel means trouble, and a sure sign that trouble lies ahead:  a friend who did watch the game said that when the camera showed Manziel, he was kneeling on the sideline, off by himself.  (For God’s sake, Johnny, grab a clipboard and stand near the coach and look like you give a sh—.)

*********** The Japanese lost their World Cup match to Belgium in the closing seconds of play, but despite the heartbreak of defeat, they set an admirable example of sportsmanship and class.

Other teams have lost in just such a manner and proceeded to trash their locker room.

Not the Japanese team.  Wrote Priscilla Janssens, FIFA (World Soccer Organization) Venue Director,

“This is the Japanese dressingroom after losing to Belgium in the 94’ minute. Thanked their fans in the stadium, cleaned up everything (bench and dressing room) and spoke to media. Even left note with ‘thank you’ in Russian. What an example for all teams!! Privilege to work with!”




*********** I mentioned that I’d been assisting a friend who just took another job, and for the past week, we’ve been mostly throwing the ball. 

Yes, yes, I know - the Double Wing is all about running, and passing is for cowards and blah, blah, blah.

But…

(1) A Double-Wing passing attack can be extremely productive in terms of percentage completed and touchdowns per attempt, and very sound in limiting interceptions and sacks.

(2) If you don’t have some kind of passing game, you will live to regret it.

(3) If you wait until official team practice begins to build your passing game, you’ll be too late.  The passing game is built in the summer.

(4) Not all that many kids show up for summer workouts hoping to run off tackle.


*********** I usually stay in double tight most of the time - sometimes using I-wing, Tackle over.  for an inexperienced team and I am the only DW coach what other formations would you recommend?

Coach,

My first changeup would be RAM




Chances are one of your runners is a good bit better than the other, and this way he’ll get most of the carries.

Not only that, but he has the ability to run anywhere along the line.

People may “know” that you’re going to run off-tackle right, but they still have to prepare for the counter.

The B-Back gets to his Super Power block faster, and the Wedge is really good.

Play action fakes are always better when you have a tailback to fake it to.

This is my first step in “opening” the offense to eventually become the Open Wing.


*********** You have to hand it to the NBA.  Here it is, just weeks before NFL players report to camp, and all you read about the NFL is this or that knucklehead being suspended for taking illegal drugs or - allegedly - grabbing the crotch of an Uber driver.

The NBA, meanwhile, has been sucking up most of the NFL’s oxygen with all the speculation about where LeBron would ‘take his talents” this time.

Los Angeles, is it? There,  I would say, he’s going to be under some pressure to produce. Los Angeles is a market that doesn’t tolerate mediocrity in its sports teams, with a newspaper whose sports columnists are not afraid to call out the emperor if he’s not wearing clothes.

*********** Hugh,

Billy Joe Hobert?  Wow.  That's a blast from the past!

I did not know that about Finnish name pronunciations.  So how would one pronounce Teemu Selanne??  TEEmu SELanne?  (Wish he played for the Hawks).

Talk soon!

Joe Gutilla
Austin, Texas

Hi Joe-

Great question -“Teemu Selanne” is a bit of a tongue-twister.

Most Americans get the first name correct - roughly, “TEH-moo.”

But the last name?  Correctly, it’s “SEH-lahn-neh,” but that’s too tough for Americans, so it wound up as “suh-LAHN-ee,” almost like a lunch meat!

Another Finnish tip:  just as in Hawaiian, EVERY letter is pronounced.

*********** Morning coach,

We had our Provincial finals yesterday and came out on top of a 46-38 victory. It was a back and forth affair with no turnovers and very few penalties. We had previously beaten the team by 30 points, but the night before the game our  A back (olympic hopeful speed skater) broke her hand at a skating meeting (How you break it at a meeting, I don’t know). So we had to substitute a linebacker at A and not ask her to do anything too ambitious. However, the opposing team, tightened everything up on the LOS in an effort to take away Power and Criss-cross. We managed to bludgeon our way to a few scores, but the power pass was always just a bit off the mark, even though it was open all day.

With the score tied 38-38 and two minutes left- here is what happened (see video).

The QB is not a great football player, but she is a tremendous competitor who worked on this pass for two months prior to the season. Notice how she gets her eyes around right away, hides the ball on her hip and attacks the LOS with her shoulders loaded.

After the game Shandy had an interesting comment. "Things have changed with your teams. They no longer hope to win. They go into games expecting to win. Even though that one was a nail biter, they looked like they expected to win.”

She’s right coach. We’re good (both our girls and boys teams), but there is this competitive confidence amongst the kids now, where even if the game is tight, they know it will turn out alright in the end. I’d heard of this before, but I have never been part of it for more than one season.

So now this season is over, I have an all star team to coach and then our boys season starts. I am looking at almost an entire calendar year coaching. I’m tired, but not tired of coaching.

Tom Walls
Winnipeg, Manitoba

Coach Walls, a former high school head coach coach in Winnipeg, and his wife, Shandy, started a youth football organization from scratch a few years ago, and have built it to the point where it now fields several teams at different age levels, including girls.  That was very perceptive of Shandy.  We often hear people talk about their kids having to “learn how to win.”  We don’t hear nearly so much about this positive attitude of “expecting to win” because it’s not nearly so common.  That is a huge bar to cross.

*********** I came across an interesting story about a couple living in Bainbridge Island, Washington.  It’s a rather affluent community, something of a suburb of Seattle except that Bainbridge Islanders commute by ferry.  The couple had decided to downsize, but the problem was that between their books, their art collection and the things they’d acquired in their extensive travels, they’d amassed quite a bit of “stuff.”

They decided to label everything either Red (not going with them), Green (going with them) and Orange (not sure).  Once they made their decisions  on the Oranges, they then left everything but the Greens on the shelves and tables and walls where they’d always been displayed.

And then they hosted a large party to which they’d invited friends and neighbors.  They served drinks and then held a drawing.  And in the order assigned them by the drawing, the guests were able to choose and keep the item of their choice.

This not only helped them "get rid" of things they treasured - it brought joy  to them to know those things now belong to  people who will also treasure them.


*********** I read this article on Twitter on Friday night, and then I read your NYCU this morning and had to share the article with you. It is in response to the news that Tyler Hilinski had CTE. It is a good read that points out the flawed science that is suggesting that football = CTE.

Greg Koenig
Cimarron, Kansas

(It IS a good read. HW)

http://coachfore.org/2018/06/29/in-defense-of-football/


*********** In Finland, for some reason their football games consist of 12-minute quarters.

Nevertheless, in the country’s top league, the Maple League (so-named because in its early days, the Canadian ambassador donated a trophy for the winner), the perennially powerful Helsinki Roosters defeated the Seinajoki Crocodiles, 88-21.

It’s worse than it looks.  The halftime score was 60-7.  That’s eight touchdowns in 24 minutes. All came on passes by former Duke QB Brandon Connette, who threw for 443 yards before being lifted at halftime.

Believe me, when I coached there, no one had that sort of fire power - partly because the rules at the time prohibited playing an American at quarterback.

Game story + some decent highlights footage: http://www.americanfootballinternational.com/finland-helsinki-roosters-put-an-88-21-whupping-on-seinajoki-crocodiles/?utm_source=American+Football+International+Weekly&utm_campaign=3cb14a8337-American_Football_International_Weekly11_16_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_37995d0cb0-3cb14a8337-80500341


*********** QUIZ ANSWER : As a major college QB, Billy Joe Hobert   took over  when starter Mark Brunell was injured, and as a sophomore he quarterbacked the Washington Huskies to a Rose Bowl win and a share of the 1991 National Championship. He was voted MVP of the Rose Bowl.

As a junior, he continued on his hot streak.  In early November his team was 8-0, on a 22-game win streak, and was ranked Number One in the country. As a starting college quarterback, he was 17-0.

But he had a cowboy’s name, and his undoing came when he tried to live up to it.

Suddenly, the news broke that he had been “loaned” $50,000 by a football booster - which he blew, in the words of one Seattle writer, on “cars, guns, golf clubs and wild weekends with his buddies.” He was immediately declared ineligible, his college career over.  He never started another game, college or pro.  Washington , meanwhile,  lost three of its last four games to finish 9-3.

An NCAA investigation ensued, and just prior to the next season’s opener, the Pac-10 Conference placed such serious sanctions on the football program - which the University accepted with no protest or argument - that Don James, the most successful head coach in the school’s history, resigned in protest and never coached again.

Washington  has struggled ever since to return to the heights it had achieved under him.

Hobert, meanwhile, left the wreckage of the program behind and embarked on a pro career.

He was drafted in the third round by the Raiders, the third QB selected.  After four years as a backup, he was traded to the Bills, but they cut him loose when the starting QB got hurt and he admitted that he wasn’t ready - he didn’t know the plays.

He was acquired by the Saints, who kept him for a little more than two seasons, and he spent two years with the Colts without so much as taking a snap in a regular season game.

In eight years as an NFL QB, he threw for 23 TDs and 25 Interceptions.

Since his wild younger days, Billy Joe Hobert claims to have been born again.  Maybe so. Maybe so.

CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING BILLY JOE HOBERT
JOSH MONTGOMERY - BERWICK, LOUSIANA (“When we were kids (and he was with the Saints) we called him ‘Billy Joe Hopeless.’)
JOE GUTILLA - AUSTIN, TEXAS
MARK KACZMAREK - DAVENPORT, IOWA (Almost forgot all about him…love your trips down memory lane!)
JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
TOM WALLS - WINNIPEG, MANITOBA
MIKE FRAMKE - GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN
CHARLIE WILSON - CRYSTAL RIVER, FLORIDA
TIM BROWN - FLORENCE, ALABAMA
KEN HAMPTON - RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
GREG KOENIG - CIMARRON, KANSAS - Greg sent this clip about Billy Joe Hobert’s daughter: https://www.seattletimes.com/sports/high-school/kennedy-hobert-makes-a-name-for-herself-as-white-river-basketball-star/
KEVIN MCCULLOUGH - LAKEVILLE, INDIANA
OSSIE OSMUNDSON - WOODLAND, WASHINGON


***********  QUIZ - A native of North Battleford, Saskatchewan, he led his high school team to a provincial championship, and in track he set a provincial record in the 100 meters that still stands, more than 35 years later.

As a running back at Washington State, he was twice named Pac-Ten Player of the Year.  He set an NCAA single-game rushing record with 357 yards against Oregon in 1984.  He was a consensus All-American and finished tenth in the Heisman voting.

He is a member of the College Football Hall of Fame.

He was drafted in the third round - the 57th pick overall - by the Saints and was named the 1986 NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year.  He played five years with the Saints - he was named to two Pro Bowls - and finished his career with the Seahawks.

He is one of only five natives of Saskatchewan ever to play in the NFL.

While with New Orleans, he was featured in a documentary entitled "The Saint From North Battleford."

Credit for today’s QUIZ subject (I refuse to use the term "trivia"  to refer to these people who passed our game down to us) to Josh Montgomery, Berwick, Louisiana

FRIDAY,  JUNE 29,  2018 -   "Either love your players or get out of coaching." Bobby Dodd

You seem to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps.... Their power [is] the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.

We're living in a sophisticated time, as you say; more worldly-wise and knowledgeable all around. In that context, is football itself as important as it used to be?

"More important than ever. What else have we got to tie to? Where else can you walk out there even, same everything, even, and compete? I think it's 10 times more important. Let me ask you this. Have you taught your children to work? To sacrifice? Have you taught 'em self-discipline? Hell, no. They don't get it in the home, they don't get it in the school house, they don't get it in the church. Not anymore. I guarantee you this. You send your boy to Fran Curci at Miami—I use him as an example because he's right up the road here—and he'll teach him those things. Check up. Look around. Maybe the football field's the only place left." Bear Bryant

We're losing it everywhere else?    "We've already lost it."

Charlie Wilson
Crystal River, Florida


*********** QUIZ ANSWER:  Eric Dickerson has to be considered one of the greatest runners in the history of the game.

He played his high school ball in Sealy, Texas, and in college, as a member of the notorious “Pony Express,”  he was an All-American, finishing third in the Heisman voting behind Herschel Walker and John Elway.

He was drafted in the first round of the NFL draft - second overall - and in his first eight seasons in the NFL he rushed for more than 1,000 yards.

In his 11-year NFL career, he played for four different teams. He rushed for 1808 yards as a rookie and was named  Rookie of the year.   He was named NFC Offensive Player of the Year three times, and NFL Offensive Player of the Year once. He was named to six Pro Bowls and was All-Pro 5 times.  He was named to the NFL 1980s All-Decade Team.

He rushed for more than 13,259 yards total - 90 touchdowns - and in his second season he set a season rushing record of 2105 that still stands, 35 years later.

Eric Dickerson  is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.


CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING ERIC DICKERSON

JOSH MONTGOMERY - BERWICK, LOUISIANA
JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
MARK KACZMAREK - DAVENPORT, IOWA
ADAM WESOLOSKI - PULASKI, WISCONSIN (The 30 or 30: "The Pony Excess" was a good one.
TIM BROWN - FLORENCE, ALABAMA
JOE GUTILLA - AUSTIN, TEXAS
JOHN BOTHE - OREGON, ILLINOIS
GREG KOENIG - CIMARRON, KANSAS (Can you imagine having to coach against him in high school? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWCMna59yCU)
MIKE FORISTIERE - TOPEKA, KANSAS
KEN HAMPTON - RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
TITO CORREA - NEW BRITAIN, CONNECTICUT
DAVE POTTER - CARY, NORTH CAROLINA (A great RB but not worth the eight players it took for the Colts to get him.
MIKE FRAMKE - GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN
KEVIN MCCULLOUGH - LAKEVILLE, INDIANA
CHARLIE WILSON - CRYSTAL RIVER, FLORIDA
PETE PORCELLI - WATERVLIET, NEW YORK
OSSIE OSMUNDSON - WOODLAND, WASHINGTON


***********   Coach Dave Potter writes from Cary, North Carolina:

Coach Wyatt,

http://www.sportsgrid.com/real-sports/nfl/ranking-the-7-greatest-nfl-coaching-staffs-ever/

Like a lot of insipid "greatest ever" polls that rarely predate the authors' births, this list is just as flimsy.  He overlooks a 1968 Baltimore Colts staff that consisted of three Super Bowl-winning head coaches," 5 NFL head coaches, and 2 Hall of Famers.




*********** What led to the trade of Eric Dickerson to Indianapolis…

Dickerson did not want to play in Los Angeles any more because he was distressed with his contract, which paid him a $682,000 salary, and which he insisted on renegotiating.

''No one player is bigger than the team,'' Robinson said yesterday in Los Angeles. ''When the contract begins to affect on-the-field activities, it's time to make a move.''

The Colts, meanwhile, have not had a player of Dickerson's magnitude since they traded their quarterback, Bert Jones, in 1981.

TUESDAY,  JUNE 26,  2018 -   "Better to lose with conscience clean/Than win by methods false and mean."  Edgar A. Guest

*********** Another  comment on the new playbook by a veteran successful Double Wing coach  “Wow! So happy I bought this. I feel re-energized.  It’s why I fell in love with the offense.” P.P., New York

*********** While listening to a Portland sports talk show a few days ago, I heard them mention how bad things really are for the Pac-12 relative to other networks, specifically the Big Ten.

It seems that in a recent year - 2016, I believe - every Big Ten member received upwards of $50 million as its share of revenue from the Big Ten Network; on the other hand, each Pac-12 member school received roughly $30 million from the Pac-12 Network.  In other words, Purdue and Indiana each received $20 million than, say, USC and Washington, to name the two most financially healthy Pac-12 schools. 

That’s $20 million extra that every single Big Ten school has at its disposal to pay coaches, fund minor (and women’s) sports, build facilities, and expand its athletic bureaucracy. (I added the latter item because history tells us that is sure to happen.)

And based on the revenue projections of the two conferences, that huge disparity will not narrow.

(Maryland and Rutgers are not yet receiving  full conference shares, or I would have mentioned them as examples as well. Rutgers?  USC? Gimme a break.)

*********** After six months on the job as a special assistant to new Oregon State head coach Jonathan Smith, Mike Riley has pulled up stakes and left Corvallis.

For the third time.

The first time, it was to become head coach of the San Diego Chargers.  What the hell - he’d won two Grey Cups as a head coach in Canada, and in his two years at OSU he’d started to turn the program around: he’d gotten them to a 5-6 finish, pretty damn promising for a school whose streak of losing seasons was approaching 30.  So, especially after his successor, Dennis Erickson, broke the losing streak and took the Beavers to national prominence with a waxing of Notre Dame in the Fiesta Bowl, he was forgiven.

The second time, after returning as Beavers’ head coach, it was to take the head job at Nebraska.  It seemed odd that Nebraska, hungry for a return to power, would tap a guy who’d been at Oregon State for 12 years and had done nicely enough that he would appear to be in a position to coach there until he retired.  (Did I mention that Corvallis, Oregon, home of Oregon State, is his hometown - where he went to high school, while his dad, Bud, coached at OSU?)  Beavers’ fans were split.  To some of them, he’d earned a shot at the kind of big-time job every ambitious coach craves.  To others, he was deserting a program and a school that needed the special attention that only a local guy or an alum could provide. To me, it was as if Nebraska had taken a guy who’d been winning stock car races on the dirt track circuit and handed him the keys to a Formula One machine.  It didn’t work, and after three years in Lincoln  in which he went 19-19, with two trips to minor bowls, Mike Riley was fired.

Which brought him back to Corvallis as a special assistant to new Beavers’ head coach Jonathan Smith.  What a deal - back in his hometown, with a chance to be the sort of mentor that every young coach could use - a guy who’s been a head coach in the CFL (Winnipeg), in the NFL, and at two major colleges.

Who knows how things were working out, but for the last six months, that was his job - until last week, when something called the Alliance of American football, an “upstart” league to use the sports cliche, came calling.

Evidently, he couldn’t resist the urge to return to coaching, if that’s what it’s going to be, joining other coaches such as Dennis Erickson, Rick Neuheisel, Steve Spurrier and Mike Martz.

This makes the third time that he’s walked away from Oregon State.  This time, I would argue, he’s giving his old school the finger.

Writes John Canzano in the Portland Oregonian,  “I’m sort of weary with the ‘Mike Riley is such a nice guy’ narrative. I wonder how many nice guys leave a place like OSU in the rear view mirror three times.”

Amen.

*********** Just what the sports world needed - another shoe and apparel company on the scene.

It’s not exactly a new company - it’s Puma, one of the first two modern-day athletic shoe companies, founded by the Dassler brothers. (How many of you know that  the name “Adidas” came from its founder, Adolph “Adi” Dassler?)

Puma, once an industry giant, has been out of the major sports business in the US for some 20 years, but perhaps spurred on by the financial problems besetting Under Armour, it appears to be returning with a vengeance.

This year’s Number One pick in the NBA draft, Arizona’s DeAndre Ayton, will be wearing Pumas.


*********** Penn State put 21,000 student season football tickets on sale last week, selling its allotment for graduate students on Monday and proceeding, day by day, until selling to the freshmen on Friday. In a total of less than 50 minutes, spread over the five days, the entire allotment of 21,000 was gone. The seniors’ tickets were gone in under three minutes.

https://www.pennlive.com/pennstatefootball/index.ssf/2018/06/penn_state_football_exhausts_s.html


*********** If you already have my new playbook and you’ve started working with your kids, you’ll want to take a look at page 154 (Sprint Brown) and 155 (Sprint Brown Throwback). If you don’t have the book yet, mark these pages down. They’re actually two variations of the same play, which I introduced on Friday to a group of kids I’ve been working with.  Almost immediately, those kids were executing sharply, even against token coverage.  If your QB has any speed at all, this  is as “RPO” as you can get, a great chance for him to either throw on the run - or run.  You’ll also want to go to the left (Sprint Black and Sprint Black Throwback). One of the beauties of this concept is your ability to “explode” to the right or the left at the snap, without any motion.


*********** Q. I have a big lineman who colleges are looking at.  He is very athletic, and when he catches the ball in our touch games he shows some real running ability after the catch. My question is, would he be more helpful to me at tight end?  And if I move him to another position, will it hurt his college prospects?

A. To answer your question(s):  If he’s good enough to play guard, he would NOT be more helpful at tight end.  In my mind, Guard is a more crucial position in the Double Wing.

But here’s something you evidently haven’t thought of yet:  if he is as athletic as you say he is, he might be the B-Back of your dreams, because if your B-Back is big enough and strong enough to block any defensive end you’ll ever see, you will definitely be able to run power off-tackle.  Every offensive coach I know of looks for a mismatch - a situation where he has a decided manpower advantage - and this is yours.  And if he is a good enough runner besides, you’ll have an inside game - between the tackles - as well. You’re on your way.

Which brings me to your second question.  For three years, back in the mid-90s, I  took a 6-4, 240 pound kid who’d been a tight end and made him my B-Back (my fullback). He was a basketball player, and quite athletic. My inspiration was something that Woody Hayes once said about what to do with  a dominant player - don’t put him at end,  on one side of the line where he’ll only affect a portion of your plays.  Put him in the middle of your offense where he can run or block and where he can be such a threat that people will become so conscious of him that it makes your misdirection plays go.  With him at B-Back, we always had a power play, and he turned into a pretty decent runner, too.  We turned around a program that a Portland newspaper called “the most forlorn program in the state of Washington.”  It didn’t hurt his college prospects in the slightest. In fact, it may have helped to show how athletic he was.  He wound up starting at Weber State, and in his senior year, Jon Newman was first-team All-Big Sky Conference as a guard. (As Casey Stengel would say, you could look  it up.)  He told me that he always got a laugh from his teammates when he’d tell them that he’d played fullback in high school.

Last season, when my old friend Greg Koenig took a job at Cimarron, Kansas, he found to his delight that he had inherited a combination tight end-defensive end named Jaylen Pickle, who had already committed to Kansas State.  Jaylen  was rated the Number 3 college prospect in the state of Kansas.  He was 6-5, 260, and he could run. 

Only a true, hard core Double Wing  coach could see what Greg saw - a big, strong, fast B-Back.  That’s what Jaylen Pickle became, and by any standard, it was a brilliant move.  (That’s Jaylen at B-Back in the photo at left.)

The Cimarron Blue Jays went 7-3, making it to the state playoffs, and outscoring opponents 360-169.   Assured of a powerful kickoff block on Super Power,  A-Back and All-State linebacker Josh Seabolt rushed for 1592 yards and 17 TDs.   Jaylen Pickle showed that he was far more than just a glorified guard, carrying 69 times for 337 yards and 13 touchdowns - plus nine receptions for 116 yards and a TD.  And he was a terror on the defensive line, where K-State intends to play him.

I don’t know how big or how athletic your player is and I haven’t seen him play. It’s not my team, obviously, and I can’t make your decision for you, but if it were my team, I would sleep well at night knowing that defenses had no answer for our B-Back - nobody who could deal with the kickout block - of my 6-5, 260 pound B-Back.


*********** There at the College World Series - Go Beavers! - the TV showed us one of Omaha’s favorite sons, the great Johnny Rodgers.

And just in case nobody knew who he was, he was wearing a hat that said “HEISMAN TROPHY.”

Do you suppose his car has a bumper sticker that says,  “HONK IF YOU HAVE A HEISMAN, TOO?”


*********** Back in March, a Michigan father, upset with his son’s basketball coach, slipped out of the gym at halftime of a state playoff game and slashed the coach’s tires.

He was caught on surveillance video, and charged with malicious destruction of property.

https://www.wxyz.com/news/parent-charged-after-slashing-coach-s-tires-during-troy-high-school-basketball-game
 
*********** The uncle of a kid who attended a camp put on by Scott Frost caught the new Nebraska coach telling the campers that if they hope to be recruited by the Cornhuskers, they’d better be very, very careful about what they post on social media…

“Aside from GPA, when we’re recruiting kids, the next thing we’re going to look at is what kind of kid the person is. And part of that is looking through every ounce of social media we can possibly look at. So if some kid tweeted something four years ago that’s bad, we’re going to know about it.

“And I’ll tell you this right now — if there’s anything negative about women, if there’s anything racial or about sexuality, if there’s anything about guns or anything like that, we’re just not going to recruit you, period. Piece of advice for you — what you put on social media, that’s your résumé to the world. That’s what you’re trying to tell the world you’re all about. That’s how you’re advertising yourself. Be smart with that stuff.”

FRIDAY,  JUNE 22,  2018 -   "Confidence is the invisible cement that binds a team together."  Bud Wilkinson

*********** Hugh,

From your description Coach Vogler not only sounds like a great guy, but a wonderful dad.  Both so much more than just being a good coach.

It is the Justin Chongs of this world that I have enjoyed coaching most of all.

I think the President could have at least come up with a better name than "Space Force".

Didn't you know in pro basketball there must be at least that many assistants to deal with player egos!  I would imagine that LeBron James had at least 2 assistant coaches (still didn't work).

While coaching in Minnesota and Ohio, and playing by NFHS rules, we would almost always receive the benefit of a flag when a defender would cut our FB's knees, and always the official explanation to the opposing coach was it was called for "dangerous play".  Not here in Texas.
We play by NCAA rules where cut blocking on offense is allowed.  Therefore, what's good for the goose...  Because of that we were forced to come up with a different blocking scheme on power to avoid our FB's getting cut.

Absolutely enjoyed the old NFL film clips of Mike Curtis.  Wow.  The definition of 'tough' in the dictionary should have his picture included, and the definition of 'protective' should have that Georgia grandma's picture included!

Have a great week.

Joe Gutilla
Austin, Texas

*********** Rick Davis, who splits his time between New Zealand and Massachusetts, is a longtime Double Winger who a few years ago spent a week of pre-season practice with us at North Beach.  He writes,  “Thought you'd get a kick out of this photo....it's my brother with Alejandro Villanueva in Newport, RI (Naval War College of all places for a West Pointer). My brother's wife's family is from Columbia, and her cousin was finishing a year-long program, so my brother and his wife travelled from Florida to attend the graduation. Alejandro's father is best friends with the cousin's father, so he was there for the ceremony as well. My brother is 6'6" 240 pounds, to give you an idea how big Alejandro is. Pretty cool.”



*********** Those leftist sh--ts who harassed a cabinet member while she and her husband were dining in a restaurant are very lucky that my wife and I weren't in that restaurant at the time.  We've rolled over and let this go on for so long that they think they can put on their little act with impunity.  It's time to take up the cudgels, fellas.

*********** The Little League season is over.  It’s not July yet, but Daddy ball - all-star tournaments - begin this weekend.

School is barely out here in the Northwest.  Baseball would seem to be just the thing kids need to stay busy this summer, but unless they’re an all-star, baseball’s over for them.

Sure seems short-sighted of major league baseball, which has acknowledged for years that it has to fight for its share of young athletes, to tolerate the idea of turning so many kids loose with a whole summer ahead of them.

Or are the all-star selectors such astute judges of talent that they already know from the time the kids are 12 which ones are going to play in the majors some day?

*********** QUIZ ANSWER - Of all the running backs who are not in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Ken Willard may be the greatest.

He was a native of Richmond, Virginia.

He was  a good enough baseball player to have been offered a contract with the Red Sox, but he passed it up in order to play football for North Carolina.

He continued to play baseball in college, and twice led the ACC in home runs.

On the football field, he was an All-American running back and was named MVP of the 1963 Gator Bowl.

He was chosen by the 49ers in the 1965 draft, the second player chosen overall.  The next two players chosen after him were Dick Butkus and Gale Sayers, both taken by the Bears.

A big (6-1, 220) and strong runner, he was also an excellent receiver. He had five seasons in which his  combined rushing and receiving yardage exceeded 1,000 yards.

He played in four Pro Bowls. 

In nine seasons with the 49ers, he missed only one game.

Overall, he rushed for 6105 yards, and he caught 277 passes for 2184 yards. He scored 62 touchdowns - 45 rushing and 17 receiving.

At the time of his retirement - after playing nine years for the 49ers one with the Cardinals -  he was ranked eighth all-time among NFL rushers.

CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING KEN WILLARD

KEN HAMPTON - RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
GREG KOENIG - CIMARRON, KANSAS - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfnbezJBGVQ
TITO CORREA - NEW BRITAIN, CONNECTICUT
MIKE FRAMKE - GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN
TIM BROWN - FLORENCE, ALABAMA
JOE GUTILLA - AUSTIN, TEXAS
JOSH MONTGOMERY - BERWICK, LOUISIANA
MARK KACZMAREK - DAVENPORT, IOWA - Another “Strat-O-Matic” player that was a big winner for me…Ken Willard…specially on the swing pass
KEVIN MCCULLOUGH - LAKEVILLE, INDIANA
ADAM WESOLOSKI - PULASKI, WISCONSIN
OSSIE OSMUNDSON - WOODLAND, WASHINGTON


*********** QUIZ - His players, and everybody who knew pro football, knew that his two chief assistants - the guys in charge of his offense and defense, before there was such a title as "coordinator" - were really running the team.   But he had the title of head coach, and got the credit.  In his seven years as their head coach,  the Giants played in three NFL Championship Games, winning the title once by beating the Bears 47-7.

His overall record was 53-27-4.

Six of his former players are in the Hall of Fame.  And so, too, are those two assistants, who went on to great careers as head coaches of  teams other than the Giants.

TUESDAY,  JUNE 19,  2018 -  “To hell with exciting. I'd rather be drab as hell and win.”  Woody Hayes

*********** It was graduation at North Beach High last week, a rather emotional time for my wife and me, as the kids that I coached there are just about all gone now.  The entire coaching staff (all three of us) are now gone, but I managed to get this photo of my wife and me with former fellow coach James Vogler and his girls.  I am so proud of Coach Vogler - he has raised those young ladies by himself, since they were in grade school. It used to be a special treat for me to see them outside our locker room after practice, waiting for Dad to finish up so he could take them home.  (The word on his shirt helps explain Dad’s approach to teaching, to coaching, and to raising his kids. He was THERE for them, and he was a pillar of strength for them.)  He protected his girls and they knew he loved them, but he didn’t smother them. They were excellent students and three-sport athletes - and they are lovely people as well. 

It always amuses me when I hear about a guy giving up coaching to “spend more time with my family,” because Coach Vogler managed to coach football and track - and spend extra time after school helping kids with their math - yet still find plenty of time to be everything to his girls. For most of the time I worked with him, going back to 2008, he had to give them up every other weekend, and he was one miserable guy on those weekends. 

Now, he’s really going to have to get used to an empty house.  From the time she was a freshman, older sister Jenna was determined to attend the US Naval Academy, and there she is, in the photo,  home on leave after finishing her plebe year at Annapolis.  She hopes to become a Cobra pilot.  Mariah, Jenna’s younger sister, has  taken part in Washington’s “running start” program, which enabled her to earn an AA degree by attending a junior college the past two years. She has also received an appointment to the Naval Academy, and in a couple of weeks she’s off to Newport, Rhode Island where, like Jenna, she’ll spend a year at the Naval Academy Prep School.  Her ambition is to be a Marine infantry officer.

Coach Vogler, having raised two girls headed for careers in the military,  is not going to be an empty-nester in the Pacific Northwest: he’s headed back to his native Arizona, to a teaching job in Prescott.

*********** One of the problems with our current culture is that people are afraid to sound corny. But as coaches, we have a chance to earn a special place in our players’ lives, and corny as it may sound, we can’t be afraid to tell those boys that we love them.  Or that we’re proud of them.

At the recent North Beach High graduation I saw Justin Chong, a former player whom I hadn’t seen in over four years. He was there to watch his girlfriend’s younger brother graduate.  Justin played tight end and middle linebacker for us in 2012 and 2013, and he was one tough kid.  In fact, when he first showed up, as a junior, we were afraid he might be a bit too tough, at least off the field.  He’d been at North Beach as a freshman, but he’d been running with a rough crowd and he’d gotten into a bit of trouble, and his mom very wisely sent him to another school for a year to get him away from his buddies. When he returned after his year away, we knew he could be a player for us, but we had our doubts: we couldn’t be sure he’d changed any, and we certainly didn’t want to have to deal with the “old” Justin. 

Shortened version of the story: he was never a problem.  He was coachable.  He was a team player.  And he never got close to being in any trouble.  Oh - and he was a very good player.  His senior year, he was a team captain and an all-league linebacker on a 7-3 team, the school’s first winning team in five years.

And then, after graduation, instead of hanging around town, he headed off to a school in Idaho called Northwest Lineman College.  No, not guards and tackles - electrical linemen.  (They can’t make me say the more political correct “lineworkers.”)

He’s now an apprentice lineman in Beaverton, Oregon for Portland General Electric, and well on his way to becoming a journeyman.   I’m as proud of him as I could be of any of our players who’ve gone to a four-year college -  and I told him so.

*********** I still find myself from time to time questioning whether the Air Force shouldn’t have simply remained part of the Army - the Army Air Corps, as it was known all during the Last War That America Won.

But no… We had to have a whole new branch of the armed forces, an Air Force - with its own secretary, its own chief of staff, its own hierarchy,  its own academy.

So now our president's calling for a  “Space Force?”

WTF?

Do we really need another service lined up at the public trough, fighting for its share of defense funds?

Wouldn't you call this an “expansion of big government?”


*********** After my wife read this to me, I had to ask her to hand me the paper so I could read it myself:

“The Memphis Grizzlies have named Jerry Stackhouse, Nick Van Exel and six others as assistant coaches…”

Wait, I thought.  "Six others?"  EIGHT assistants? 

NBA teams carry just 15 players, with only 12 of them active at any one time. They play three and sometimes four times a week, which doesn’t leave a while lot of time for practice. There's no recruiting to be done, as in college. And yet,  they need EIGHT ASSISTANT COACHES?

Hmm.  So maybe this is where the NFL teams got with the idea that they need upwards of 20 assistants.

* The Eagles have 25 assistant coaches.

* The Seahawks have 23 assistant coaches, including one with the title “Offensive assistant” and another called “Associate Head Coach.”  The offensive line coach has two assistants, the defensive line coach has one. There is an Assistant Quarterbacks Coach and an Assistant Linebackers Coach.

* The Cowboys have 22, including four strength coaches.

* The Vikings have 21. The head strength and conditioning coach has three assistants. The quarterbacks coach has an assistant quarterbacks coach.

But wait -

* The Patriots have - 14.  FOURTEEN!   What does this guy Belichick know that the others don’t?

*********** LeBron James, who to the best of my knowledge never once sat his ass down in a college classroom, would seem to be the last person you’d expect to be telling us about the way college athletes are being exploited, but there he is, adding his name to an HBO show that sounds as if it’s going to be just more of the usual “pay those poor kids” rubbish.

https://coachad.com/news/lebron-james-to-co-produce-hbo-show-on-exploitative-world-of-ncaa-sports/

*********** Illinois is going to adopt a “mercy rule” for high school basketball, calling for a running clock in the fourth quarter any time there is a 30-point difference in the score at the end of three quarters.

*********** Johnny Manziel didn’t get into the Hamilton TigerCats’ game this past weekend, a 28-14 loss to the Calgary Stampeders. 

The problem with the TiCats doesn’t appear to be the quarterbacking, though.  Jeremiah Masoli threw for 344 yards.

The problem seems to be the defense.

CLUE: The defensive coordinator is Jerry Glanville, a much-heralded master of self-promotion. 

*********** Watching the Hamilton-Calgary game, I heard the referee announce a penalty for an “illegal block” - against the defense!  Damned of they didn’t catch one of these guys who are the bane of any Double Wing coach’s existence - a defender - in this case a defensive back about to be kicked out by a pulling lineman - cutting a blocker at his knees.

And what do you know?  The announcers said it was a “safety issue” - something we’ve been trying to tell officials for years.

*********** Hi Coach,
Just read your news page today...what a rotten thing to happen to Coach Potter and Coach Williams! At the clinic, I was impressed with their kids and how well they executed the offense and the new stuff you threw at them. Maybe the new coach didn't want to have to explain why his JV team was winning but his varsity team wasn't. On the other hand, I don't know how you can run two different systems with your JV and Varsity. Regardless, it looks like the guy could have found a place for two good coaches who already had an investment in the kids and the program.

Not saying this guy is not a good coach (he must be doing something right to land a high school head job) but middle school W-L records can be deceiving. Most middle school coaches I know couldn't even tell you their records. Almost always, talent wins in middle school and there is usually a wide disparity between schools. If you are fortunate to coach at the talented school, and you are a decent coach, you can win a lot of games. Things tend to even out in high school.

Just my two-cents. I hope Coach Potter and Coach Williams land on their feet somewhere they are appreciated.

Jim Crawley
China Grive, North Carolina

*********** A longtime western New York high school coach who lost his job filed a suit against parents who claimed that he had a “drinking problem” - and he was awarded $50,000.

https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/sports/high-school/2018/05/18/high-school-basketball-coach-mark-storm-defamation-lawsuit-parents-honeoye-athletes-helicopter/543634002/

***********  When we were kids in school, we used to sit and roll our eyes when Officer Friendly should come to school and tell us (1) never dart into the street from between parked cars; (2) never chase a ball into the street; (3) always cross at the corner; (4) if there’s a traffic light, always wait for it to turn green; and especially - (5) look both ways before crossing.

Well, duh, we’d say at Number 5.  Who doesn’t?

Answer: every dumbass who’s graduated from public schools in the United States in the last 20 years or so.

We’ve been so busy teaching them how many genders there are and how to have safe sex with them that we’ve neglected to pass along to them one of the basics of survival in urban life, and as a result, pedestrians are increasingly being knocked off.

The interesting thing to me is that while states and cities appear concerned about the increased fatalities involving cars and pedestrians, most of the attention is being give to drivers - maybe they’re going too fast… maybe they’re distracted by smartphones… maybe they’re drunk or high on pot. 

There are so many explanations that it starts to sound like one of those stupid PSA’s about people not knowing which size car seat  to use (“did you know that friendly kids have more friends?” “Well, yeah - everybody knows that.”)

Well, yeah, everybody knows that drivers shouldn’t go too fast… or drive distracted… or drive while under the influence.

But I sure wish I had a dime for every fool I’ve seen crossing a busy street, immersed in texting and totally oblivious to danger.

*********** Speaking of fools,  a spectator ran onto the field during Saturday’s game between the BC Lions and the Montreal Allouettes, and wound up being knocked on his ass by a BC defensive back.

But do you think they’d let us see it?   Oh, no.  Professional football, which has no qualms about showing players hitting each other senseless, is united in its determination not to let us see drunks on the field.

Bear in mind that there is no similar protection from “comedians” holding up the bloody, severed head of the President of the United States.

http://www.theherdnow.com/video-idiot-fan-on-field-during-cfl-game-gets-knocked-senseless-by-fed-up-player/

Some of us remember a bygone era when it was okay for us poor schlubs to see - live - how a pro football player deals appropriately with an intruder in his workspace…

https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?fr=spigot-chr-ffmac&p=mike+curtis+hits+fan+on+field#id=5&vid=804e6de2d8563d075a231f6ec9011b2e&action=click

*********** So the FBI had people in its employ who are essentially crooked - who worked, while on the taxpayer's dime,  to undermine the election of a President.

Now, though, we can rest easy.  The Director assures us that all his employees are going to undergo "ethics training."

Right, boss.  Just take a bunch of people without ethics or scruples and give them a day or two - with pay - of lectures on ethics, and - shazam! - all fixed.   That ought to restore credibility to the FBI.

*********** There is tough.  And then there is Georgia Grandma Tough.  A Georgia woman, attacked by a rabid bobcat, strangled the damn thing, and the entire time she fought with it - if you’ve ever seen an angry wildcat, you’ll appreciate this - she refused to scream for fear it would draw the attention of her granddaughter and put her at risk.

http://www.onlineathens.com/news/20180615/hart-county-grandmother-kills-rabid-bobcat-with-bare-hands

*********** Hugh,

Spent the past three days with my sister-in-law (wife's youngest sib) so I wasn't able to catch your Friday news and quiz until today.

There's going to be some serious "splainin" to do regarding that FBI nonsense.  While I would like to believe that all of the hard-working base of the FBI are good people, it is a hard pill to swallow that those who were in charge didn't infect some of those underneath them.  We both know that whichever Humpty Dumpty they bring before the Congress to testify a lot of other Humpty Dumpty's will join in on "the great fall".  That whole "Russia gate" Mueller debacle we are witness to has done more damage to this country than "Watergate" could have ever posed.

I don't think Mike will have that problem with his parents.  He is making quite an impression on them with his home visits.  The local cops are even getting on board by bringing the kids food for them to eat before/after their workouts. 

The PAC 12 is a by-product of the progressive efforts in major cities on the west coast in general.  In my opinion its little wonder why they have fallen way behind the other Power 5 conferences in the major sports (football and basketball in particular), and have seemingly lost some of the major markets.  Examples:  San Francisco/Berkeley, Los Angeles (albeit large portions of it), Portland, and Seattle.

I missed Darryl Rogers as one of the FBS coaching choices.  Another Fresno State guy.

That's truly unfortunate news about Coach Potter and Coach Williams.  I know a guy in Topeka that could use their help!

I had the privilege of watching some of those Straight T teams on video.  They can bring it.

QUIZ:  Roosevelt "Rosie" Brown.

Have a great week!

Joe Gutilla
Austin, Texas

*********** Is it a death wish, or was there really some rational business (or sports) reason for the NFL to participate in the New York “Pride” Parade? 

https://sportsnaut.com/2018/06/nfl-to-take-part-in-nyc-pride-parade-for-the-first-time/

***********  QUIZ  ANSWER:  Roosevelt Brown was so much bigger than the other kids as a child that he was moved ahead two grades in school, and as a result,  when he reported to his first NFL camp as a rookie, he was only 19.  But he was a physical marvel, 6-3, 255 with a 29-inch waist.  His fellow rookie, Sam Huff, called him a “big Jim Brown.”

To the NFL, though, he was a total unknown,  having played at little-known Morgan State, a small historically-black school in Baltimore, in the days before the NFL scouted the black colleges.   The NFL draft lasted 30 rounds in those days, and he was the 318th player chosen, known to the Giants only because of his having been on the Pittsburgh Courier’s Black All-American team.

Rosey Brown (not to be confused with his equally famous teammate, defensive tackle Roosevelt Grier) played in 162 games in 13 seasons for the Giants, and from 1955 though 1963,  with him at left tackle on offense, the Giants won six division championships and one NFL title.  

Five players from those Giants’ teams are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and he is one of them.

He was named All-Pro eight times, and played in 10 Pro Bowls.   He was named to the NFL Team of the 1950s, and in 1975 he was named to the NFL’s 50th Anniversary team.

The Giants take pride in saying, “Once a Giant, always a Giant,” and Roosevelt Brown embodied it: as a player, assistant coach and scout, he spent 51 years in the Giants’ organization.

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/11/sports/roosevelt-brown-71-dies-hall-of-fame-giants-tackle.html

CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING ROOSEVELT BROWN-
KEN HAMPTON - RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
TITO CORREA - NEW BRITAIN, CONNECTICUT
GREG KOENIG - CIMARRON, KANSAS
JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
ADAM WESOLOSKI - PULASKI, WISCONSIN
TIM BROWN - FLORENCE, ALABAMA
PETE PORCELLI - WATERVLIET, NEW YORK
MIKE FRAMKE - GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN
JOSH MONTGOMERY - BERWICK, LOUISIANA
OSSIE OSMUNDSON - WOODLAND, WASHINGTON
KEVIN MCULLOUGH - LAKEVILLE, INDIANA
MARK KACZMAREK - DAVENPORT, IOWA

*********** QUIZ - Of all the running backs who are not in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, he may be the greatest.

He was a native of Richmond, Virginia.

He was  a good enough baseball player to have been offered a contract with the Red Sox right out of high school, but he passed it up in order to play football for North Carolina.

He continued to play baseball in college, and twice led the ACC in home runs.

On the football field, he was an All-American running back and was named MVP of the 1963 Gator Bowl.

He was chosen by the 49ers in the 1965 draft, the second player chosen overall.  (The next two players chosen after him were Dick Butkus and Gale Sayers, both taken by the Bears.)

A big (6-1, 220) and strong runner, he was also an excellent receiver. He had five seasons in which his  combined rushing and receiving yardage exceeded 1,000 yards.

He played in four Pro Bowls. 

In nine seasons with the 49ers, he missed only one game.

Overall, he rushed for 6105 yards, and he caught 277 passes for 2184 yards. He scored 62 touchdowns - 45 rushing and 17 receiving.

At the time of his retirement - after playing nine years for the 49ers and one with the Cardinals -  he was ranked eighth all-time among NFL rushers.