TUESD

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SIGN UP TO PRESENT THE BLACK LION AWARD TO A PLAYER ON YOUR TEAM -  COACH GREG KOENIG (ON THE RIGHT IN THE PHOTO) HAS PRESENTED IT TO PLAYERS AT THREE DIFFERENT SCHOOLS IN COLORADO AND KANSAS SINCE 2001 - AND NOW HE'S AT HIS FOURTH SCHOOL - WHERE HE WILL ALSO PRESENT IT!  IT'S THE ONLY AWARD HE GIVES!  IT'S ABSOLUTELY FREE - YOUR PLAYER RECEIVES A CERTIFICATE AND AN OFFICIAL BLACK LION PATCH.  ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS WRITE A LETTER NOMINATING YOUR PLAYER.  NOW'S THE TIME TO SIGN YOUR TEAM UP - EMAIL ME THE NAME OF THE TEAM AND THE HEAD COACH'S CONTACT INFO:
blacklionaward@mac.com

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*********** I was watching two Seattle area schools play on TV last Thursday night. I especially wanted to see Kennedy Catholic’s sophomore quarterback, Sam Huard, who threw for 10 TDs in a game earlier this season.  A tall lefthander, Huard is the son of  a former University of Washington and NFL quarterback, Damon Huard, and the nephew of another former Husky and NFL quarterback, TV analyst Brock Huard.

I was certainly impressed with the kid’s ability, but Kennedy (5-2) seemed unable to put Kentwood (2-5) away.

Finally, though, with under two minutes to play, Kennedy took a 36-35 lead.

But Kentwood drove into field goal range, and with seconds left, called time out and lined up for what it hoped would be the winning kick.

Unfortunately for Kentwood, though, the snap was bad, and the holder, unable to scramble out of trouble, threw incomplete.

With that, the Kennedy Catholic bench emptied and Kennedy players raced to the end zone to celebrate the hard-fought win.

Or so they thought.

Unnoticed by anyone but the officials, it had only been third down, and when the Kentwood holder threw incomplete, there was still time remaining - and it was still Kentwood’s ball.

The Kennedy celebration? The act of players leaving the bench area resulted in an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty - and another (and closer) field goal attempt by Kentwood.

This time the snap was good.  And so were the hold and the kick.

Final:  Kentwood 38, Kennedy Catholic 36.

Think about that the next time you wonder about the wisdom of kicking that field goal a down early.

*********** College Football playoff situation - updated

Remember:
1. No team with two losses will make the playoff
2. There are still plenty of teams that will finish with no worse than one loss
3. No team outside the Power 5 conferences has a chance of getting in with one loss.  At present, Central Florida, Cincinnati and South Florida of the American Athletic are still undefeated - but they all have to play each other.
4. Notre Dame, as an independent, has an inside track even with one loss (should it lose to USC) because as an independent it can stay home and watch as other playoff contenders eliminate each other in bogus “conference championship” games.
5. With Notre Dame still unbeaten, the Irish are likely to be one of the four playoff teams, which means only three spots remain for the Power 5 conferences. That also means there is little likelihood of two teams from the same Power 5 conference.  Most importantly, though, it means two conferences - and all their members - will not get a nickel of playoff money, while Notre Dame gets to pocket AN ENTIRE CONFERENCE SHARE. (Who made that deal, anyhow?)

Speaking in terms of Power 5 conferences only…

There are still two unbeaten Power 5 teams:
Alabama and Clemson

My call: “Alabama plays Tennessee in their traditional Third Saturday in October game, but Bama isn’t going to blow this one.” True dat. 

My call: “Clemson and NC State meet Saturday - at Clemson.  The winner has a great shot at taking the Atlantic Division spot in the ACC championship.”  Clemson definitely got the job done.

Last Thursday’s preview: “there are still lots of one-loss teams fighting to stay that way and make it to their conference championships.  Several of them will play in big games Saturday…”

1. Michigan vs Michigan State?  Michigan got the job done

3. Texas vs Oklahoma State? Texas got thejob done.

4. West Virginia vs Baylor?  WVU got the job done.

5. LSU vs Mississippi State? LSU got the job done.

6. Ohio State at Purdue?  “Buckeyes are just too good,” I wrote.  Well.  As I wipe the egg off my face… apologies to the good folks from Purdue whose patience and forebearance was rewarded with one of the most inspired performances you’ve ever seen over an Ohio State team that looked dazed.  This team - the same Ohio State that gave us Archie Griffin and Eddie George and Jim Otis and Bob Ferguson and John Brockington and Ezekiel Elliott and Hopalong Cassidy and Vic Janowicz threw the football 73 times!

7. Vanderbilt at Kentucky?  Kentucky got the job done.

8. Oregon at Washington State? (“So is ESPN Game Day, in recognition of 15 years of the Cougar flag - Ole Crimson - waving at Game Days around the country. The loser will come out of this with two losses and can kiss its playoff chances good-bye.  The Pac-12’s last hope for a playoff spot is for Oregon to win this one and win all the rest. The Ducks’ toughest game the rest of the way is at Utah, and then, of course,  the conference title game.  Washington State? If they beat the Ducks, the Cougars still have to beat Stanford, Colorado and Washington, and - out here it’s called “Cougin’ it” - they can’t possibly win them all.”) The Cougars won, and now - tada - they “control their own destiny.”

9. Duke vs Virginia?  Duke was 5-1 going in, but they’re 5-2 now.

10. Iowa vs Maryland?  Hawkeyes got the job done. They’re now 6-1 - and they’re still ranked below Penn State, who’s 5-2.  They’ll settle that one on Saturday.

*********** My playoff prediction, updated:

1. Alabama.  Best team in the country by far.  Jalen Hurts, their "second starter" at quarterback (he deserves a better title than “backup”) could start for almost any other team in the country.  He appears to have suffered an ankle injury against Tennessee Saturday. The Tide will beat LSU, MIssissippi State and Auburn.  (And The Citadel.)

2. Clemson. The Tigers have had their close call against Syracuse.  They dispatched pretender NC State with such ferocity that it’s obvious they’re in a class by themselves in the ACC.  They will beat Duke and archrival South Carolina.

3. Notre Dame.  Damn, this one pisses me off.  But a deal’s a deal, and evidently the wizards who put together the playoff didn’t have the stones to tell ND to go get in a conference like every other major college team.  Any other year, Northwestern, Florida State, Syracuse or USC would be a significant hurdle - but not this year.  USC’s thumping by Utah Saturday night makes it apparent that USC is still a long way from restoring the glory days.

4. Either Michigan or Ohio State.  This assumes that they will both enter their final-week matchup unbeaten, and that the winner of their game will move on to the Big Ten championship game - and win it.  Even that might not be enough for Ohio State to overcome the embarrassing beat-down that Purdue put on the Buckeyes this past Saturday.

(At the very least, I’d like to see Notre Dame in that #4 spot, so the Irish have to play Alabama in the semi-finals.  But Clemson will beat them just as bad.)

OUTSIDE SHOTS:

Georgia or Florida (or even Kentucky) could slip in with an SEC title-game win over Alabama (or LSU). Despite rankings and all that, I don’t see how Bama could get the nod - this time - over a team good enough to beat it in the conference chmpionship game.

LSU - But they have to beat  Alabama. (The game’s in Baton Rouge.)

Iowa - Only if the Hawkeyes win out. And Wisconsn loses once more. Iowa still has to play Penn State, Purdue and Northwestern.  And even if the Hawkeyes  were to run the table, Wisconsin - the only team to have beaten Iowa - would get the Big Ten West title game spot if the Badgers were to win the rest of their games.

Oklahoma/Texas/West Virginia - It’s quite a job for any of them.  Texas and OU both have to play WVU. And they both have to play Texas Tech.  And when one of them is eliminated,  the two survivors  will have to meet in the conference title game.

Washington State - A Mike Leach team will always put up points. And don’t look now but the Cougs play pretty good defense, too. But they’ve already got one loss and it’s highly unlikely that they’ll win the rest of their games - not with Stanford, Washington and a conference championship game still ahead.

*********** SITUATIONS TO WATCH:

1. PENN STATE.  The Lions are now 5-2 (remember when they were just one bad call away from possibly beating Ohio State?). They play Iowa this week, then they play Michigan at home and then Wisconsin on the road.  That’s three tough games in a row.  Remember a year ago when Georgia State lined up for a field goal with 11 seconds left to play, and Lions’ coach James Franklin called a timeout? Penn State led, 56-0. Franklin at first defended what he did as always keeping his foot on the gas, then after catching heat from some New York sports writers, he denied that he did it to ice the kicker and preserve the precious shutout, and said that he called the timeout to get his second unit in the game.  Right.  That’s why he called it nanoseconds before the kid kicked.  Anyhow, if you believe in karma, three weeks from now Penn State could very well be 5-5 (2-5 in conference play) and playing Maryland - Maryland, for God’s sake! - to stay out of the Big Ten East cellar.

2. OREGON. A week ago the Ducks were riding high. Their convincing win over the Washington Huskies had washed away the pain and stain of their lone loss, a fluky, overtime defeat at the hands of Stanford, and now they had a shot at a possible playoff spot.  All they had to do was beat Washington State. But as one Portland sports writer noted, the game started at 4:00 and the Ducks started at 5:30.  By the time they got serious, the Cougars had put them away.  The Ducks play a suddenly-alive UCLA, then at tough Utah, then Arizona State.  They could lose two more.

3. OHIO STATE. Earlier in the week came the rumors that Urban Meyer might be on the verge of another “health crisis” - you know, like the one that caused him to walk away from the train wreck about to take place in Florida.  And then came the whipping put on the Buckeyes by Purdue. This week, they’re off, and then they’re at Nebraska.  The Cornhuskers have been showing signs of life lately, but the Bucks have too much talent for them.

4. PURDUE. The Boilermakers lost their first three games - including a four-point, opening-game win against Northwestern - so they’re way out of any playoff conversation. But they’re now 3-1 in Big Ten play, with a decent shot at getting into the title game: they need to win out, and they need someone else to beat Northwestern.

5. NEBRASKA. The Huskers thoroughly beat Minnesota in Lincoln.  And to their fans’ credit, there was no storming the field in celebration.  I mean, this is still Nebraska, right?  With the proud tradition of Nebraska football, ending a losing streak is not celebrated as if it were a national title.  Besides, they have to keep focused on Saturday’s big game against Bethune-Cookman.

6. MINNESOTA. After rowing the boat to wins in their first three games, the Gophers must have let go of the oars, because they’ve lost four in a row.   And they haven’t been close in any of them.  WTF is going on?

7. NAVY. Their offense seems to have lost a step.  Is it me, or  could it be that having to play a full conference schedule - in a very tough conference at that - is beginning to take a physical toll on the Middies?

*********** Harbaugh just can’t seem to resist being an a$$hole,  which explains why he’s got guys on his team like  Devin Bush out there before the game playing the child, scuffing up the Michigan State Spartan logo, and why he defends the guy’s actions afterward.

*********** I sort of wanted to see Cincinnati remain unbeaten, even if it meant beating Temple, but not after I saw the dirty hit that a Cinci player put on a defenseless Temple receiver.  That did it for me.  That was borderline assault and battery.

https://www.12up.com/posts/6201588-video-incredibly-dirty-hit-on-temple-player-results-in-impressive-coach-freakout

*********** The Michigan-Michigan State game was delayed by severe weather for 1-1/2 hours, and once they resumed playing, Fox seemed to think none of us cared to resume watching, shuffling us off to some little-known Fox channel that I have yet to find on either cable or Dish.

*********** You won’t see this happen often, but just before halftime, with one inch to go and one down to score a touchdown, Army - a wishbone team - wasn’t able to punch it in against Miami (OH).

*********** With 17 seconds left to play, Miami scored against Army to pull to within 21-20.  Any chance that the whatever-they-ares-now (used to be Redskins) might have decided to go for the win went out the window, when the receiver who scored the TD just had to spike the damn ball. Just had to do it.  After the penalty they kicked the point and the game went into OT, but Army won. 

*********** Diversity is our strength…  It wasn’t so much that the referee at the Army-Miami game was female.  It was having to listen to that shrill voice. 

*********** Miami (OH) linebacker Brad Koenig (“KAY-nig”) is really good.  Miami had a good scheme against Army, and Koenig was making tackles all over the field.

*********** Maybe these spread teams that don’t even bother to recruit fullbacks any more ought to pay attention:  Michigan ran a fullback, a 6-3, 250 pound horse named Ben Mason, as an I-formation tailback for a score against Michigan State.

*********** Starting to see a lot of flat passes being thrown from shotgun to the running back that was just faked to.

*********** Indiana gave Penn State all they wanted but the Hoosiers just can’t seem to finish the deal.

*********** Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, said Samuel Johnson. 

First Nike aligns itself with Colin Kaepernick, and then it goes and plays patriotic by resurrecting a story of the 1918 LSU team - whose members went off to fight in World War I - as the pretext for putting the Tigers in all-white uniforms with purple helmets.

I’ll bet you could even buy replica jerseys at the LSU book store.

*********** Who else was hoping that Purdue would go for two at the end, just to make it a nice round 50 against THE Ohio State University?

*********** ESPN College Game Day did a very nice feature on Tyler Trent, a young Purdue fan with terminal cancer who basically expressed a dying wish that his beloved Boilermakers could somehow beat Ohio State.  It was quite moving, and if there was any football fan in the United States who had trouble picking sides before watching, the choice was easy afterward.

*********** Purdue was picked to have a good season, but then the Boilermarkers started out 0-3, including a loss to Eastern Michigan. Purdue Coach Jeff Brohm was asked after the Ohio State win what happened to turn things around and he started out, “We were 0-3. We were conservative, and we got our ass - our butts - handed to us…”

*********** Mike Leach has a dry sense of humor, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him smile. (Remind you of Bobby Knight?)

So when he had finished his deadpan postgame explanation that his Cougs still hadn’t played a compete game, the interviewer said to him, “Try to enjoy this.”

*********** Tua Tagovailoa still hasn’t played in the fourth quarter of a game.  He’s thrown 25 TD passes and ZERO interceptions.

*********** Linfield College, a D-III school in McMinnville, Oregon, is now 4-2.  If they beat Pacific Lutheran next Saturday,  2018 will be their 63rd straight winning season.

*********** A few days ago I happened on a great TV feature on Jim Abbott, whom some of you may remember as an outstanding left-handed pitcher at Michigan, and then for a number of major league teams.

In his major league career, he won 87 games and had 888 strikeouts, and in 1993, while playing for the Yankees, he pitched a no-hitter.

But It’s never possible to write about him without mentioning that he was born without a right hand, and I do so in admiration of how, not unlike a great football coach named Mark Speckman (who was born with no hands), he learned to “deal with it.”

His biggest initial challenge was fielding - throwing with his left hand, then quickly putting on his glove to catch the ball, and then just as quickly shedding the glove and grabbing the ball with his hand so he could throw.  His story of how as a little kid he worked and worked to get good enough at fielding is quite inspirational.

He was an exceptionally talented athlete, driven not just to compete, but to excel. “I was tired of being an inspiration,” he said.  “I didn’t want to win the Courage Award. I wanted to be the MVP.”

What was especially interesting to me was that he also played high school football, and rather well at that.   His high school, Flint (Michigan) Central, turned out many good athletes and good teams.

He was a quarterback, of course, but first the coaches had to figure out how he was going to get the ball from center, and one of them recalled how funny it must have seemed to see three coaches kneeling down, watching him take the snap.

He didn’t start a game until the final game of his senior year, when he was pressed into service - and threw four touchdown passes.

Interviewed on the show, his high school baseball coach said,  “playing football made him the baseball player that he became.’


*********** If you didn’t watch the Washington State-Oregon game, you missed this.  Even if you did watch, you might have missed it.



Washington State, in dark uniforms, is lined up in what would ordinarily be a 3 x 1 spread formation, with trips to the right. (There is also a split end on the left but he’s out of the picture, to the bottom of the screen.)

Just one little matter: that flexed end on the right side (the guy circled) is the “center.”. He’s going to flip the ball to the QB, who’s going to hand off to the running back, who’s going to run a plain old running play to the left.  (But then, he’s going to cut back to the right, break maybe six or seven tackles, and dive in for a Cougar score.)

Nothing at all ingenious about the play itself, but the formation on the right side was an adaptation of the “Lonesome Polecat” as explained by the great Tiger Ellison in his book, ‘Run and Shoot Football” (1965).

Two things to note about the “center”:

1. He doesn’t have to snap the ball between his legs. He can flip it directly back, of course, but he can also throw it, underhanded, to either side.  (In this case, he’s going to throw it to the left, to the QB)

2. Although he may be the “center” in the sense that he’s snapping the ball,  he’s on the end of the line, and he’s wearing an eligible number (17) - which makes him an eligible receiver.

It’s interesting that the Cougars ran what they did, because it ws only a couple of weeks ago that I got an email from  Mat Hedger, of  Langdon, North Dakota, who saw Iowa run something similar and asked if I’f ever run from any “special formations.”

Why, yes, I told him.  I’ve done stuff like that on occasion - mostly toward the end of a season as a way of having fun and keeping guys interested.

But a few years ago, finding ourselves in a first-vs-fourth first-round playoff game (we were the fourth-place team and we were facing a to-ranked team, one that we knew would blow us out by 50-60 points)  we decided to run some Lonesome Polecat - Credit to Glenn “Tiger” Ellison and his book, ‘Run and Shoot Football” (1965).  It was a very limited package, because the emphasis is on improvisation...



We got blown out, as we knew we would, but we had a lot of fun in practice and we actually ran off a few good plays in the game - more than we would have if we’d stayed in our base offense.  Try taking a very good scrambler and lining him up ten yards deep - and see hard it is for two or three defenders to run him down.  (Any more than that and they’ll have trouble covering all your eligibles and defending against the blocking of your five linemen.)

*********** The Web site is named “isgrudengoneyet.com

And the  answer is an emphatic NO

and running counters show:

* the years/weeks/days/hours/minutes/seconds left in his contract

* The amount of money he’s made so far

* The amount of money he’s made just since you logged in

* The amount of money he’s still due

http://isgrudengoneyet.com/

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

Sorry for the late reply.  

What gives Urban Meyer a headache?  BOILERMAKERS!!  That was a flat-out take 'em out behind the shed and give 'em an old-fashioned a** whoopin'!!

Suddenly...Michigan is looming even larger for the Buckeyes.

Mike Leach has a favorite new hobby...Duck Hunting!

Only thing standing between Notre Dame and the National Championship Playoff is Notre Dame.  Each of their remaining games is a trap game.  Any one of them could knock the Irish off.  Navy has the option.  Florida State is steadily improving.  Northwestern has a history of pulling off big upsets.  Syracuse is a sleeper.  USC is a rival.

Some TV talking heads continue talking about Texas as playoff contender.  NOT.  As much as I would like to see the Horns in it their remaining schedule is daunting, and even if they were lucky enough to keep winning they would have to face Oklahoma again in the Big 12 championship.  Sooners will be fired up for that rematch.

I think it's way too early to start predicting the playoff.  Way too many tough conference games remaining, and conference championships.  People keep saying Alabama is a lock, BUT... they still have to play Ed Oregon's fired-up LSU Tigers IN Baton Rouge next week.  Clemson may have the easiest schedule (and the best team).  See above for Notre Dame.  Ohio State may be fading and thus opening the door for either Michigan or Iowa.  The PAC 12 champ will be playing in the Rose Bowl.  Georgia is still a factor.

My alma mater Fresno State continues to impress at 7-1.  Only San Diego State and Boise State (as tough as it gets) stand in their way of being considered for a January 1 bowl game.

Army managed to escape a huge upset at the hands of Miami OH.  Goes to show that even the most disciplined teams can't afford taking anyone lightly.

I thoroughly enjoy seeing those old play sheets from great coaches of the past. 

Talk soon!

Joe Gutilla
Austin, Texas

Joe’s joke is pretty good.  I wonder how many younger guys - or guys who didn’t grow up around working men - even know what a boilermaker (the drink) is! The boilermaker is nothing more than “a shot and a beer.”  The shot - usually blended whiskey (once called “rye” in Pennsylvania) - is tossed down neat in one gulp, followed by the beer - usually a short draft or a small bottle because it’s as much about the whiskey as it is about the beer.  I see on Youtube that there are people trying to call it a “cocktail,” but it’s nothing of the sort. It’s a real man’s drink, a “workingman’s special,” and it’s definitely an acquired taste. The guys I once worked - and drank - with wouldn’t have known what the hell to think if they’d heard some millenial refer to it as a “cocktail.”

*********** QUIZ ANSWER: Doug Atkins came out of Humboldt, Tennessee and went to The University of Tennessee on a basketball scholarship. He was a great high jumper, finishing second in the SEC track championships.  He played football for General Bob Neyland, and  although he played in the 1950s, he’s still considered perhaps the greatest defensive player in the history of SEC football.

He was so good as a defensive end - big and mean and agile - that he would have been as good today as he was when he played.

At 6-8 and 265, he would be big enough to play in today’s NFL, but by the standards of his day he was huge.

In 1953 he was the first-round pick of the Cleveland Browns, but after two years in Cleveland, it was apparent to Paul Brown that he was not Brown’s type of person, and he was traded to the Chicago Bears for a couple of future draft choices.  In his 12 years in Chicago he made eight Pro Bowls.

Said Bears’ owner/coach George Halas years later, “Paul Brown couldn't handle him in Cleveland. I could slough off anything. He didn't give me trouble, except when he'd get stiff and call me up at night."

Because of him, Halas hired a private detective to keep track of players. At training camp, Bears’ coaches refused to check his room at bed-check time because he kept a pit bull named Rebel in his room. Recalled teammate Richie Petitbon, Rebel was “trained to kill.”

He evidently liked a drink. Once, he and fellow defensive lineman Fred Williams had a martini-drinking contest.  They stopped drinking at 21, but Williams conceded that Atkins probably won, since he was able to drive them home.

He didn’t like to practice - he claimed the Bears didn’t pay him enough to play and practice, too.

He loved to try to get under Halas’ skin.  Once, on the first day of training camp, he arrived late to practice, and  proceeded to jog lazily and indifferently around the field. When Halas asked him what he was doing, he said, “Breaking in my helmet.”

For all his distaste for practice, though, he once went 12 straight years without missing a game, and in his 17 years of football he missed only 17 games.

And on the field, he was feared; the word among opposing offensive linemen was, “Don’t make him mad.”

According to the Chicago Tribune, “Fullback Rick Casares once said: ‘We used to hope that somebody would hold him. The next play you would see guys flying around like King Kong had gotten ahold of them. Awesome. I've seen him grab a tackle by the shoulder pads and just flip him over like a doll, then come in on a back that weighed 225 pounds without breaking stride and hit him in the chest, knock him over on his back, reach over, grab the quarterback by the shoulder pads and throw him down with one arm.’”

Despite his great size, he would often hurdle over blocking linemen on his way to the quarterback, and if sacks had been counted when he played, he would almost certainly be in the record books.

Recalled his Tennessee teammate Jack Stroud, who had a long career with the Giants, “The notion that because those guys in the 50s didn’t lift weights and take steroids they weren’t strong is a crock.  A lot of those guys would have whipped the hell out of these guys today.  Take Doug Atkins. He was 6-8 and 265 and was solid muscle and bones. And he he high jumped six feet.  And he never touched a weight in his life.  With the frame he had, he could have weighed 300 pounds no problem. His arms were 18 inches around.  We measured them in Knoxville.  I told him over to the gym to try to get him to work out (Stroud was a serious lifter). He allowed that that was a lot of extra work he didn’t need.”

He was a team leader - of sorts.  “Doug was a nice guy but you were scared of him," said Mike Pyle, who played center for the Bears. "He nominated me for player representative. He said, 'I nominate Mike Pyle 'cause he's from Yale.' The rest of the players were asked, 'Anybody else?' Doug said, 'Yeah, I move the nominations be closed.'"

At 37 he was sent to the Saints in the expansion draft, but he had enough left in the tank that in the three years he played in New Orleans he played well enough to have his number retired.

Despite Halas’ initial misgivings about his practice habits, he is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

His highest salary was $25,000, and at his Hall of Fame induction, he said he once got into a heated argument with Halas over $500.
"Coach Halas said if I give you that money you would only spend it. I said, 'Coach, that's what I want it for'"

CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING DOUG ATKINS:

JOSH MONTGOMERY - BERWICK, LOUISIANA
KEN HAMPTON - RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
GREG KOENIG - CIMARRON, KANSAS
MIKE FRAMKE - GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN
ADAM WESOLOSKI - PULASKI, WISCONSIN
TIM BROWN - FLORENCE, ALABAMA
TOM DAVIS - SAN CARLOS, CALIFORNIA
KEVIN MCCULLOUGH - LAKEVILLE, INDIANA
JOE GUTILLA - AUSTIN, TEXAS
OSSIE OSMUNDSON - WOODLAND, WASHINGTON

*********** Great article on Doug Atkins…

http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/football/bears/ct-bears-atkins-appreciation-spt-0103-20160102-story.html

*********** Video of Doug Atkins - thanks to Greg Koenig…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MIh8BPLgwI

*********** QUIZ - He was a native of Lexington, Nebraska who played college ball at Nebraska.  Although he lettered three years, he didn’t start until his senior year, when he was also named a co-captain.

He was undrafted, but after signing as a free agent with the Vikings in 1962, he became their starting center as a rookie. He held that spot until he retired in 1978.

He was generally considered to be the best center of his time, being named first team All-Pro five times and second team twice.  He played in six straight Pro Bowls from 1964-1969.

He is one of just 11 Vikings’ players to have played in all four of their Super Bowl appearances

When he finally did retire, he had started in 240 consecutive games, second only among NFL players to his  former teammate, Jim Marshall.

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

FRID

*********** College Football this weekend…

By  official proclamation of the owner of this site, it’s time to begin assessing playoff possibilities.

Assumptions:
1. No team with two losses will make the playoff
2. There are still plenty of teams that will finish with no worse than one loss
3. No team outside the Power 5 conferences has a chance of getting in with one loss.  At present, Central Florida, Cincinnati and South Florida of the American Athletic are still undefeated - but they all have to play each other.
4. Notre Dame, as an independent, has an inside track even with one loss (should it lose to USC) because as an independent it can stay home and watch as other playoff contenders eliminate each other in bogus “conference championship” games.
5. With Notre Dame still unbeaten, the Irish are likely to be one of the four playoff teams, which means only three spots remain for the Power 5 conferences. That also means there is little likelihood of two teams from the same Power 5 conference.  Most importantly, though, it means two conferences and all their members will not get a nickel of playoff money, while Notre Dame gets to pocket AN ENTIRE CONFERENCE SHARE. (Who made that deal, anyhow?)

Speaking in terms of Power 5 conferences only…

There are still three unbeaten teams:
Alabama
Clemson
NC State

Alabama plays Tennessee in their traditional Third Saturday in October game, but Bama isn’t going to blow this one.  Bama still has to play LSU, MIssissippi State and Auburn.  Also the Washington Generals. Not really - but they always have a softy down near the end of the schedule and this year it’s The Citadel.

Clemson and NC State meet Saturday - at Clemson.  The winner has a great shot at taking the Atlantic Division spot in the ACC championship except… Clemson still has to play Duke and - big intrastate rival - South Carolina.  Should NC State get past Clemson, the Pack has a fairly easy schedule remaining: Syracuse, FSU, Wake, Louisville, ECU

There are still lots of one-loss teams fighting to stay that way and make it to their conference championships.  Several of them will play in big games Saturday…

1. Michigan plays at Michigan State.  Ohio State may be the big game for Michigan, but Michigan is the big game for State.  The Spartans are tough, especially coming off last week’s win at Penn State. A loss would probably keep Michigan out of the Big Ten championship game, since the Wolverines still have to play Penn State and Ohio State.

2. Oklahoma at TCU.  OU has one loss and even after TCU, the Sooners still have to play Texas Tech, Oklahoma State and West Virginia.

3. Texas at Oklahoma State. Texas has beaten Oklahoma, but still has to play Texas Tech and West Virginia.

4. West Virginia plays Baylor.  WVU “controls its destiny” as they like to say.  (Except that if it’s destiny, nobody has any control over it, right?) The Mountaineers still have to play Texas, Oklahoma State and Oklahoma.  The season-ending OU game will be in Morgantown.  And then, theoretically, the two teams could meet a week later in the Big 12 title game.

5. LSU plays Mississippi State in Baton Rouge.  The Bulldogs are tough. A loss to State would cook LSU’s goose. Oh - and Bama’s coming up next week. 

6. Ohio State goes to Purdue.  Buckeyes are just too good. After this, though, they still have to play Michigan State and Michigan.  (The Spartans could break my “no team with two losses” rule if they were to win out - giving them wins over Penn State, Michigan and Ohio State - and then win the Big Ten title game.)

7. Vanderbilt is at Kentucky.  While Florida and Georgia take this weekend off before their big one next week, Kentucky continues to fly under the radar.  The Wildcats, who already have a win over Florida, have an outside chance at a playoff spot.  Their schedule the rest of the way: MIssouri, Georgia, Tennessee, Middle Tennessee and Louisville.  But then, of course, there’s the SEC title game - against Alabama.

8. Oregon is at Washington State. So is ESPN Game Day, in recognition of 15 years of the Cougar flag - Ole Crimson - waving at Game Days around the country. The loser of the game will come out of titwith two losses and can kiss its playoff chances good-bye.  The Pac-12’s last hope for a playoff spot is for Oregon to win this one and win all the rest. The Ducks’ toughest game the rest of the way is at Utah, and then, of course,  the conference title game.  Washington State? If they beat the Ducks, the Cougars still have to beat Stanford, Colorado and Washington, and - out here it’s called “Cougin’ it” - they can’t possibly win them all.

DARK HORSES

9. Duke is playing Virginia in Durham.  Duke - surprise - is 5-1. Virginia, fresh off a win over Miami, will not be easy. Next for Duke: Pitt, Miami, UNC, Clemson and Wake Forest 

10. Iowa hosts Maryland.  Am I the only person who overlooked the Hawkeyes?  They are 5-1 and their schedule the rest of the way is not exactly a killer: Penn State (in Iowa City), Purdue, Northwestern, Illinois, Nebraska. The Hawkeyes are my pick to face Ohio State in the Big Ten title game.

*********** Just a bit more on the Vosean Joseph situation at Florida (where a player was called for unportsmanlike conduct but allowed to remain in the game, without correction or chastisement)…

This is just me, you understand, and I’m not telling anyone else how to coach his team, but anyone who ever played for me knows that anyone responsible for a penalty - encroachment, illegal motion, holding, block in the back - came out of the game.  Immediately.  In most cases, it was just for one play, and the miscreant went right back in.

But everybody on the team knew that if he got his team a penalty, he was coming out of the game. Simple as that. Nothing to negotiate.  It was part of the fabric of the team.

Yes, yes, I know:  But, but, but… embarrassing… humilating… singling him out… blah, blah, blah. 

Look - you don’t want to bring unwanted attention to yourself?  DON’T GET YOUR TEAM A PENALTY!

Who the hell are you that you think you have the right to cost your team a game?

As for the Vosean Joseph sort of misconduct (two unsportmanslike conduct penalties -  in one half of play), a player, no matter how good, would have spent a more significant amount of time on the sidelines, listening to me.  But that was never an issue: I don’t mean to brag, but going back at least to 1993 I can’t remember any player on any team I coached incurring a personal foul or unsportsmanlike conduct penalty.  It just… wasn’t… done.

I don’t think any major college or pro coach can say that (but then, neither could I if I had to coach the kind of barbarians that they bring into their programs, in the hope that somehow their good deeds will outweigh the bad).

Very simply - you have to eliminate the things that beat you, and that takes stones, because it means making it a part of your culture that penalties, like turnovers, won’t be tolerated.

I believe it was  Jack Reed, a coach from Northern California,  whom I first heard say it: “What you tolerate, you encourage.”

*********** RIP Jim Taylor, a fullback’s fullback whose block was indispensible in making the Lombardi Sweep a part of football lore…

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/packers/2018/10/13/jim-taylor-dies-packers-hall-famer/1629378002/

*********** Few NFL players have have brought more class and credit to our game than Steve Largent,  all-time Seattle Seahawks’ great receiver and later a four-term Congressman from Oklahoma.

From an interview with Seattle Weekly…

*** I kind of came from a tough background. My parents got divorced when I was 6. My mom remarried when I was 9. And the guy she married was an alcoholic. So there was a lot of friction in the house. It really was football and the people I met through football, particularly coaches, that were real mentors to me. Football was a life-saving event in my life. I’m very thankful.

*** I tell my own grandkids … I encourage them to play. And play hard and have fun. And all that stuff. I don’t think football is any more dangerous than other sports. There is some risk involved, but it’s pretty minimal, especially at a younger age.

https://www.seattleweekly.com/news/seahawks-legend-steve-largent-football-was-a-life-saving-event/

*********** Kimberly-Clark, the giant paper company that makes Kleenex, has caved in to pressure from - who the hell else? - and will “rebrand” (change the name of) its “man-size” tissues.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/kleenex-rebrand-mansize-tissues-gender-complaints-58582322


*********** By any measure, General Robert Neyland of Tennessee was one of the greatest coaches of all time.  He was Nick Saban long before Nick Saban was born.

Tim Cohane, in his  book, “Great  Football Coaches of the  Twenties and Thirties” wrote, “Neyland, by repeated proof and victory, was able to convince his team, as no coach before or after him, that the keys lay in - and in this order, if order there must be - a sound kicking game, a containing defense, and, say, a couple of dozen plays all thoroughly learned, meaning that none of them is run in a game until it has been practiced at least 500 times.”

He was a single-winger.  But he believed in the importance of “position rather than possession.”  His teams were so sound defensively that he didn’t mind giving you the ball - in your end of the field.  He didn’t mind at all punting on an early down if it could get him out of his own end of the field, or if it could pin you deep in your own territory. He would punt on the opponents’ side of the 50, from the 45 to the 35, with strict instructions that the ball should be “angled out or punted dead to the 10 or inside it.”

So thoroughly did he integrate the offense, the defense and the kicking game - long before most other coaches - that it was said that if Neyland could get a touchdown up on you, he had you beaten.  And if he could get two scores up on you, it was a runaway.

As sound a football man as ever lived, the General (he was a West Point graduate who really did earn his star as an Army general) had a well-thought-out reason for everything he did.  For him, nothing happened by chance.

Why did he run a balanced-line single wing when everyone else ran it from an unbalanced line? Why, I was told by Dr. Andy Kozar, who played for the General and then collected and published his notes and journals, he lived to run off-tackle, and he knew that with a balanced line his tailback would get to the off-tackle hole faster. Actually, he told author Tim Cohane in the 1970s, “I was not wedded to the single wing as closely as some thought. I used it because we could get quicker power at tackle.”

Another thing that the General did was position his blocking back in the strongside “A” gap - nowhere near as wide other single-wing coaches (these are the General’s own play diagrams, published in Dr. Kozar’s magnificent book, “Football As a War Game.”)  #10 is his staple off-tackle play.



One major reason why the General put his blocking back where he did (actually, he was still just as close to the off-tackle hole as the blocking backs in unbalanced lines) was that he was a great admirer of one thing that T-formation (with the QB under center) teams could do that single wing teams couldn’t: a quarterback sneak. In the diagram below, General Neyland has shown a sneak from his punt formation in Play 32. (In Play 35 he has also drawn up a toss sweep.)



(Dr. Kozar is now dead and his book is out of print.  If you can find a copy, be prepared to pay.  If you bought one back when I first recommended it, hang onto it and leave it to one of your kids in your will.  Or let them fight over it.)



General Neyland’s respect for the quarterback sneak ought to be enough of a recommendation for anyone, but even now, every Sunday we see genius coaches line up on 4th-and-1 in a shotgun and, already starting four yards deep in the backfield, hand off to the only running back in the backfield (what - you thought they’d have their QB run it?).  Occasionally - you know how the pros are - they’ll even throw the ball on 4th and 1.  Sometimes, they’ll put their quarterback under center, but he’ll hand off to the only running back, who’s lined up seven yards deep! (You do see some of this same crap on Saturday, too, since an awful lot of today’s college coaches are auditioning for the NFL.)

Even when it’s now legal to push the runner from behind, I’m amazed that I don’t see people running a sneak -  with a 300-pound fullback right behind their quarterback as a pusher.

You have to wonder why not.  Michael Salfino, writing on October 10 in the Wall Street Journal, noted that this season, in the NFL, sneaks had been attempted 44 times on either 3rd and 1 or 4th and one, and they’d been successful 42 times - that’s a 95.5% success rate. (Since 2013 - Sneaks in those situations have an 84.9% rate of success.)

For non-sneaks, the success rate is considerably lower - 64.6%

But here’s the kicker: despite the overwhelming odds in favor of a successful quarterback sneak in 3rd and 1 and 4th and 1 situations, teams sneak only 15% of the time!

The "sneakiest" NFL coach is Ron Rivera of the Panthers - he calls sneaks 26.8% of the time. (Of course, he’s got a giant economy-size QB in Cam Newton).

NFL coaches who are most reluctant to sneak:

Pete Carroll: 2% of the time.
Jason Garrett, Mike McCarthy: 3.4 % of the time.

One of General Neyland’s former players, Phil Dickens, did the General one better - he had his QB take snaps and sneak, toss, drop back, and run options to the weak side.  The QB was not exactly under center - he was in the A gap but turned in, facing the center.  From that position, he could take the snap, or he could allow the direct snap to go to the tailback or fullback while he did what a single wing blocking back was expected to do - block. This came to be known as the “side-saddle T.”  He was 29-11-1 running it at Wyoming, and his 1956 team (shown in the photo against Arizona) went 10-0.  That was good enough to get him the Indiana job, but, alas, he got caught cheating and that was his last coaching stop.



WYOMING VS ARIZONA, 1956

John McLaughry ran his version of it at Brown, which I remembered from my college days. I spoke with him not long before he passed away, and he said that his main reason for running it was that it better enabled his QB to spin and lead through on off-tackle plays.  I gathered from that that he was not a single-wing coach trying to acquire some of the deception of the T-formation; instead, he was a T-formation coach trying to acquire some of the single wing’s power.



FROM YALE SCOUTING REPORT VS BROWN, 1959


*********** Whenever there’s talk about “shutting down” the government, it’s always accompanied by a threat:  they’ll close the national parks.

And when the school board says it has to have more more money, it threatens us: it says that unless it gets the  funds it’ll have to cut sports.

Those government types aren’t dumb. They know what’s really important to us.

So now, all their pleas to save the polar bears and keep the oceans from rising having fallen on deaf ears, the climate change zealots are trying the same tack as the school boards.  They’re threatening to take our fun from us.  You see, unless we change our ways immediately, the world’s supply of barley could be in danger by the end of this century.  And since barley is a major ingredient in making beer, well, you can figure out where this is going.   Help us fight climate change or you’ll be cut off.

PS - The end of the century is still far enough away that anyone reading this who is 18 or over will probably be drinking Ensure by then anyhow - if he’s still around.

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

First I heard about the UCLA win and how bad it was for Cal.

As big a fan I am of ND there is NO WAY the Irish are one of the Top 5 teams in the country.  A Top 5 team should beat everyone they play, and beat each one convincingly to earn that recognition.  ND is a good team, but if they want to be considered Top 5, or a National Championship caliber playoff team, they need to step it up big-time.  Otherwise it will be another January 1 bowl game that could end badly for them.

Apparently I didn't miss much in last week's Army game vs. SJSU.  

Mark my words...after Humboldt State drops football next year, SJSU will be the next California State University to follow suit and join the ranks of the following schools that dropped the sport: San Francisco State, Hayward State, Chico State, Sonoma State, Cal State LA, Cal State Northridge, Cal State Long Beach, Cal State Fullerton, and Cal Poly Pomona.  Others: University of the Pacific, Santa Clara, St. Mary's, USF, Loyola, Pepperdine, and UC Riverside.

Speaking of Sonoma State and Gary Patterson.  Gary and I met in 1985 while I was a coach at Sonoma State and he was working an Offense/Defense Camp back there at that time.  He was the coach that introduced me to his 4-2-5 defense concept.  Just a concept at that time.  But it was his concept I took back to high school with me after my short time at SSU and have used it ever since.  I follow Gary's TCU teams from afar because of his defense, and briefly visited him at TCU a few years ago.

Have a great week!

Joe Gutilla
Austin, Texas

Joe,

I agree with you on the Irish but only Northwestern and  USC appear to be left with a decent chance of beating them. The big thing they have going for them is not having to play a damned useless  conference championship game.

Sorry to see California dropping all those “small school” programs.  The death knell is going to come when then start dropping JC programs.  Oregon and Washington had them when we first moved out in 1975, and within 20 years they were all gone.  Just having JCs and the realistic goal that going to one represented really helped high school programs.

I think that Patterson has done a remarkable job at TCU, and I respect him for having the good sense to stay there as long as he has.

********** Pro football eats its seed corn… 

Defensive linemen Nick Bosa didn’t even make it halfway through his junior season before declaring that his Ohio State career was at an end.

A team captain, Bosa announced that he’s not going to be coming back from his injury, but instead he’s going to drop out of school (I’m sure he’d really been faithfully attending classes) to devote all his time to rehabbing from his injury - and getting ready for the NFL draft.

From a purely financial standpoint, with tens of millions of dollars on the line, Bosa’s decision makes sense.

But, thinking along those lines, how long will it be before top college players begin to “save their bodies,” starting to take it easy and pay attention to little aches and pains once they hit junior year? (If they aren’t already doing so.)

https://www.si.com/college-football/2018/10/16/nick-bosa-ohio-state-return-2019-nfl-draft-plans-injury-news


*********** QUIZ ANSWER: Charlie Justice was a native of Asheville, North Carolina, where he was an outstanding athlete.

After “service” in the Navy (he played football) during World War II he enrolled at the University of North Carolina, where he became the most storied player in Tar Heel football history.

It was while playing at Bainbridge, Maryland Naval Training Center that his running style was compared to a locomotive, earning him one of the most colorful nicknames ever bestowed on a runner - “Choo-choo Charlie.”

In his four years at Chapel Hill, the Tar Heels were 32-7-2 and played in two Sugar Bowls and one Cotton Bowl.

Playing tailback in Coach Carl Snavely’s single wing, he rushed for  3774 yards and threw for 2362 yards and, running and throwing, he was responsible for 64 touchdowns.

He was a four-time All-American, and finished second in the Heisman voting in 1948 (behind Doak Walker) and 1949 (behind Leon Hart).

Following graduation, he was the MVP of the College All Star game, rushing for 133 yards in leading the All Stars to a 17-7 win over the Philadelphia Eagles.

His NFL career with the Washington Redskins was cut short by injuries.

Charlie Justice is a member of the College Football Hall of Fame.  His Number 22 has been retired by North Carolina.

CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING CHARLIE ‘CHOO-CHOO” JUSTICE:

TUESD

*********** It seemed only days ago that we Portlanders learned that Paul Allen’s cancer had returned, and then today came the sad news that Mr. Allen, co-founder of Microsoft and owner of the Portland Trail Blazers and Seattle Seahawks, had died.  He was 65.

Strange and somewhat reclusive, Mr. Allen was one of the wealthiest men in the United States, and he invested his wealth in a wide number of areas besides sports. I can only imagine how many people he and his many companies employed, but just as one example, his 400-foot yacht, the Octopus, carried a crew of 57. He actually lent the yacht - which had a deep-diving submarine - to governments for use in major salvage and rescue operations.

What a job it’s going to be to sort out all of Mr. Allen’s many and varied holdings.

I suspect that fans in Portland and Seattle may never again have it as good as they did with him, one of our own, owning our major sports franchises.

*********** Hard to tell which was more painful for Cal fans Saturday - the thumping that their Golden Bears got from UCLA, or their loss of first place to UCLA in Times Higher Education’s rankings as the Top Public University in the US.

*********** If you’ve ever been in a spot where the wolves were howling for your job… I’ll bet you didn’t have a guy standing behind you the way Donald Trump stood behind his nominee for the Supreme Court.

*********** John Walters, in The Athletic, asks, “How does a kicker come to be known as “Bubba?’” (Miami’s Bubba Baxa.)

*********** Tua Tagovailoa has yet to play in the fourth quarter this season.

*********** I got so tired of hearing announcers say “Hopkins-Junior” this and “Hopkins-Junior” that as if that’s the last name of Army QB Kelvin Hopkins that I turned off the volume.  And then I tuned in an Air Force game and it was even worse: “Hammond-the-third” this and “Hammond-the-third” that.

*********** What does a spread team do when it’s 3rd and 1 or 4th and 1 and it has to go for it?  Why, first it snaps the ball back to a guy who’s four yards deep…

*********** A holding call in the Vandy-Florida game prompted this bit of professional analysis: “He might have got a LITTLE bit of jersey…”   Yeah, it was just a little bit of jersey.  "Penetration, however slight..."

*********** I would have enjoyed listening to some of the Iowa-Indiana game, but no-o-o-o-o.  Not once I heard that it was Beth Mowins on play-by-play.

*********** Indiana’s secondary appears to be incapable of covering receivers without interfering.

*********** Oklahoma State was on the Kansas State one, third-and-one.  The one-FOOT line, actually.

So what do they do?  Why, they run a jet sweep.  And lose five yards.

*********** A Florida linebacker named Vosean Joseph - more from him later - picks up a Vandy runner and pile-drives him, earning a richly-deserved unsportsmanlike conduct penalty.  And the Florida staff did absolutely nothing about it. Didn’t bat an eye.  Just as if it was business as usual, he was still on the field for the next play. What the hell kind of coaching is that?

*********** The brand… the brand… the brand.  We hear this sh— from the marketing guys at the colleges as if they really have an understanding of what branding is all about… And then they send their product out into the marketplace in a package that’s unrecognizeable. 

What, exactly, is the reason for all the all-black uniforms on teams whose colors have never included black?  This past weekend it was Tulsa and Iowa State.

Maybe it’s all part of the Death of Normal.

*********** A Florida player puts a dirty hit - blind-side, helmet-to-helmet - on a Vanderbilt player and as the Vandy player lies motionless on the ground, his coach, Derek Mason, has words with Florida coach Dan Mullen.  Florida DC Todd Grantham seems to forget that he’s not the head coach, and flaps his mouth, too.

Meanwhile, Vosean Joseph - remember him? - picks up his second unsportsmanlike conduct penalty IN THE SAME HALF and now he has to leave the game.

But not without a tantrum.  The mother, I would say, of all tantrums.  Hmmm.  Maybe that’s why nobody on the Florida staff had the stones to pull him out of the game for a little “coaching” after that first unsportmanlike conduct penalty.

New coaching staff.  Same old Florida.

*********** 4th and 18 and a great fake punt catches Vanderbilt flat-footed.

*********** Nebraska takes a 28-14 lead early in the fourth quarter.  Could this be the Huskers’ day?

*********** Vanderbilt’s deep snapper hustles downfield and  catches the punt in the air.

*********** How an option team takes itself out of its offense…

Georgia Tech, down 14-7 to Duke, fumbles and - like that - Tech is down 21-7.

Georgia Tech, down 21-7 to Duke, fumbles and - like that - Tech is down 28-7.

And now, Georgia Tech is forced to play Duke left-handed -  throwing the ball.

*********** Speaking of playing left-handed… Two very sketchy grounding calls that should have been called against Northwestern. One of them is so bad that the Northwestern QB is “throwing” the ball left-handed.

*********** This is how it happens when you’re going down the gurgler…

There’s 2:02 left. Nebraska leads, 31-24, and Northwestern is on its own one yard line. 99 yards to go.

And then a Cornhusker lineman is called for a blow to the head, and Northwestern is out of the end zone and on its way to the last-second score that will send the game into OT.

*********** Free timeouts for incomplete passes.  Since when do we reward failure?  It’s making a farce of the game.

*********** Pitt comes out wearing its Dorsett-era uniforms - sunflower gold helmets and pants.  All that was missing was the talent they had on those teams.

*********** Derek Mason and Dan Mullen seemed quite cordial in their post-game meeting at midfield.

*********** The Oregon-Washington game saw a targeting call against a UW linemen who couldn’t possibly have made a more beautiful form tackle on the Oregon QB.

*********** Proof that there’s a God - Washington’s kicker missed what would have been a game-winner as time expired, and the game went into OT.  What a sin it would have been if the game - a real classic - had ended, like most NFL "thrillers,"  on a f—king chip shot kick.

*********** For the 1,000th time… coaches should not be calling time out.  Ever,

*********** Washington scored in the top half of OT to lead, 33-30.

In its first series, Oregon was stopped on 3rd and 1, and now faced 4th and 1.

But wait - Oregon was called for holding. What to do?

Take the play and force the Ducks to decide whether to kick or go for it?

Or take the penalty and bet that they can’t make 3rd-and-11?

Washington took the penalty, but Oregon made the first down - and went in to score the winning touchdown.

*********** UCLA 37, Cal 7 - It was that bad an ass-kicking.  How’s that QB demotion working out? Well, since you asked, Cal had FIVE turnovers, all by the QB.

*********** Is there no end to the stupid play?  Virginia, leading Miami 16-13 with :30 left to play, kicks a field goal to go ahead 19-13.

But not so fast - a Miami player roughed the kicker.  Take the penalty and it’s an automatic first down. Miami has no timeouts left, which means GAME OVER.

*********** Lotsa Field Storming on Saturday…

Iowa State
LSU
Oregon
UV

*********** Lost in the crowd?  More like the crowd lost in the seats?

For some reason, San Jose State chose to play Army in Levis Stadium.  You can imagine what 15,627 (announced) looks like in a stadium that seats 68.000

AND THIS IS WHAT SAN DIEGO STADIUM LOOKED LIKE WHEN AIR FORCE AND SAN DIEGO STATE RETURNED AFTER A 1-1/2 HOUR LIGHTNING DELAY



*********** I watched Tom Brady score a TD against Kansas City when he ran out of the grasp of a Chiefs’ defensive lineman. Are you kidding me?  Brady breaking a tackle?  I swear it looked to me as if the defender, afraid of throwing Brady to the ground and getting called for roughing, let up.

I suspect we’re going to be seeing more of this,  and it threatens to make a travesty of the game.

At the very least, in return for the cosseting of the QBs, there should be some tradeoff.  How about when he’s “in the grasp” (remember that?) the play is dead?

There.  That way we’ll find out if this no-roughing garbage is really about the quarterback’s safety… or if it’s about goosing the offensive stats.

*********** Bowling Green didn’t wait until the end of the season to fire Mike Jinks, letting him go roughly at the mid-point of his five-year, $2.1 million contract.

He had to go.  Losses were mounting.  Crowds were dwindling.  Boosters were bailing.

And all because of an AD who had no f—king idea how to hire a football coach.

Back in 2015, coming off a MAC championship and needing to replace his coach, the AD did what any sharp AD would do.  No, he didn’t go to a list of potential hires he’d begun to compile back when it became obvious that his current coach (Dino Babers) was so good that somebody was bound to lure him away.  No, that’s what old-time ADs did.

This digital-age AD went to Google.  No lie.  He searched for the team with the most productive offense, which Google said was Texas Tech.  And then he zeroed in on the top Tech assistant that he could afford.

That turned out to be a running backs coach named Mike Jinks.  So Jinks had never so much as been a college coordinator. So Jinks had never even been in the state of Ohio.

So Jinks was so unready he didn’t even have a list of assistants to hire if he ever got a head coaching job. (His first staff wound up consisting of seven assistants who had never previously coached at the Division 1 level, and had, in toto, zero ties to Ohio.

What could possibly go wrong?

(For what it’s worth, the AD in question, a guy named Chris Kingston, worked at West Point under one of the world’s worst ADs, a guy named Kevin Anderson. Kingston is no longer at Bowling Green.)

https://www.toledoblade.com/sports/college/2018/10/14/college-football-bowling-green-state-university-mike-jinks-david-briggs/stories/20181014165?abnpageversion=evoke


***********  Hugh,

You may be right about the option.  While I never miss an Army game now I can see how the cut block downfield has limited the offense's effectiveness on the perimeter.  I completely disagree with it, and my point is this:  If a defender is allowed to take the legs away from the blocker, how is THAT not considered as dangerous as a blocker taking the legs away from a defender??  Or...if defenders are allowed to leave their feet on a tackle below the waist...why isn't that considered dangerous to both the ball carrier and the defender??

While I briefly watched some of the Yale-Dartmouth game last Friday I couldn't help but notice the crowd in the venerated old Yale Bowl. 

Speaking of crowds, and Andy Kerr, and Stanford...is there a possible connection that crowd sizes at Yale and Stanford last week may have something to do with the progressive mindset on both the east coast and left coast???

Glad to have you back!  Have a great weekend!

Joe Gutilla
Austin, Texas

Joe-

I am actually seeing calls of cut blocking against defenders who take on blockers at the knees.  Coaches on the sideline act incredulous.

What pisses me off about what’s happening with the spread guys ganging up on the option is that it’s like Amazon and Wal-Mart and Target favoring legislation that may sound great on the surface ($15 minimum wage!)  but is actually designed to crush the little guys.

As for the Yale Bowl (dear to me because it’s where my wife and I first met)...

The Bowl was once the largest stadium in the United States.  Even adjusted for the greater width of modern-day asses, it still seats close to 70,000.  To see even 20,000 in that big old bowl looks like those incongruous scenes on TV of high school playoff games being played in NFL stadia.

Ivy League football is long gone as a spectator sport. We were borderline big time  when I went there, at least by the measurement of attendance.

To give you an idea of how Yale once drew…

In 1956, my freshman year, Yale played SEVEN home games. They drew 243,825 - and average of 34,800.

Compare that with
ALABAMA - 6 games - 154,000 - 25,700 per game
ARKANSAS - 6 games - 161,000 - 26,800
AUBURN - 5 games - 120,000 - 24,000
FLORIDA - 7 games - 233,662 - 33,400
GEORGIA - 4 games - 110,000 - 27,500
OREGON - 4 GAMES - 55,000 - 13,500
PENN STATE - 4 games - 107,030 - 26,750
SYRACUSE - 5 games - 157,480 - 31,500
TCU - 4 games - 104,000 - 26,000
WASHINGTON - 6 games - 190,000 - 31,700

College football has undergone a sea change since then.

At Yale, we would routinely draw crowds in excess of 50,000 for “big” games.

At that time, that meant Princeton, Harvard or Dartmouth.  For those games, we could make decent money selling our tickets to rich New York alumni who wanted to impress client with good seats (our seats were on the 40). We didn’t consider it scalping because we didn’t pay anything for them. Those rich alumni were the students of the 30’s, when Yale football was a national power.

Nowadays, I think the quality of the play is probably better than when I played,  but the interest is gone. The fan base has eroded.  The old alumni are dead. Today’s students don’t give a sh— haven’t in years, and when they graduate they become alumni who don't give a sh—.  This process has been going on since about the time they admitted women (hmmm.). Soon, there will be no alumni at all who care. Only parents and girlfriends of players will be at games.

It may be a coastal thing, but I believe it’s also a tribal thing - members of the leftist/feminist/LGBTQ tribe don’t care much for football.  Certainly not for glorifying something that reeks of testosterone and male toxicity.

(This appears to be a small but dangerous first-stage cancer even at real football schools, where students party in the tailgate area instead of going to the actual game.)

Thanks for getting me going on this.

Hugh

PS— Thought you might enjoy this, from June, 2001—

*********** Hi coach, Just a couple of things to note. We installed the DW this past week at Benilde-St. Margaret's School in Minneapolis. I was thrilled at our turnout, (over 60 players grades 7 through 12) but more importantly, the players picked it up quickly and they're really fired-up about it. The coaching staff can't wait to get going! Your installation tape, and attending the Chicago clinic made the installation that much easier. I'll be in touch with you periodically to let you know how things are going for the "Red Knights".

 Also, I'm very interested in the "no-huddle" and "new play" information you described on your website "news" and would greatly appreciate anything you can send. Look forward to hearing from you, and again, thanks for all your help.

 Joe Gutilla Head Football Coach

P.S. By the way, my "star" TB I told you about when I first contacted you about running the offense (he was very skeptical about the change) watched the Dynamics video and took part in the installation. He's now convinced there isn't anyone we'll face that will be able to stop him at B back. I may have created a monster.

*********** The Law of Unintended Consequences…

You wonder why our language is going to hell?

My daughter passed this along to me some time ago…

A friend of hers said a speech therapist she knows told her that it has become more and more difficult for her to motivate kids to improve their speech, because now that it's no longer acceptable for others to make fun of the way they speak (“bullying?”), there's no incentive for them to learn to speak properly.

The intended consequence of “tolerance” was to keep kids from feeling bad about themselves. After all, we didn’t want them all committing suicide, right?  But what we got instead was a growing cohort of people who, if they even speak English at all , speak it poorly.

*********** Number one-ranked Mater Dei, of Santa Ana, California, fell to St. John Bosco, of Bellflower on Saturday.

Mater Dei doesn’t lose often.  Bruce Rollinson has been the Mater Dei head coach 1989, and during that time, he’s coached a number of state championship teams, including  last year’s team that was also named the national champion.  Among his better known players are Matt Barkley, Colt Brennan and Matt Leinart. And USC’s current true-freshman QB,  J. T. Daniels, was Mater Dei’s QB just last season.

There’s a nice article in the latest AFCA publication about Coach Rollinson and his approach with parents, which he decribes as “brutally upfront.”

Here’s why: Even after winning the national championship last year, Rollinson said nine different players transferred from Mater Dei to other programs.
A major reason was playing time or “getting their share of the spotlight.”

Said Rollinson, “I was disappointed because they did have potential but I was never going to make their parents happy anyway.”

*********** I have a theory that kids who stare at screens - who never read and never listen to stories - never develop their imaginations.  With everything done for them from the time they’re old enough to hold an iPad, they’re basically unable to create pictures in their minds. 

In popular entertainment, this manifests itself in primitive humor that lacks subtlety because its audience simply can’t put the pieces together. Why take the chance that they won’t be able to figure out for themselves why that guy is doubled over in pain?  Why not simply show him being kicked in the balls?

Matt Groening, whom we can all thank for giving us “The Simpsons,” referred to this recently in recalling the early days of the show. “Our original concept was a little coarser and a little more risque.  We went in that direction and it didn’t feel right. It felt too easy. There are words you can use that will automatically get a laugh.  But it’s more fun to skirt the edge.”


*********** Just checking to verify that Frontier is enrolled for the Black Lion Award.

We’re having another good season despite having just 4 seniors on the squad.

We lost our opening game to a ranked opponent and had the lead at half but couldn’t finish. We lost momentum when we didn’t score in the closing seconds of the half and had a thin 6-0 lead. (We took the kickoff at the start of the game marched right down the field -textbook DW) Since then we 3 straight and average over 30 points per game.
66/77 average over 8 yards per carry. I’ve also worked in a freshman at A back for some carries. He shows real promise and contributes to the rushing stats. Despite the bruising rushing attack a few “Dads”can be heard on the sidelines calling for us to “open it up”.  Yeah right.  Besides running 66/77 the usual way we will run 66 with Liz motion with the QB reversing like on a 56c.  We call it LIZ 66 INSIDE POWER or RIP 77 INSIDE POWER. Our sweeps also look pretty good this year. Something we lacked the past few seasons. 88/99 G-REACH and we sometimes offset the FB play side or flank the FB to play side about 8 yards and have him crack on the outside LB.

Works pretty good - especially after pounding off tackle for a few plays. We continue to practice openwing as well.   Havent unleashed it yet other than in preseason scrimmage but it’s there if we need it or just want to mess with next weeks opponents scouting. It might placate a few of the Dads. lol

Only 3seniors starting on each side of the ball tonight. Wish us luck.

BTW I enjoyed the Army vs Oklahoma game - got to watch it via YouTube.

Don Gordon
Frontier Regional School
Deerfield
Peoples Republic of Massachusetts

PS   Did I read somewhere you’re working on another playbook focusing onformation adjustments?

Coach-

You did read correctly.  But first on my list of projects is the next installment of the Open Wing playbook.

Keep enjoying your season.  I’ve enjoyed watching your team.



*********** Hello Coach,

I hope you are feeling better. I saw on your NYCU that you had been under the weather.

I wrote to you back at the beginning of the season regarding my fumbling problems and you gave me some excellent advise, but we still kept fumbling. Some of the players had improved, but others were not able to really get better, and with play time rules in effect I made a switch after our 3rd game. We had a bye week and I decided to install the Open Wing. In examining my skilled players I came to realize I had 2 guys who are excellent runners (put them at BBack)and a pretty good QB that throws well and can run a little. Since the installation we have put up 42 and 29 points in the 2 games and we have won both games. The transition was pretty seamless for the Oline other than I decided to flop them using an open and tight side, and my center had no trouble with the short snap. The biggest improvement is we have only fumbled once( in the first game in the Open Wing) and the kid got the message real quick when I benched him for the rest of the half. As for the other guys that continued to fumble, well they get to play X and Slot and never have to see the ball. I do have a kid at X that I throw to, and a slot player that is lightning quick so I run him on reach plays, but other than those two no one else out there gets a whiff of the ball.

I do have a question about the Open Wing, I have the videos and maybe I need to look at them again, but when would I use Over, Eastern, or Western? Especially if I am sticking with the G-O's, X-O's, and the traps. When would be a good time to change the formation that may be advantageous to the play calls I hope this makes sense.

Thanks Coach

John Guebara
Craftsbury, Vermont

Glad you’ve been able to make use of the Open Wing.

A brief answer to your question would be that you might use Eastern and Western (moving your slot to the Tight Side) when a defense that’s normally a 3-deep covers your slot back with its safety (and therefore there's no one in the middle).  That means that it’s playing your running game 9-on-9. (TOP)

By moving your Slot Back to the other side ("Western") , you can force the secondary back into its base 3-deep, and  make it an 8-man box. (BOTTOM)



Otherwise, unless you have some plans to throw, there’s no advantage to you to go Western or Eastern. (If you can throw, you have trips to the tight side, and almost certainly one-on-one coverage on the split end.)

Hang tight until I send out playbook pages for “Strong” backfield.

Good Luck!

*********** Hugh Freeze joins Rick Neuheisel!

1. https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/former-ole-miss-coach-hugh-freeze-hired-as-offensive-coordinator-in-new-aaf-league/

Uh-Oh.

2. Have you felt the Push for Notre Dame as NatChamps this year? "It's the feel good story of the 2018 college football season..."  CBS Sports on the 'Net is the worst: A  picture of the ND QB with high cheek bones and a chin carved from a rock from Mount Rushmore appears for a few seconds with whatever story you're reading.  This guy is ready to star in a Superman  movie.  Get ready for another "Fifth-to-First"  year, even with a Playoff System.

Think there aren't strings being pulled for some people?

Charlie Wilson
Crystal River, Florida

*********** Don’t you just love Politial Correctness?

Came across this…

The mascot of Flint Central High School since 1928 was the Indian. In 2001 the Flint Board of Education voted to phase out school mascots that made reference to Native Americans in all of Flint's schools. This affected other school mascots as well including the Pierce Elementary School Arrows (although the mascot name is a reference to the automobile model, not the weapon),

Did you get that?  There was once a car called the Pierce Arrow.  And a very prestigious automobile it was. Therefore, it being Michigan and autos and all that, what a clever nickname for Pierce Elementary School.

But ooooooo. Arrows bad.

*********** I go back a long way with Gil LeBreton, a long-time sportswriter and columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.  Back in the days of the World Football League, Gil, an LSU guy,  was the PR man for the Birmingham Vulcans, and I served in the same capacity with the Portland Thunder.  We hit it off pretty well and in return for his hospitality when I visited the Magic City, I reciprocated when he came out to the Northwest.

After a long career with the Star-Telegram, Gil has embarked on a new venture, a subcription-only site devoted to Dallas-Fort Worth sports.
In one of his most recent columns, Gil wrote about Gary Patterson’s losing both of his parents in the past year, and how his upbringing has been responsible for making him the man - and the coach - he is…

Patterson left tiny Rozel, Kan., in 1978, first to Dodge City Community College and then to attend Kansas State, but in a lot of ways Rozel has never left him.

Rozel is smack dab in the middle of central Kansas, 137 miles from Wichita, 135 miles from the Nebraska state line and 150 miles from Colorado. There’s a grain elevator, a water tower and a few dozen houses, but no signal light or even a stop sign on the town’s main street.

The population of Rozel is listed as 156. Patterson’s final year at Pawnee Heights High was the school’s last season to play 11-man football.

*****
“People say, ‘Well, why are you so driven?’” Patterson reflected Tuesday. “You’re driven because you have parents that drove you, and you want to make sure that you paid them back for all the hard work they did.”

Patterson’s father Keith, who died in January, leveled farm land for a living so area farmers could find irrigation. His mother was a career nurse.
His parents valued the necessities of hard work, Patterson said.

“I went back to see her last Sunday after the Iowa State game, and it was the last time,” he said. “Most people, if they knew a parent was going to pass away, would have stayed a couple of days.

“But she was one of those [who said], ‘Now, I don’t want you to get beat by Texas Tech, so you need to get back and get prepared.’

“That’s just the way we do things. That’s the way they brought me up.”

His mom died quietly on Thursday, Oct. 4, four days after Gary visited.

*****
From his parents, Patterson continued, he inherited his zealous drive.

“They were a couple who knew what they were and how they did things,” he said. “They worked hard. The reason myself and my brother and sisters turned out way we did was the simple reason that they pushed us to be that.

“We never knew we didn’t have anything. We didn’t have anything but we didn’t know that. They always found a way to make sure we had an education, clothes, everything.”

When Patterson returned in January to see his then-ailing father Keith, he received a similar scolding as the one his mother would later give him – get back to work.

“If you lose a recruit because you’re back here . . . ,” the elder Patterson told his son.

FRID

*********** The latest Sports Illustrated contains a couple of very deep football articles, neither of which will please someone who dislikes the way the game is headed.

One, “The NFL’s Unfixable Problem,” by Tim Layden, deals with the newest definition of roughing the passer, and how offenses have taken advantage of the near-untouchable status of the quarterbacks  and the added protection of “defenseless” receivers to put up numbers less related to the skills of the players than to the laxity of the rules. It’s part a concern for  player safety, true, but it’s also business-driven, because spectators pay to see offense. (Next:  baseball moving the pitcher’s mound back to 90 feet, and giving the batter four strikes - and saying that because so many pitchers are throwing in the 90s now, it’s for the safety of the batters.)

Jack Lambert drew laughs back in the 70s when Howard Cosell asked him if he could think of any rules change to protect quarterbacks and he answered, “it might be a good idea to put dresses on all of them.”

We are almost there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=15&v=IxDUCaUYhnw

The other article, “The Option,” by Ross Dellinger, does a nice job of giving an overview of the various forms of options and how  option football appears doomed. Even its practitioners agree, and most of them seem to feel - as I do - that the rulesmakers “have an agenda.”  The latest attack on option play has been an outlawing of below-the-waist blocking downfield. Passed as a “safety measure,” I have yet to see the data to support it.

There’s no question in my mind that there is an “agenda” to do away with option football.  Non-option coaches are a great majority, and their influence on the rules committee reflects it.  If with just one rule they could outlaw option football overnight, they’d do it, but realizing that that’s impossibile, they’re settling for one bite at a time.


*********** Downtown Vancouver, Washington used to be a fairly rough place, known mainly for its dives, card rooms (legalized poker) and - a sure mark of a place where people live on the edge - pawn shops.

Gentrification is making its inroads.  The cardrooms were sent packing long ago, the dives are being replaced by brewpubs and wine bars, and with the closing of a major pawn shop, only two remain from what was not long ago seven.

The reason for the pawn shops’ demise doesn’t seem to be as much a factor of an improved downtown as it is a result of peoples’ ability to sell things online.

But at least one guy isn’t worried about the future of  pawn shops in Vancouver.

Said Dan Maks, co-owner of still-in-business Lucky Loans, “As long as people still spend more money than they make, there will always be pawn shops.” 

*********** KC Smith, of Walpole, Massachusetts, brought to my attention an NFL player/MD whom I’d overlooked.  And shame on me because he was an Ivy Leaguer.

He’s Dr. Archie Roberts, a native of Holyoke, Massachusetts who played at Holyoke High and then Deerfield Academy before going on to Columbia.

He got his MD at Case-Western Reserve, and became a cardiac surgeon.

By the time he retired, he had performed more than 4,000 open heart operations.

(Actually, he missed the list because he’s not  a former NFL player - he was an AFL player (Jets and Dolphins) and barely one at that, appearing in only one game.)

KC Smith wrote with some amount of personal interest: Archie Roberts played at Deerfield Academy for his dad, Jim Smith.

So did KC.  And so did KC's  four brothers, Mike, Danny, Jimmy and Patrick.

In his 36 years at Greenfield, Jim Smith coached the Deerfield Big Green to a 175-88-12 record.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_Roberts_(American_football)
 
https://deerfield.edu/athletics/news/2012/10/smith-football/10198455/

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

Everyone down here is gearing up for the Red River Rivalry between Texas and Oklahoma in Dallas this weekend.  I like Texas' chances and will take the points! (Honest - I got this email before the game! HW)

I think the guy having the tough season is the same guy we both know.  A ton of injuries to his starters, and the drop-off at each position is significant.  He still has great support because his boys are learning a lot about character this year.  Just a matter of time before they start winning.

It's apparent Todd Bridge has a plethora of football knowledge as a player and a coach, and I'm happy to hear he landed a good job.

Sounds like Coach Pierce is facing the same challenge as our head coach here.  Lack of numbers.  He only has 16 healthy bodies including 6 freshmen and 4 sophomores.  They're 0-4 and have cancelled 3 games with only two remaining...provided they have 20 players eligible by decree of our school administration.  The chances of the football program surviving are slim.

Sometimes you have to wonder wtf some coaches are thinking when they don't supervise their athletes.  Likely they aren't thinking, and why we hear and read about those asinine stories.

An old mentor coach of mine (RIP) was the one who advised me on becoming a head coach to always strive to be different than your opponents.  He knew what he was talking about.  While everyone back then was running some form of triple option, or power football he was throwing the ball all over the field and winning championships.

Have a great weekend!

Joe Gutilla
Austin, Texas

*********** Coach John Coelho, in Turlock, California, sent me this classic “10 men in the box” shot…



Mustn’t have been too successful, because his Hornets are now 5-1, second in their league, and they lead the league in scoring,

(Remember - the closer defenders get to the line of scrimmage, the more committed they become to that side, and the less of a threat they are to plays run in the other direction.)


*********** Coach - I actually enjoy this Friday Night Ivy League  Game thing ESPN has got going , who ever came up with that concept  should be promoted.  What I would actually like to see is ESPN dedicate a Night  - Wed Night or Thurs Night OR even a time slot on Sat - on one of their Channels for a 1-AA (FCS) Game of the week. I actually think that would catch on. Plenty of good 1-AA conferences
 
John  Muckian
Ipswich, Massachusetts

John,

It’s a great concept and the Ivies have been putting on a good show.

The Ivy has a chance at getting viewers because they are nationally-known colleges with great reputations that turn away large multiples of the numbers of kids who apply.

I actually would prefer something every week like this past Tuesday night’s Arkanas State-App State game.  The non-Power 5 FBS conferences play football that's good enough that the average fan couldn’t distinguish it  from the SEC if they were to switch uniforms with SEC teams. And this would be their chance to shine on a national level.

And don’t forget, it’s almost time for the MAC to start playing two or three nights a week. (Sure hope it’s good for MAC football to be totally turning their backs on Saturday afternoon football.)

*********** In the AFCA Coaches’ Top 25 weekly poll, the top five in the less-publicized classifiations
 
FCS
1. North Dakota State; 2. Kennesaw State; 3. Eastern Washington; 4. Wofford; 5. South Dakota State

DIVISION II
1. Minnesota State; 2. Grand Valley State; 3. Ferris State; 4. West Georgia; 5. Ouachita Baptist

DIVISION III
1. Mount Union; 2. Mary Hardin-Baylor; 3. St. Thomas; 4. Brockport State; 5. Wisconsin-Whitewater

COMPLETE RANKINGS...

https://www.afca.com/fcs-poll-elon-upsets-james-madison-to-shuffle-top-5-in-afca-fcs-coaches-poll/?utm_source=AFCA+Insider&utm_campaign=8a96b6388d-AFCA_Weekly_100317_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_343e846137-8a96b6388d-147880073

*********** Think the fans in Pittsburgh haven’t noticed?

Michael Salfino in the Wall Street Journal noted that  over the last nine games of the 1976 season, the Steelers’ defense allowed opponents a grand total of 28 points.

This year’s Steelers’ defense has given up 21 points in one quarter - against the Chiefs in game #2.


*********** I consider Charlie Wilson of Crystal River, Florida to be as knowledgeable  about the wishbone and/or the belly as anybody I’m aware of, and I knew I’d hear from him after Georgia Tech’s demolishing of Louisville:



Look at the Attachment.  It's a good ol' WT-6 with the Safety at 6 over C and the OLBs out of the picture.  That oughta' work.  So..."Whadya' run against THAT, CPJ?"

Of course!  "I'm gonna Double the DT by reaching the C to the right and Blocking my Right T down whilst I Pull my G around...".  The Louisville D is still looking for TaQuon Marshall who reversed Counter Clock Wise, took a step or two and then cut straight up-field.  Just gashed 'em.

Remember what I've said through the years?  "All Defenses of the Wishbone/Flexbone/Spread Option go back to the Wide Tackle Six and the Defense the Option Team most wants to face is the WT-6."

I may not get to sleep tonight.

Hope yer OK.


*********** With the recent deaths of George Taliaferro and John Gagliardi, the world of football lost two giants in the space of just a few days.  Ironically, they’d both been featured during the past year as subjects of my quiz. (No, I don’t see myself as “jinxing” them in any way.  Don’t forget, the men I write about - if they are still alive - are already well up in their years as it is.  I’m just glad that I happened to bring them to some people’s attention before they passed away.  We need to treasure men like that while they’re with us. God rest their souls.

BACK IN FEBRUARY…..

***George Taliaferro  spent six years in the pro football, with four different teams in two different leagues.

He  was a native of Gary, Indiana. In 1945, as a 17-year old freshman playing with returning war veterans such as Pete Pihos, who would become a Pro Football Hall-of-Famer, and Ted Kluszewski, who would go on to baseball fame with the Cincinnati Reds, he was the starting tailback on Indiana’s undefeated Big Nine  championship team.  (Michigan State wouldn’t become the conference’s 10th member until December, 1948). At the end of the season, he was named All-America - quite possibly the youngest player ever to be so honored.

He was the only black player on his team, at a time when at least one football publication referred to him quite unselfconsciously as a “spectacular Negro back."

He was a twice named All-Big Ten, and named on various All-America teams over three different seasons.

In 1948, he was his team's leading rusher, passer and punter.

Although he  was the first black player ever drafted by an NFL team (Chicago Bears - 13th round - 1949),  he was not the first black draftee to play in the NFL (that was Wally Triplett of Penn State) because he signed, instead, with the Los Angeles Dons of the All-America Football Conference.

He carried 62 times for 330 yards and caught 25 passes for 246 yards, but the Dons went 4-8 in 1949, and they folded following the season. That would be the first of a number of poor seasons he would experience, as his career took him from one bad  team to another.

In 1950, following the AAFC's "merger" into the NFL, he wound up with the New York Yankees. They went 7-5 in 1950 - the only winning season he would experience -  but in 1951, after they finished 1-9-2,  they were moved to Dallas and renamed the Dallas Texans.

After sparse crowds at their first four home games, the Texans' owners gave up and returned the team to the league, and the Texans became vagabonds - officially, a "road team.”  They played the remainder of their schedule on the road, using Hershey,  Pennsylvania as their home base,  but rarely stopping there long enough to do much practicing. They finished the 1952 season a woeful 1-11.

In 1953, after NFL Commissioner Bert Bell persuaded a wealthy Baltimorean named Carroll Rosenbloom  to head a group to buy the Texans and move them to Baltimore,  he went along. Those early Colts’ teams were not yet the team that would win back-to-back NFL titles in 1958 and 1959.  In each of his two years there, the Colts were 3-9.

He was traded to the Philadelphia Eagles before the 1955 season and spent a final year there, playing sparingly on a team that finished 4-7-1.

In college and in the pros, he was a Mr. Everything - in his NFL career, he rushed 436 times for 1936 yards, and caught 70 passes for 1054 yards.  He returned 27 punts for 251 yards and 67 kickoffs for 1415 yards. He punted 93 times for an average of just over 37 yards, and he’s third in the NFL record books for most punts per game, with 14.  He was selected to play in the Pro Bowl in 1951, 1952 and 1953.

Sadly, he played before free agency.  Nowadays, star players shop around for the team that gives them their best chance at a Super Bowl ring, but in his six seasons in pro football - playing on five different teams in two different leagues - he experienced just one winning season.

His teams won a total of only 23 games - 11 of them in his first two seasons - and in 1951-1952 he experienced back-to-back one-win seasons.

In 1972, he was named assistant to the President of Indiana University, responsible primarily for minority recruitment.

In 1981, he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame, and in 1992 he was elected to Indiana University’s Hall of Fame.

At age 91, George Taliaferro is one of the oldest living former NFL players.

CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING GEORGE TALIAFERRO:
JOSH MONTGOMERY - BERWICK, LOUISIANA
MARK KACZMAREK - DAVENPORT, IOWA
JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
KEN HAMPTON - RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
ADAM WESOLOSKI - PULASKI - WISCONSIN
OSSIE OSMUNDSON - WOODLAND, WASHINGTON
KEVIN MCCULLOUGH - LAKEVILLE, INDIANA
JOE GUTILLA - AUSTIN, TEXAS

LESS THAN A MONTH AGO…

*********** QUIZ ANSWER - In 64 years of coaching college football, John Gagliardi (Gal-ARR-dee) coached at only two colleges -  both of them small Catholic schools -  spending the last 60 of those years at one of them.

One of nine children of an Italian immigrant coal miner in Trinidad, Colorado, he first became a head coach in 1943, at the age of 16 -  when his high school coach went off to war and there was no one else to coach the team.  It was during that time, as he had to learn on the fly, that he began to question - and reject - many of the rituals and practices thought sacred among the football coaching fraternity.

While attending Colorado College,  he didn’t play football. Instead, he coached a local high school team the entire time.

At 22, he got his first college head coaching job, at Carroll College in Helena, Montana (where Bob Petrino’s father would later become the coach). In four years there, his record was 24-6-1.

That led to the head coaching position at St. John’s University, in Collegeville, Minnesota, where he would stay for 60 years.

His coaching philosophy, at which coaches of all levels marveled,  was, to say the least, “different.” He came to call it “Winning with NO,” which meant no titles (such as “Coach”), no whistles, no hollering at players, no blocking sleds, no tackling in practices, no slogans or signs in the locker room, no playbooks, no grading films - that’s a sample.  The list of his “No’s” was long and impressive.

His practices were 90 minutes - no practice on Sundays or Mondays - and just 45 minutes on Fridays.

All his seniors were captains (“that way they can all put ‘captain’ on their resumes”).

“Calisthenics” might consist of “One perfect jumping jack.”

How did it all work out?

Well, first of all, how many other guys can you think of who lasted 60 years at the same place?

When he retired in 2012, he was the winningest coach in college football history.

At St. John’s, from 1953-2012, he was 465-132-10, with 27 conference titles

His Johnnies won national titles - NAIA 1963 and 1965 and NCAA D-III in 1976 and 2003.

In his entire career he had just two losing seasons - 3-4-1 in 1956 and 3-5 in 1967.

He is a member of the College Football Hall of Fame - he and Bobby Bowden were the first active coaches to be inducted

Since 1993, a Trophy in his name has been awarded annually to the outstanding player in Division III.

CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING JOHN GAGLIARDI
JOSH MONTGOMERY - BERWICK, LOUISIANA
GREG KOENIG - CIMARRON, KANSAS
JOSH COLE - ODESSA, NEW YORK
TIM BROWN - FLORENCE, ALABAMA
KEN HAMPTON - RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
JOE GUTILLA - AUSTIN, TEXAS
JOHN BOTHE - OREGON, ILLINOIS
ADAM WESOLOSKI - PULASKI, WISCONSIN
PETE PORCELLI - WATERVLIET, NEW YORK
MIKE FRAMKE - GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN
TOM WALLS - WINNIPEG, MANITOBA
TOM DAVIS - SAN CARLOS, CALIFORNIA
KEVIN MCCULLOUGH - LAKEVILLE, INDIANA
MARK KACZMAREK - DAVENPORT, IOWA - “Nice Polish kid”
OSSIE OSMUNDSON - WOODLAND, WASHINGTON
JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA

*********** At the end of the Civil War, there were 112,000 undergraduate students in the US.  Today, 150 years later, the Department of Education estimates that number to be 20,000,000.  Looking at just one measurement of education:  the quality of writing  -  compare  the literature and the newspapers of 150 years ago (even the letters written by Civil War soldiers) with what passes for writing today. Then tell me where the hell all today’s “educated” people are hiding.

*********** Don Gordon, of Deerfield, Massachusetts, wrote me last week:

Since there are few good college games this week might enjoy some of this.

https://youtu.be/evei1dpwREA?list=PL97Cp8D5oEfliAiLms3BYAedUUtn_Pvga

It’s a week late, but no matter - it’s a nice look at his kids at Frontier Regional High running his Double Wing.  Coach Gordon is my kind of guy - he coaches his kids well, he runs what works, and he doesn’t do dumb things.

COLLEGE FOOTBALL -

FIVE GAMES INVOLVING RANKED TEAMS THAT ARE WORTH MY WATCHING:
1. Michigan 9-1/2 over Wisconsin - I’d like to take my chances with the Badgers but that loss to BYU scares me off. Got to go with UM.
2. Washington 3-1/2 over Oregon - It could be a Ducks’ upset, but it could be a Huskies’ blowout. I’d take the points.
3. Georgia 7-1/2 over LSU - Georgia may be even better than the spread, but my heart says LSU will beat the spread. (My heart rules my head.)
4. USC 7 over Colorado - The Buffs had to go and pick Saturday night in the Coliseum for their first tough game and I’m afraid they’ll get it. This could be the Trojans’ team their fans have been waiting for, so I’d take USC and give the points.
5. Penn State 13-1/2 over Michigan State - I like the Spartans and it’s hard to believe the Lions are two TDs better -  but I believe it.

OTHER GAMES THAT I’LL TAKE A LOOK AT - AND STAY WITH UNLESS THEY SUCK
1. Georgia Tech 2-1/2 over Duke - I love Duke and Coach Cut and I know how much he dislikes the wishbone but what the Jackets did to Louisville last week was scary. Still, I’ll take Duke and the points
2. Northwestern 4-1/2 over Nebraska - This could be the Huskers’ best chance at a win. I’ll take Nebraska and the points
3. Iowa 5 over Indiana - Only 5? Can Indiana be that tough? Nah.  I’ll take the Hawkeyes.
4. Boston College 13-1/2 over Louisville -  Louisville admitted it doesn’t have the money to buy Petrino out, but otherwise I’d say he was going down the gurgler. I’ll go with BC
5. Temple 7 over Navy - Sounds about right.  This is not a good Navy team. Air Force crushed them last week in a way few teams - even teams  like Ohio State and Notre Dame  -have ever done. I’ll take the Owls.
6. Cal 6 over UCLA - I think that Cal blew their chances for a decent season when they made a bonehead decision to bench the QB who’d been their starter all last season. Pick of the week: Bruins finally win
7. BYU 11 over Hawaii - I don’t get it.  A BYU team that’s lost two in a row? Blown out in one loss  by 28, the other by 25? If I were in Vegas right now I’d actually bet money on this one.  It’s a lock.
8. Miami 6-1/2 over Virginia - I think the Canes will kill UVa.
9. Virginia Tech 5-1/2 over North Carolina - Not so fast. In their sleep, the Hokies are two touchdowns  better than the Heels.
10. Army over San Jose State - there’s no point spread posted, but if I had to do it, I’d take Army and give 10. San Jose hasn’t seen this sort of an offense.


*********** QUIZ  ANSWER - ANDY Kerr -  was born in Cheyenne, Wyoming, but his family moved back East when he was young and he went to high school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and then to  Dickinson College in the same town.

After several years coaching high school football, he got a job at Pitt as track coach and basketball coach, and as an assistant football coach under the legendary Pop Warner.

In 1922, Warner agreed to accept the head coaching job at Stanford, but because he was contractually bound to Pitt for two more years,  he sent our guy out to “hold his place.” (As a sign of the high regard in which Warner was held, Stanford agreed to the arrangement.) For two seasons, until Warner could arrive and  take over, our guy was Stanford’s head coach, and he  went 11-7. He then returned to being an assistant under Warner for two more years, at which point he accepted the head coaching job at Pennsylvania’s Washington and Jefferson College.

In three years at W & J, he was 16-6-5, which earned him the head job at Colgate, then something of a football power.

That was 1929, and he stayed at Colgate for 18 years, compiling a record of 95-50-7.

His 1932 team, which went 9-0 and didn’t give up a point, was named national champion. But despite its record, it wasn’t invited to represent the East in the Rose Bowl, as would normally have been the case, and writers conferred on that team the nickname “Undefeated, untied, unscored on - and uninvited.”

He finished his career  close to home, at Lebanon Valley, in Annville, Pennsylvania, where he went 15-8-2.

ANDY Kerr is in the College Football Hall of Fame.

A little known fact is that he was also a college head basketball coach.  In one year at Pitt and four years at Stanford he compiled a record of 54-26.


CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING ANDY KERR

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

*********** MORE ON ANDY KERR…

Most of the “research” I do for my QUIZ subjects is rather cursory since I normally need just a few salient facts about a guy.  And, to be frank, I’m often in a bit of a hurry.  But every so often I see something that makes me want to dig deeper, and when I do, I’m always amazed at the things I  discover.  (I take a little pride in pointing out that the research I’m taking about is not synonymous with “googling.”  The material I’m talking about digging through is old-fashioned print-on-paper.  Books, they used to call the things.  And if you don’t have access to the books, you don’t have access to the information that’s in them.

As I did my Internet research on Andy Kerr, it occurred to me that there had to be a lot more to the guy’s story. Book research - two books on the history of Stanford sports, two on the coaches of the early 1900s, one on the history of Pac-10 football, and one on the history of college football - showed me there was quite a bit more.

Some important things you ought to know about ANDY  Kerr.

1. He will forever live in football lore as ANDY Kerr.  Andy, not Andrew  Never at any time during his career or afterward was he referred to as “Andrew.” If someone today were to refer to a “William” Belichick or “Nicholas” Saban, you would wonder if he’d just arrived from another planet.  I can only assume that those of you who identified him as “Andrew” Kerr drew your information from the sometimes-fallible Wikipedia, where evidently for some time and  for some unknown reason Andy Kerr has been called “Andrew.”  I apologize on behalf of Wikipedia, which by and large does a good job, and with my ability to edit its entries I have already made what changes I could to his entry.  It sure would be a sin to see somebody named Andrew Kerr get the credit that’s due to Andy Kerr. 

2. Andy Kerr’s story offers hope for those of you who might be coaching in high school but still aspire to a job at a college.  After graduation from Dickinson College, Andy Kerr taught at a business college in Johnstown, Pennsylvania while coaching high school football there,  and he didn’t get his first college coaching job until he joined Pop Warner’s staff at Pitt in 1915.  He was 36 years old.

3. On the Pitt teams he coached  were two future coaches who would, like him, also carry on Warner’s legacy:  Jock Sutherland, who would go on to become a coaching legend himself at Pitt and then with the Pittsburgh Steelers, and Claude “Tiny” Thornhill, who would later serve on Warner’s staff at Pitt with Kerr, and would accompany Kerr to Stanford to coach the line. He would remain at Stanford  for 11 years as Warner’s line coach, and when Warner left to go to Temple, he became the Indians’ head coach. In his first three years, Thornhill took Stanford to three straight Rose Bowls, and for almost 80 years - until David Shaw did so (2011-2013) -  he was the only Stanford coach to take a team to three straight bowl games.

4. The Stanford football program that Kerr arrived to take over wasn’t exactly big time, and he had to start almost from scratch.  Following a long spell (1906-1918) of playing rugby instead of football, Stanford had only three years earlier resumed playing college football. And after three straight losses - the last two of them blowouts - to hated Cal, Stanford’s leaders decided to do something about it.  They went after the best coach possible - Pop Warner.  So badly did they want him that when he expressed interest in the job but when he informed them that he had two years remaining on his contract at Pitt (people didn’t get out of contracts in those days), they agreed to go along with his proposal to send Kerr and Thornhill west to install his system. 

5. All Stanford people  owe a debt of gratitude to Andy Kerr as the coach who brought Ernie Nevers to Stanford.  One of the greatest players in college or pro football history, Nevers is forever identified at Stanford with Pop Warner, but he actually arrived at Stanford the same year as Kerr, and then played his first year of varsity ball as a sophomore under Kerr. (Part of the Ernie Nevers legend is that, as a native of Superior, Wisconsin, he’d hoped to get a scholarship from the Badgers. When no offer came,  he approached the coaches at Cal, who looked at his size and said they’d be interested in him - as a lineman.  Andy Kerr was smart enough to recognize what he had with Nevers. The big guy remained in the backfield and went on to football immortality.)

6. There were many who said that Kerr and Sutherland were actually greater practitioners of the Warner system than Warner himself.  For ten years their careers overlapped,  from 1929 - when Kerr took over at Colgate - through 1938 - when Sutherland resigned in protest of the university’s lack of support of his program -  and during that ten-year period their combined record was 147-32-8.   Despite their common roots under Pop Warner, there doesn’t appear to have been any particular closeness between them, socially or professionally.  In fact, it was Sutherland’s 1932 Pitt team that got the Rose Bowl bid that Colgate was denied.

7. Andy Kerr deserves some credit for making the forward pass an integral part of the game, and not just a surprise tactic. From a site devoted to the 1932 Colgate team:

one of his biggest accolades was the normalizing of the forward pass. Within a pass happy game these days, it is hard to remember that the forward pass was frowned upon early in the formation of football, and was only seen as a desperation play.  If you could not be manly and tough by gaining yards by running the ball, then you had to resort to the less-masculine concept of passing the ball.  However, Kerr saw past this negative stigma and saw how this had the potential to change the game forever. He saw the forward pass as a vital part to an offensive game plan, meaning that if a team was not expecting a pass, then the ability to pass the ball successfully increases significantly. 

(This is a great site,  including video highlights of the Red Raiders’ game against Brown.)
https://sites.google.com/a/colgate.edu/sharaczy/andy-kerr

8. The same site credits Kerr with popularizing what we now call a play-action pass:

"Without directly saying so, Kerr popularized the concept of a 'play-action pass"' whereas the offense fakes a run play followed by a downfield pass."

9. Probably more than anyone in the history of the game, he incorporated the lateral, long a staple of rugby (where forward passing is prohibited), into all aspects of his offense. 

Allison Danzig,  in his great book “History of American Football: Its Great Teams, Players and Coaches (1956),” called by a New York Times critic "without doubt, the most ambitious and best book ever published on the subject of college football."[ tells of a letter he received from Kerr in 1951 in which Kerr wrote, “I believe my development of the lateral pass is one of my greatest contributions to football.  In the development of lateral passes I put great stress on ball handling.  For this phase of the game I received information from rugby coaches and players at Stanford University as well as from one outstanding Canadian rugby coach.  Our ball handling was perfected to the point where the boys could handle multiple passes with accuracy and precision under tremendous pressure…

“We have made a great deal of use of down-field laterals. Some of these are definitely planned and other are optional. On most of our double wing plays we have a back who is faking taking the ball from the fullback (what he called the player in position to take the direct snap. HW). He continues down field and in many cases he is in a position to receive a lateral pass.”

In 1934, Ohio State  narrowly beat Colgate. Later, Buckeyes’ coach Francis Schmidt told the Saturday Evening Post, “Colgate offers one of the most modern offenses in the country, and they don’t think any more of tossing a lateral pass than they do of taking a shower after the game… Colgate has a squad of ball handlers and they fired the pigskin around like a major league baseball team during the infield practice.”

In 1931 Warner, his season over, sat on the sideline during a game in which Colgate struggled to beat Brown, 13-7.

When the game was won, Warner said to him, “Those touchdowns come hard, Andy. Good thing you had those laterals.”

When Kerr responded, “I suppose you think you could have done better with straight power, Pop?” Warner said, “No. Seriously, Andy, I’m tinkering with this lateral business.”

10. From 1932 until 2001, Colgate was known as the Red Raiders.  Andy Kerr was the reason.  In 1932, he introduced bright maroon uniforms for his team, and as Colgate’s record built (that was the year of Colgate’s famed unbeaten, untied and unscored-on team), so did its reputation.  Just as a sportswriter years later would refer to Army as the Black Knights of the Hudson, Dexter Teed, a young instructor of journalism at Colgate coined the term “Red Raiders of the Chenango Valley.”  The nickname caught on, and Colgate’s teams began to be known as the Red Raiders. Unfortunately, although the nickname  originally had absolutely zero racial connotations, over time there grew some “references to Native American caricatures and mascots,” and the “red” had to go.

In 2001, the University Board of Trustees made the following statement:

The Colgate University Board of Trustees, upon the recommendation of the President, Director of Athletics and the members of the campus Committee on Athletics, has announced that the University will drop the "Red" from its nickname Red Raiders. The change will be initiated immediately.

Colgate adopted the name Raiders to move away from the racial stereotype, which is indeed not the true origin of the nickname for Colgate but may nonetheless be offensive to the general public in ways that undermine the institution's values and commitments.

RESOLUTION
WHEREAS, the nickname Red Raiders was originally coined by Dexter Teed as a reference to the new maroon uniforms of the 1932 football team, but later associations for many years created references to Native American caricatures and mascots,
AND WHEREAS, though Colgate dropped the Native American references in the 1970s, sentiments connected to the old mascot linger and there has been pressure to change the nickname,
AND WHEREAS the on-campus Committee on Athletics - comprising students, faculty and staff - has recommended that "Red" be dropped from the Red Raider nickname to remove any possible inference of a racial stereotype,
AND WHEREAS, the State Education Department is encouraging high schools throughout the state to change nicknames and mascots that signal a racial stereotype, and "Red Raiders" is on that targeted list,
AND WHEREAS Colgate recruits students from those schools and seeks to be a model for them,
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that Colgate teams henceforth shall be known as the Raiders, and further, that as new uniforms, equipment and publications are phased in, they will incorporate the new name.

TUESD

FRID

As everybody with a cause or a project seems to be doing these days, I started a Gofundme page with a hard-luck story about needing enough money to keep me in beer for the next  couple of months; I'm happy to report that with donations now in excess of $450,000 (I had no idea there were so many chumps out there) , I could afford to turn down the extremely generous offer made to me by an Indian casino to provide college football tips to their high rollers, and to continue to publish this page twice a week.

*********** (The following is written by someone who can remember (1) when there was NO college football on TV (mainly because there was no TV); (2) when the NCAA limited  college football on TV to one game a week, and spread the wealth in such a way that it was rare to see teams other than Notre Dame or Michigan or Texas more than once a season.   Now that he’s able to watch maybe 50 or 60 different game on an average Saturday, you’d think, wouldn’t you, that such a person would be grateful as hell,  the last person in the world to gripe about the quality of this Saturday’s offerings?  Well, you’d be wrong.  That’s what happens when you spoil someone…)

Guys, if ever there was a fall Saturday that you could go shopping with your wife, or rake leaves, or watch little kids play soccer, this is it.

Okay, okay - just kidding about the little kids playing soccer.

But damn - with some 50 games on TV Saturday, there’s precious few that you’d call must-see.

How about this: there are just three game between two ranked teams:

#19 Texas vs #7 Oklahoma in Dallas (OU favored by 7-1/2)

#5 LSU at #22 Florida (LSU favored by 2)

#6 Notre Dame at #24 Virginia Tech  (ND favored by 6-1/2)

(To me, they’re all interesting games.  For what it’s worth, although Florida scares me, I would take the favorite in all of them.)

***

Otherwise, there are very few games that anyone  but a football fanatic  would call “compelling.”  Most of the ranked teams are in stinker matchups:

You like #1 Alabama?  You can watch them for a quarter or so and then take your wife out to lunch and not miss much.  They’re 35-point favorites over Arkansas.

#2 Georgia? The Bulldogs play Vanderbilt.  I like Vandy - got a granddaughter who goes there.  Couple of weeks ago, Vandy almost beat Notre Dame. Now, Georgia is a 27-point favorite.

#3 Ohio State?   They’re 26-point favorites over Indiana.

#4 Clemson?  They had trouble with Syracuse last Saturday.  This week it’s Wake Forest.  I like Wake - got a grandson who goes there.  But sheesh. Clemson is favored by 20.

#9 West Virginia?  28-1/2 points over Kansas

#10 Washington? 21-points over UCLA

#15 Michigan?  17-1/2 points over Maryland

#16 Wisconsin? 17-points  over Nebraska

***

MY TEN MOST INTERESTING GAMES

Boston College at #23 NC State - (NCS by 5-1/2) Don’t look now, but State is still unbeaten  STATE

Missouri at South Carolina - USC by 1-1/2 - The Battle of the Columbias. USC has been a BIG disappointment. I’m going out on a limb at taking MIZZOU

Navy at Air Force (Navy by 3)  — Air Force is down this year - NAVY

#8 Auburn at Mississippi State (Auburn by 4) —- AUBURN seems to have State's number

Arizona State at #21 Colorado (Buffs by 2-1/2) — We’ll find out if Colorado really is the best in the Pac-12 South - COLORADO

#13 Kentucky at Texas A & M  (A & M by 6) — Seriously? The Aggies are favored? BY 6 points? KENTUCKY

Florida State at #17 Miami (Miami by 13-1/2) - This one scares me, but - MIAMI

California at Arizona - (Cal by 2-1/2) - Wildcats have to win this one ARIZONA

Iowa at Minnesota - (Iowa by 7) - What happened to that boat, anyhow?  IOWA

Utah at #14 Stanford - (Stanford by 5-1/2) - Both teams have been disappointing.  STANFORD


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

Notre Dame surprised me.  I thought they had what it takes to beat Stanford, but I didn't think it would turn out the way it did.  Ian Book now makes the ND offense consistent, and the defense is getting better each week.  This week's game vs. VA Tech is a definite 'trap' game for ND. They'll need to play extremely well to beat the Hokies in Blacksburg.

I'm with you on the Army West Point stuff.  Really annoying.

My alma mater Fresno State is now 3-1.  Only loss a last minute one to a young, injury riddled and slumping Minnesota Golden Gopher team.

Have a great week!

Joe Gutilla
Austin, Texas

***********   I remember Steven Montez's dad. I was coaching at Las Animas, CO, when he was making headlines for tiny Granada, CO. If you haven't seen this, I think you'll enjoy it.

https://www.ralphiereport.com/2016/10/8/13167122/steven-montez-colorado-buffaloes-football.

Greg Koenig
Cimarron, Kansas


*********** A coach I’ve known for quite some time, a guy whom I’ve seen grow into a really good coach, is off to a rough start.

Lest you think that God picks favorites, it can happen any time  to any of us who don’t have control of where and how we get our athletes and who’s on our schedule.

For what it’s worth, once you’ve coached long enough, a bad season doesn’t diminish you in any way as a coach.  In my case, after I’d been through an 0-9 season, I figured I’d been through the worst thing that could happen in terms of  win-loss record, and that seemed to give me added strength in my dealings with anything that might come my way.

If others thought less of me as a coach because of that season, that was their problem.  I knew I could coach and it didn’t affect my self-confidence in the slightest.

In my opinion, you’re not really a coach until you no longer allow wins and losses to define you as a coach; unfortunately,  sometimes that means you have to take a beating to get to that point.

It might help any coach who’s suffering right now  - even a first-timer - to keep in mind that in Chuck Noll’s first three years as a head coach, he went 1-13, 5-9, 6-8. He went on to establish himself as an all-time great.

Tom Landry’s start as a head coach was even worse. In his first FIVE seasons he was 0-11-1, 4-9-1, 5-8-1, 4-10, 5-8-1.


*********** My former head coach, Todd Bridge, played offensive line for the Washington Huskies back in their glory days under Don James. Not once did I see him wear any of the rings he’d earned while at Washington.  Monday, he wore four of them.  He’s now the AD at Elma, Washington High, and this being Homecoming Week, he was prevailed on for some reason to wear them: (From left to right) National championship; Rose Bowl; Rose Bowl; Pac-10 championship.



*********** Although his family moved to Rochester, New York when he was a boy, Don Holleder was born in Buffalo, and that city has begun to realize that it, too, plays a part in the Don Holleder story.

https://www.wgrz.com/video/news/don-holleder-a-buffalo-born-hero/71-8268776

*********** TIMING IS EVERYTHING DEPT…

At a time when the fate of a Supreme Court nominee was being fought over an issue of alleged sexual misconduct, UMASS head coach Mark Whipple, after losing at  Ohio U, 58-42, chose an especially inappropriate time to say,  in his postgame remarks,  that the officials “raped us.”

And in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, of all places.

He was suspended without pay for a week.

https://boston.cbslocal.com/2018/09/30/mark-whipple-umass-football-suspended/

*********** Baseball’s overall average attendance per game continues to decline.

It was down 4 per cent this season, and  Baltimore, Chicago (White Sox), Minneapolis, Miami and Pittsburgh all experienced their lowest average attendance since opening new ballparks.

So what’s baseball doing about it?  Why, they’re going to try to appeal to the “younger” audience - the one that’s been conditioned to expect the sort of antics they see in other sports.  The antics that baseball has long frowned on, such as  taunting and  bringing undue attention to one’s self by - you know, flipping the bat, pausing to admire one’s home run, flexing and pulling off the Clark Kent shirt and tie.

As a start, Major League Baseball is running a promo on TV showing the antics in question and suggesting that it’s time to do away with the game's “unwritten rules” against buffoonery.

Yeah. That’ll get the kids out to the Old Ball Game.

Once, maybe.  Until they get tired of watching batters stepping in and out of the batter’s box and repeated changes of pitchers,  and managers walking out to the mound - and games taking three hours to play.

And no amount of bat flipping or flexing will get them to come back.

*********** My friend Dwayne Pierce split last Friday: he won one and lost one.

He lost when his Coolidge High team fell to Cordozo, 18-0, in a Washington, DC high school varsity contest.

But he also won - simply by fielding a team.  If he hadn’t been able to field the required 19 eligble kids by game time, Friday,  Coolidge’s kids, who had already had to forfeit their first two games, would have had to sit out the rest of the season.

(More likely, the handful of dedicated kids  who really wanted to play football would have transferred elsewhere, driving a stake into any hopes Coolidge would have had to revive the program next year.)

It took Coach Pierce weeks of recruiting.  At one point, he thought he had a deal with the soccer coach who had a similar numbers problem and proposed a swap of players: if Coach Pierce would “lend” him some players for a soccer match - which he did - the soccer coach would return the favor.  But when it came time to do so, he didn’t. 

Coach Pierce endured repeated turndowns by basketball players, good athletes but third stringers on the basketball team, with little chance of ever playing. They  told him that they were going to stick with basketball because they were going to play in the NBA some day. 

Somehow, he pulled it off  I didn’t ask him how.  All I did was tell  him that my wife and I were praying for him and his kids.  It couldn't have hurt. .

After the game several kids came up to Coach Pierce and asked if it was too late for them to come out.

Never too late, he told them.


*********** If what a Gunnison, Utah mother claims is true, there are some sick boys in their high school’s football program.  And some irresponsible coaches.

What is it that goes on in kids’ minds when they - allegedly - pin a kid down while one of them squats and presses his junk in that kid’s face?

And - assuming that this happened as the mother charges - what kind of coaches would allow kids to be unsupervised to the point that this ugliness could take place?

I wish we could say that this has nothing to do with football, but football was the reason why those kids were associating with one another, and any act like this reflects badly on our game.  Those coaches - if this is true - have let us all down.

Let this be a lesson to all coaches who have ever left kids unsupervised - at camp, on buses, in locker rooms:

Utah has lawyers, too, and if this happened the way it’s described,  those coaches could pay dearly for their failure to supervise the kids entrusted to them.

https://usatodayhss.com/2018/utah-football-mom-gunnison-valley-details-alleged-in-practice-sexual-abuse-of-son


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

Hope all is well.

I love reading the news and a few things came to mind this week.

When you were at Eagles Mere I hope you at least hiked the waterfall trails at Red Rock, its a pretty impressive thing to see.   Other than that I agree that there isn't much to do there.  My wife's family cabin is nearby.  We happened to go to HersheyPark yesterday, it was extremely crowded but we had free tickets and only stayed for a couple hours.

I thought you might find this interesting.  The local paper did a piece on high school team mascots.  I graduated from and coached wrestling and football at Hempfield High School, I'm a little more proud of the mascot now than I ever was before.

https://lancasteronline.com/news/local/what-s-the-origin-history-of-high-school-mascots-in/article_a049d366-c1a8-11e8-9711-6310d9d900cf.html

I know you are interested by school mascots.

On a side note, I reffed a youth game on Saturday and noticed the coach had a play drawn up out of double wing.  He didn't know much about it so I directed him to your website.  I hope he contacts you, he seemed interested.  I recommended the new playbook.

Thanks

Dave Kemmick
Mount Joy, Pennsylvania

Coach Kemmick’s high school:

Hempfield: Black Knights
District spokeswoman Shannon Zimmerman found the answer in a speech given several years ago by Don Emich, a 1955 Hempfield graduate, at his induction into the district’s Athletic Hall of Fame.

According to Emich, former Intelligencer Journal sports editor Marvin Miller wrote about Hempfield athletes as the “Red and Black of Hempfield” or “the boys from Landisville” in articles in the early 1950s. By the mid-’50s, the student council decided they needed an official name.

They solicited names from the student body, pared entries down to five and asked students to vote. The Black Knights were victorious.

Emich said the name was submitted by classmate Ken Bowers, who told him he chose the name to honor the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, whose athletes were “at the pinnacle of college football” in the late ’40s and early ’50s.

Their official name was the Cadets but they were fondly known as “the Black Knights of the Hudson,” Emich said. (The Army formally changed its team name to the Black Knights in 1999, some 44 years after Hempfield adopted the name.)

*********** Remember C. J. Fuller from Clemson?  A few years ago, he was a key part of their national championship team.  This past February, he announced that he planned to transfer; the next month, he was arrested and charged with armed robbery.

He was found dead Wednesday of as-yet known causes.  He was 22.

*********** A coach I know was advised that he “needed to make more efforts to get our best athletes more attention by incorporating offensive concepts that they would use at the ‘next level.’”

The irony is that he’s been highly successful. But in our society, everybody wants more, more, more.  It’s not enough to win games - you have to “showcase” your athletes.

He basically told them to shove it.

*********** On the subject of running a spread offense at the high school level, there are certainly some points in its favor:

One of the most significant is that  because so many top college programs are running a spread offense of some sort, you have access to the offensive thinking of some of the brightest people in the game.

But to me, the most significant is that it gives you immunity as a strategist.  There can’t be anything wrong with your thinking, can there, if you’re doing the same stuff they’re doing at Alabama… or Clemson… or Ohio State… or Penn State…? It gives you cover, because (for the Alabamas, the Clemsons, the Ohio States) it works!

But there is a problem.  A HUGE problem. 

If you’re going to do what everybody else does, you’re going to have to do it at least as well as they do.

You’re going to have to have the people… the knowledge of the schemes… the people… the ability to coach the techniques… the people… the savvy to call the plays… the people.

People?  If you’re a high school coach who has to deal with the kids who get off the bus every morning, you can’t depend on having the people.

There’s something else, too. When you run what everybody else runs, you don’t create any special problems for opposing defenses.  They’re used to seeing your offense, and they think they have a way to stop it.  An old football saying covers it: “Familiarity breeds defense.”

There’s a lot to be said for being different: for being the only guy in your league who uses a tight end - two tight ends, even;  the only guy who runs option; the only guy who has a lead blocker; the only guy who runs misdirection; the only guy with a QB under center.

You get the idea - when you choose to be different, you don’t have to be better than everybody else at what they’re doing.  In fact, if you can become good enough at what you’re doing, you will create huge problems for opponents because they can’t possibly be as good as you at running your offense.  What that means is the even the best teams will have trouble trying to simulate your offense with only a week to do it.

***********  A few weeks ago, on national TV, Jets’ running back Isaiah Crowell scored a touchdown, then “celebrated” by wiping his rear end with the ball before throwing it  into the Cleveland crowd. (He’d once played for Cleveland.)

Jets' coach Todd Bowles was not amused.  Nor was the NFL, which fined him $13,000.

Hey, he said afterwards. he was just havin’ fun. You know how that goes, he said:  “You gotta have fun. If you're not having fun with what you do, you might as well stop doing it. That's how I feel about it."

Yeah. I mean, if it gets to the point where you can’t score a touchdown and celebrate by wiping your ass, you might as well give up football and get a job at the car wash.

In the meantime - only in America - it appears that Mr. Asswipe has been signed to an endorsement contract by something called Dude Wipes.

I’m amazed, given Mr. Crowell’s past  (an arrest for multiple firearms offenses that got him thrown off the team at Georgia) that Nike let Dude Wipes get to him first.

*********** QUIZ ANSWER -  Bill McColl was a four-sport star as a high school athlete in San Diego, and at Stanford, at 6-4, 225 (a giant for his time) he was a 2-time All-American.  Playing both ways, he was an outstanding pass receiver as an offensive end and a terror on defense at either end or tackle.

He, along with a quarterback named Gary Kerkorian, were the main reasons why new coach Chuck Taylor took the Indians (as they were then called) to the Rose Bowl in his first season on The Farm. Taylor realized that his best chance of success was to stress the passing game - something for which Stanford became noted over the years, as it turned out great quarterback after great quarterback.

He was a third-round draft choice of the Bears, and in his eight years in Chicago, playing as a tight end and then as a slot back,  he played in all 96 games. For his career, he caught 201 passes for 2800 yards and 25 touchdowns.

He could throw as well as catch.  In 1956, he was on the throwing end of a 79-yard pass play, the longest in the NFL that season, against the Giants.

All the while he played with the Bears, he was studying medicine at the University of Chicago, and after retirement from football he became an orthopedic surgeon.


Bill McColl  and his wife had six children, two of whom, Duncan and Milt, also played football at Stanford.

He and Duncan are the only father and son team in Stanford football history to be named All-American.

Milt McColl played in the NFL for the 49ers and Raiders and is now a physician in suburban Chicago.


CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING BILL MCCOLL

JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
GREG KOENIG - CIMARRON, KANSAS
MIKE FRAMKE - GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN
KEVIN MCCULLOUGH - LAKEVILLE, INDIANA
JOE GUTILLA - AUSTIN, TEXAS
JOSH MONTGOMERY - BERWICK, LOUISIANA
KEN HAMPTON - RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
ADAM WESOLOSKI - PULASKI, WISCONSIN
TOM WALLS - WINNIPEG, MANITOBA


*********** Besides Bill McColl, there have been a handful of other former NFL players who became medical doctors.

One current player,  Laurent Duvernay-Tardif of the Chiefs, is already an MD, a graduate of McGill University Medical School

Others:

Tony Adamle - Browns - Ohio State, Western Reserve Med School

Dan Fortmann - Bears - Colgate, U of Chicago Med School

John Frank - San Francisco 49ers - Ohio State (undergraduate and med school)

Bill McColl - Bears - Stanford, U of Chicago Med School

Dave Middleton - Lions, Vikings - Auburn, Tennessee Med School

Myron Rolle - Titans - Florida State, FSU Med School - now a resident in neurosurgery at Harvard

Mike Sommer - Redskins, Colts - George Washington University  (undergraduate and medical school)

*********** QUIZ - He was born in Cheyenne, Wyoming, but his family moved back East when he was young and he went to high school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and then to  Dickinson College. in the same town

After college, he got a job at Pitt as track coach and basketball coach, and as an assistant football coach under the legendary Pop Warner.

In 1922, Warner agreed to accept the head coaching job at Stanford, but because he was contractually bound to Pitt for two more years,  he sent our guy out to “hold his place.” (As a sign of the high regard in which Warner was held, Stanford agreed to the arrangement.) For two seasons, until Warner could arrive and  take over, our guy was Stanford’s head coach, and he  went 11-7. He then returned to being an assistant under Warner for two more years, at which point he accepted the head coaching job at Pennsylvania’s Washington and Jefferson College.

In three years at W & J, he was 16-6-5, which earned him the head job at Colgate, then something of a football power.

That was 1929, and he stayed at Colgate for 18 years, compiling a record of 95-50-7.

His 1932 team, which went 9-0 and didn’t give up a point, was named national champion. But despite its record, it wasn’t invited to represent the East in the Rose Bowl, as would normally have been the case, and writers conferred on that team the nickname “Undefeated, untied, unscored on - and uninvited.”

He finished his career  close to home, at Lebanon Valley, in Annville, Pennsylvania, where he went 15-8-2.

He is in the College Football Hall of Fame.

A little known fact is that he was also a college head basketball coach.  In one year at Pitt and four years at Stanford he compiled a record of 54-26.

TUESD

Pac-12 referee Steven Strimling performed Saturday’s pregame coin toss in Spanish. He referred to Arizona as Gatos and to USC as Troyanos and used a lot of other words I didn’t understand.

At the conclusion of the toss, won by the Gatos, I could swear Strimling said “buena suerte, muchachos, lo necesitares.”

Good luck, guys, you’ll need it.

It was truly a game neither team seemed deserving to win.

After being scorched by the Troyanos on Saturday, the most daunting news is that Arizona must still play Oregon, Colorado, Washington State and a lot of other teams before coach Sumlin’s first season reaches an end.

Saturday’s loss was sobering on two fronts: First, the Gatos weren’t really competitive until mop-up time. As USC built a 17-0 lead, the Troyanos accumulated a 238 to 52 edge in total offense. Second, only 43,573 showed up at Arizona Stadium. That’s far below the Arizona Stadium average of 52,532 fans for UA-USC games in their Pac-10/12 history.

It was barely more than the 41,493 that showed up two weeks earlier to watch Arizona play Southern Utah.

Is that how far UA football has fallen from grace in this community? It can’t even draw 50,000 fans for the USC game?

FRID

TUESD

The head coaches, board members in this league that I respect are old school, power formation, line it up, simple blocking rules and they are adamant that you cannot have pulling linemen at young ages. I don't believe them and I'm going to show them. So any thoughts or suggestions you can lend there would be greatly appreciated.

The Dynamics 3.0 book is incredible. I've spent the past few nights reading it page for page. Had a coaches meeting yesterday morning and my assistants loved it. I'd like to get them each a copy of the book.

Need some advice. So my team of 8 year olds is very small in numbers - just 13 kids. It's youth football so I need to play everybody. I am struggling mightily to put together an o-line with some of kids being insanely green and still learning contact. I can get to a 5, maybe even a 6 man decent line(I'm including Ends in that.) So I'm thinking the best thing I could do is run out of spread formation. So I wanted to get your thoughts. Do I run just everything out of spread? Or would you run open wing? I always remember you telling me you could line a guy up at receiver with no arms and the defense would still cover them. Well I got a couple that might as well have no arms!

Hey Coach!

Hope all is well. Wanted to give you an update.

After dropping our first game, we have won 3 straight games. We even beat the team we lost to in a rematch 59-25. We are running Open Wing 100% of the time. 6-G-O is absolutely the bread and butter of what we do. The criss cross counter scores about 75% of the time we run it, no matter where we are on the field.

The one change we did make is rather than have the QB ride the 6-G-O play side and run outside on the fake, we have him bootleg away from play outside. Once we get them recklessly pursuing into the back field on 6-G-O the QB fakes and keeps it outside. It's become a big play for us. All in all we are running 2 wedge, 6/7G-O, 4/5 X-O, XX 45/54C and an 88/99 G-O Reach play. We also run a quick swing pass to the B back on the open side that is great for 2 point conversions(2 for pass and 1 for a run).

We are going to install the trap today. We are playing a team with that runs a 5-3 eagle look. They stand those two tackles(biggest kids they have) up in the A-gap and try to get penetration. I think we can pull that off and make that kid look both ways when he's penetrating. We will see how the practice goes.

Anyway, love the Open Wing. It's been great for the kids. Parents think it looks cool, I don't tell them we are a power running football team, hahaha.

Thanks for everything and take care!

FRID

*********** I don’t give a sh— about the NFL, and I wouldn't drink a Bud Light if you gave me a truck load of it, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t excited about watching the Cleveland Browns - and Baker Mayfield - win a football game Thursday night.

*********** It’s official. Nike is at war with the NFL. Why else would they dress the Cleveland Browns in uniforms so ugly that Colin Kaepernick would refuse a contract with the Browns before he’d wear one?

*********** Happy Birthday to Charlie Conerly, longtime New York Giants’ quarterback and still, in the words of the late Wellington Mara,  “The Greatest Player Not in the Hall of Fame.”

Yesterday, I was reading to my wife from the book, “Backseat Quarterback,” an inside look at Pro Football written in 1963 by his wife, Perian.

(Mrs. Conerly knew her football - she was the first female member of the Football Writers Association of America and wrote a weekly column for the New York Times. And she knew her football players.  After every Giants’ game she and her husband would go out on the town with teammates like Frank Gifford and Pat Summerall.  Those were the days before the tell-all book, or she could have made a fortune letting the New York public in on the escapades of their heroes.)

The passage I was reading dealt with Charlie’s age.   World War II service in the Marines interrupted his college career after the 1942 season, and when he retutned to Ole Miss for the 1946 season, they simply took the program info from when he’d last played and added a year to his age.  Problem was, he’d been away at war  and missed three three seasons.

Wrote Mrs. Conerly, “Now Charlie has never made  secret of his age. It was just that nobody ever asked him what it really was. Several years ago in a locker-room interview session, somebody did.  A reporter who had written a recent article headlined, “Conerly - Amazing Old Pro at 33!” evidently intended to write a follow-up. “Charlie, “ he inquired, “just exactly when will you be thirty-four?”

“Been there,” Charlie said casually. “I’ll be thirty-six on September 19.”

“Holy sh—!”  I shouted to my wife.  You do know the date, right?   We both looked at each other.  She said, “You’ve got to call Mrs. Conerly.”

Mrs. Conerly is a wonderful lady of the South, with one of the most beautiful accents you can ever imagine, and talking with her is a delight, even though, in her 90s, she’s slowing down a bit.  She thanked me for calling, as she always does, and confessed that she didn’t realize it was her Charlie’s birthday.

I was sent the photo on left  of Charlie Conerly by Don Shipley, who knows how much I admire the guy.  Don, who lives in Falls Church, Virginia, is the son of the late Dick Shipley, who was my coach when I played semipro ball in Frederick, Maryland.

It may have been taken his rookie year - 1948.  Note the red leather helmet. (If he looks a bit older than your usual rookie, it’s because he was already 27 years old.) 

The number 42? On a quarterback?

From “Backseat Quarterback”...

“In the early 1950s, the general practice of designating specific numerals to certain positions was made compulsory - presumably to make player identification simpler for the spectator… Players already wearing numerals contrary to the system when the ruling went into effect were allowed to retain their old numbers.  For this reason, Charlie’s uniform bears No. 42 instead of the low numbers assigned to present-day quarterbacks. (He brought number 42 from Ole Miss, where he was a passing halfback.”

(Mrs. Conerly  knew her football well enough to know what position he played, but I guess it was easier for her simply to say “passing halfback” then to have to explain “single wing tailback.”)



*********** With all the bulls— going on over something that a Supreme Court nominee may or may not have done when he was 17 years old, I have yet to hear anyone make a convincing argument that - assuming that he even did what he has been accused of doing at a high school party - what Brett Kavanaugh did 36 years ago as a 17-year-old kid offsets everything he’s done since then, and disqualifies him to serve on the Supreme Court.

If you are old enough, like me, you have lived to be amazed at the complete transformation of  at least one person you once knew  as a wild and crazy kid into someone entirely different - an accomplished,  distinguished adult.  So distinguished is that person now, so respected for his many accomplishments over the years, that if someone were to say, “But, but… he once got drunk and tried to pull a girl’s pants off at a party back in high school,”  you’d say, “Come on, man.  That was years ago. That was in another life.”

As this whole thing continues to unfold, two guys come immediately to mind: Ken McAdams and Alex Kroll.

Ken McAdams was two years ahead of me at Yale.   He was one of the reasons I joined the fraternity I did.  Proudly bearing the name “McAnimal,”  he loved to party, and do so unpredictably.  He wore motorcycle boots (this was tweedy Yale, mind you), rode a motorcycle and could easily have ridden with a gang and held his own. I admired him and aspired to be like him. The idea of his flying an airplane one day never occurred to me, but if it had, I’d have thought it was one of the craziest things that ever passed through my brain.

But he did fly airplanes, and he made it to old age intact.

Not, I should add, as Ken McAnimal.

As Ken McAdams, Marine Corps officer and fighter pilot, then pilot for Pan Am, then Chief Pilot, flying the airline’s founder, Juan Trippe and his successor, Najeeb Halaby, and dignitaries such as the legendary Charles Lindbergh.

When Pan Am failed, he formed his own air charter service, flying 747s, then joined Korean Air as a check pilot and lobbyist, and finally retired after serving as CEO of Kiwi International Airlines.

After the death of his wife of 35 years, he remarried, and he and his second wife now live in France.  He has written several books, the last, Bon Courage. He describes how it came about:

It was like I’d hit a wall and reached the point of wondering if my life was over, or at best hardly worth living. Three years widowed, with the two airlines I’d served for thirty years gone. It was as if there would be no more sunrises ahead ... until I met Bing, an artist, who was also alone. We had chemistry, we married.

We sold what had been ours before to begin again, start anew. We bought a tired old house in Connecticut and started rebuilding it. As time passed, lots of time passed, the house was finally done and we thought we were done too. “NEVER AGAIN!” we shouted from our rebuilt rooftop.

The honeymoon we never had was finally booked into a tiny French village, far far away. Our new lives of writing and painting would begin there, in earnest.
Then we fell in love with the village, its people and … (oh no!) an ancient, very tired old house … all over again.

BON COURAGE is the Déjà vu story of our NEVER AGAIN, but this time in French!

It is funny, sad, scary, combative, conciliatory, loving and fun. Bottom line, I think it is a hell of a story.

Yes, but… but… he was such an animal.

Alex Kroll’s is an another amazing story.  He was a class ahead of me at Yale, but I never knew him.  I was on the freshman team and he was a varsity player.

He was a big kid, from a small town in Western Pennsylvania called Leechburg, where his father was a laborer in a steel mill.  He was a very good football player, and somehow he found Yale or Yale found him, and as a sophomore he was the starting center/linebacker (two way football) on Yale’s 1956 Ivy League championship team. 

But sometime during that winter, Alex Kroll disappeared.  Vanished.  Dropped out of sight.

Even at Yale they were able to keep football players’ names out of the papers. But eventually, we all found what had happened. 

There had been some sort of minor automobile mishap on one of the streets that go through the campus, and whatever happened and whether it was abetted by alcohol, the fact is that at some point, Alex Kroll dropped a guy.  Who turned out to be an associate professor. Which led to Alex Kroll’s expulsion from Yale.

After serving two years in the Army, he entered Rutgers, where he quickly earned the  spot as starting center,  led Rutgers to a 17-1 record in his two seasons there, and captained the first unbeaten team in Rutgers’ history.  He was a near-consensus All-American his senior year.

He played one year in the AFL with the New York Titans (predecessors to the Jets), then embarked on a career in the advertising business as a trainee with Young and Rubicam, then one of the world’s largest agencies.

In 1970, at the age of 33, he was made Executive Vice-President and Creative Director, and in 1985 he was named CEO, a post he held until his retirement in 1994.
In his ten years as CEO, Y & R’s billings (sales) more than doubled, and  the number of its offices worldwide more than doubled, to 331.
 
He has received the Horatio Alger Award, the NCAA Silver Medal and the Walter Camp Distinguished American Award. He is a member of the College Football Hall of fame and the Advertising Hall of Fame.

 Yes, but… but… he was kicked out of Yale.

*********** Just wondering…  Why is it that back before women became empowered - I Am Woman Hear Me Roar, and all that - they could deal with guys who were a$$holes instead of being traumatized?

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

For the second week in a row we stayed away from the double wing and worked on open wing concepts.  The linemen (and myself as the coach) have really learned some ins and outs that occur when the fullback is pulled from the formation.  Our quarterback is getting very comfortable in both the running and passing games.  As always, thank you for sharing this aspect of the offense.

Starting this week we plan on sprinkling double wing back in as we move to the meat of our schedule.  The goal is to be prepared while also giving our opponents lots to look at. 

The Trojans won last week 56-13.  We are playing well on both sides of the ball right now. 

I hope all is well.

Todd Hollis
Elmwood, Illinois

*********** Burgerville is a decent-sized fast food chain headquartered in Vancouver, Washington.  Its food is good and fresh and it’s a good corporate citizen. And it pays its employees well above the minimum wage.

Nevertheless, this past year, Burgerville became the first fast-food chain in America to have to deal with  a union,  when employees at two of its Portland locations voted to unionize. (Forget the fact that the average fast food worker stays on the job less than a year.)

Now, sure as hell, Burgerville is dealing with its first strike ever. The employees at those two stores walked out after the company told them they couldn’t wear buttons that read “ABOLISH ICE” and “NO ONE IS ILLEGAL.”

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

Thought you would find this interesting:

http://footballscoop.com/news/brian-kelly-derek-mason-going-media/

Still trying to determine exactly what they're describing but it sounds to me like Kelly is complaining about what we always complain about.  That a defender outside of the tackle box is taking the legs out of a blocker (puller or kick-out) especially if the cut is taking place toward the original spot of the ball, which by rule is illegal.

I lost a B back once because of it, and I spoke with the crew before the game to warn them that on scout film our opponent did that to another team.  They said they would watch for it.  Of course it happened, injured player, no flag, and I lost my mind with the officials over it.  I had my rules book (as you always encouraged) and pointed it out to the Umpire..again.  He went over to the opposing coach to let him know it's illegal and that they would flag it, and then that coach lost his mind!  We beat them but it didn't diminish the fact that my starting B back was out for the season.

What do you think?

Joe Gutilla
Austin, Texas

There’s a pissing contest going on right now between ND’s Bryan Kelly and Vandy’s Derek Mason, and I’d have to say Kelly has the wind at his back.   Normally, I couldn't imagine myself siding with Notre Dame against Vanderbilt, but here I am.

We Double Wingers constantly have to deal with defenders (coming from the outside) attacking our blockers at the knees  and rightly so.  It’s illegal, it’s unethical and it’s dangerous as hell, but it’s hard to get officials to pay attention to it.

This, as shown, is an easy call , and much as I like Vandy, Kelly is right and Mason is wrong.  Stop teaching dirty football, Mason.  It's hard enough to win at Vanderbilt as it is without getting people pissed off at you.

***********  Confession from a friend: Hugh, I hope your weekend went well. I know I told you we lost a very tough game in the sense that my guys gave up before we even started. Yes the team was very good, and half the kids on their team should be at our school. Transfer rules and the losing syndrome I inherited. Anyway the lack of fight really had me pissed after the game and I was showing it openly on bus ride back to school and in locker room. Well here comes the learning experience and I believe God had  a big hand in it. Anyway my son calls me and I tell him I will call him back in a few minutes, and always, with all my sons, I finished with, “I love you son!” That’s when one of my players said “I would give anything to have my dad tell me he loves me. “

That was a hell of a gut punch to me. So while I am reeling from that one of my players needs a ride home and as I pull up to an intersection outside of school a drunk runs a red light, hits a car in front of me and as the car that gets hit spins around it ends up literally inches from my car.  I have my other son and the player inside.

Then the third thing was at mass last night when the homily was on what you pick up your cross for.

So just to share with you it was a wake up call to really why I am there. We will work hard to get better.

*********** My friend, Greg Koenig, wrote this on his team’s Facebook page, for the benefit of parents as well as players…

Since I've been asked twice this week about eye black, here is what the NFHS Football Rules Book 2018 says:

Other Illegal Equipment:
3. Eye shade (grease or no-glare strips or stickers) that is not a solid stroke or includes words, numbers, logos, or other symbols with the eye shade (pp22-23).

This rule came into effect several years ago. What is allowed is a single black stroke or a strip/sticker under each eye that does not extend beyond the edges of the eye. Anything else (painted designs, thick strokes, words, numbers, logos, or other symbols) is illegal.

As I suggested at the parent meeting when I discussed visors, arm bands, etc., ask yourself why you want to wear the item. If it is to bring attention to yourself, don't wear it. Instead, get attention by playing harder than anyone else on the field and being the best teammate on the field. If you really believe that eye black (or a visor, arm bands, head band, etc.) will make you run faster or block and tackle better, please tell me why you aren't wearing it for all practices and all games.

*********** Hi Coach,

How are you doing? I am back to coaching again with a U19 Jr. Team.  I am the OC and I am running the straight DW. I wanted to do the Open Wing but they say go with the normal and I can add it maybe next year when the team understands the DW better.

The question I have for you is that I like the motion on the super power. It really works well for me. I have always taught the Wings to catch the on the pitch and run to Green Grass between the blocks. First looking at the 6 hole. Is that okay or have you found the way you do it to be better?

I am just a little afraid to try this way because I have never done it this way before and it does not go with the motions I like to run to do play actions.

Should I go with what I know or yeah trust and teach it the new way you explained in the new 3.0 version? Just trying to be sure. Remember I am in Europe!
 
Thank you for all the new stuff. I really do enjoy it very much!

Hope you are well and God Bless!

You are always welcome to come over and visit. Season Starts the end of March. We can provide the room and Board if the is what you are worried about. Just a thought.

Anyways thank you again for all the years of advice and great info!
Coach,

I am not dogmatic and I certainly don’t want people to think I'm  telling them that they HAVE to do things my way.

My intention is to state that this is what I have found to be the best way to do this or that, and if people wish to run things the way I do, it’s best for them to stay as close to the book as possible.

If you’re having success doing things your way, that’s proof enough that mine is not the only way to do it.

I would say just two things:

(1) I have found that eliminating motion works best for me for all the reasons I enumerate in the book, and other coaches with whom I’ve worked closely have found the same thing to be true;

(2) If I have to defend against you and you are using motion to run Super Power, you are giving me an advantage.

Of course you should always know and believe in what you teach - but not necessarily what you’re comfortable with.  Comfort can make us complacent, and sometimes we need to give up momentary comfort in order to grow.  My advice would be that this would be the ideal time for you to make the change.

I personally think that you will soon enough grow comfortable with it.

I appreciate the invite.  That is very enticing, and I will consider it carefully if you promise to keep reminding me!

Best always!

*********** We won again this week by one touchdown. We had an official that would blow the wedge dead sooner then last 3 weeks. Also tell me if you have had this, we wanted to run the Reach as we were on far hash and because of our tight formation all the defense was loaded between our tight ends. We call run a kid in - our speedster. He rushed in got to the line and ran the reach.  Our guard did not do a good job blocking in space. However our kid juked the corner and took the ball 40 yards for the score. A flag is thrown. Equipment violation. Kid did not have mouth piece in. Not sure if he just forgot as we rushed him in or what happened. I have never seen a run called back on that. Usually official gives a warning. Or sends the kid out. Have you had a “mouthpiece” penalty.

I have seen it called, although not after the play.  They are really on equipment violations this year, possibly because of all the bare-knee fashion models.  But they should just send the kid out.  (A player from Bowling Green refused to leave the game against Oregon and got his team a 15-yard penalty.)

I would suggest that because stupid penalties are one of the things that can kill even a good team, and therefore one of the things that you have to work against, you work agains this by first warning your players - tell them that you will call a penalty ANY TIME you see this at practice and you will penalize the TEAM - five up-downs for everybody.  And then be sure to be rigorous in enforcing it, because no rule is any better than your willingness to enforce it.

Congratulations and Good luck!

*********** My, how times have changed.  It was maybe 50 years or so ago but it seems like yesterday that people told ethnic jokes,  making fun of one nationality or another, based on unfortunate stereotypes.  Jokes developed around the popular image of this particular group or that as lazy, stupid, dirty, cowardly - you get the idea.  (Interestingly, for the benefit of those who today decry something they like to call “white privilege,” these groups were all composed of white people.  Some privilege.)

In this age in which making fun of anything (except Donald Trump, Christians,  and white male southerners) is off-limits, one particular joke will almost certainly never be told again, combining as it does both ethnic and sexist insensitivity:

A young woman went to a police station to report that she’d been raped by a (fill in the ethnic group here) man.

“How do you know he was (ethnicity)?” asked the desk sergeant.

“Because,” said the young woman, “I had to help him.”

How did members of such groups feel about ethnic jokes? 

Well, one fellow spent a great deal of his time and treasure trying to do something about it.  He was a wealthy Philadelphian named Ed Piszek, and he was sick and tired of what were then known as “Polack jokes.” He’d made a bunch of money in the frozen food business, and he spent a bunch of it in an effort to combat joke-inducing stereotypes of Polish, founding the Copernicus Society (“for the support and advancement of the Polish culture and heritage”) and purchasing - then donating to the National Park Service -  the Philadelphia house where Thaddeus Kosciusko, a Polish nobleman who assisted the American Revolution, lived.

Another approach, less subtle than Mr. Piszek’s, but possibly at least as effective,  was demonstrated to me one day by Jerry DiPaolo, the sales manager at the Baltimore brewery where I worked.  He came up to me and asked, “What’s black and blue and floats in the harbor?”

When I told him I didn’t know, he happily provided the answer:

“Next son of a bitch that tries to tell me an Italian joke.”

*********** QUIZ ANSWER:  In the 1960 Rose Bowl the Washington Huskies trounced the Wisconsin Badgers, 44-8;  a year later,  despite Minnesota’s having already been voted National Champion, the Huskies defeated the Gophers, 17-7.

Bob Schloredt, the  Huskies’ QB, was named MVP of both games, making him the first player ever to win the award twice. (Charles White, Ron Dayne, and Vince Young have since matched his feat.)

He was named first team All-American and outstanding football player on the Pacific Coast.

And he played defense, too:  In an era of two-way football, he seldom came out of a game.

Not bad, eh?

Well, as the late, great radio commentator Paul Harvey would say, here’s the rest of the story:

As the result of an accident while playing with firecrackers when he was seven years old,  Bob Schloredt was legally blind in one eye.




CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING BOB SCHLOREDT
JOSH MONTGOMERY - BERWICK, LOUISIANA
JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
KEN HAMPTON - RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
ADAM WESOLOSKI - PULASKI, WISCONSIN
TIM BROWN - FLORENCE, ALABAMA
MIKE FRAMKE - GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN
JOE GUTILLA - AUSTIN, TEXAS
GREG KOENIG - CIMARRON, KANSAS
KEVIN MCCULLOUGH - LAKEVILLE, INDIANA
SHEP CLARKE - PUYALLUP, WASHINGTON
MARK KACZMAREK - DAVENPORT, IOWA - Defeated my Badgers with Jerry Stalcup (my coach of the Rockford Rams $250/game the year before the WFL) & Dale Hackbart...the 1st year I really paid attention to football...also the 1st game I saw on a color TV...TV shop owner rented the HS gym & showed the parade & game...I'm sure it stimulated sales in little Hillsboro, WI.
OSSIE OSMUNDSON - WOODLAND, WASHINGTON - Go Huskies.  They were my heroes growing up in Renton.

*********** Great Rose Bowl reminiscences by Bob Schloredt and Don McKeta, thanks to Greg Koenig

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8vMa952L0o

*********** Nice story from SI about Bob Schloredt

https://www.si.com/vault/1960/10/03/585172/one-eye-on-the-rose-bowl

*********** QUIZ: A native of Springfield, Massachusetts, home of the Springfield Armory where the standard-issue Army rifle of World War I was made,  it was only  matter of time before his passing earned him the nickname “Springfield Rifle.”

He was Notre Dame’s first T-formation (under center) quarterback, and the reason why famed Irish coach Frank Leahy changed from the hallowed Notre Dame box  made famous by Knute Rockne.   In 1941, as a tailback in the Box, he was good, leading the nation his sophomore year with a 56.9 completion percentage.  But after being converted into a  a T-formation quarterback, he was outstanding: in his junior season, he threw for 1039 yards and 10 touchdowns, high numbers for those times.

Having enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve, he was called up to active duty six games into his senior season (1943).  In those six games, he completed 25 of 36 passes, 10 of them for touchdowns, and that, combined with his great junior year performance (and perhaps a bit of patriotic fervor thrown in) was enough for the Heisman voters - he won the 1943 Heisman. (He had finished second in the Heisman voting  in 1941 and sixth in 1942.)

He was the All-American QB in 1942 and 1943, and during his time at Notre Dame, the Irish lost only three games.

In 1944, he was shipped off to the South Pacific, where he fought on Iwo Jima and narrowly escaped death from a Japanese mortar shell.

After the War,  he played for three seasons with the Los Angeles Rams and Chicago Rockets of  the AAFC.

He is in the College Football Hall of Fame.

TUESD

Over the past three years, the percentage of 6- to 12-year-olds playing soccer regularly has dropped nearly 14 percent, to 2.3 million players, according to a study by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, which has analyzed youth athletic trends for 40 years. The number of children who touched a soccer ball even once during the year, in organized play or otherwise, also has fallen significantly.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/14/sports/world-cup/soccer-youth-decline.html


*********** Once largely confined to an area on the East Coast between Long Island and Baltimore,  plus an assortment of New England prep schools, lacrosse has begun to spread rapidly westward, as evidenced by recent NCAA championships won by Denver and Notre Dame.

Notes the New York Times…

It is among the fastest growing sports in the United States, according to a recent Sport & Fitness Industry Association report, with participation increasing nearly 10 percent in 2017 and by 25 percent since 2012.

It would seem to me to be a major beneficiary of the attack on football,  satisfying  boys’ urge to play a strenuous team sport requiring hand-eye coordination and a certain amount of contact and their parents’ wishes to steer them away from football, and some of the creeps who infest our game.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/sports/lacrosse-ivy-league-growth.html

*********** Dartmouth people must be so  proud.

The headlines announced that the School Formerly Known as the Indians has hired the “first full-time female football coach in Division I."

Wow.  That’ll pack ‘em in at the next Dartmouth game.

I see a coupla problems, though, with all the hype.

(1) This person, named Carrie Brownson, is NOT a coach.  Carrie Brownson is an “offensive quality control coach,” which technically means an “analyst,’ a staff  member who doesn’t count against the NCAA limit on coaches (Saban has lots of analysts) and isn’t allowed to coach players.

(2) Female? If you say so.  But based on the picture, I’d say that if Carrie ever wakes up in the morning and feels like identifying as a male, it wouldn’t take any more than a change of clothing.

 https://sports.yahoo.com/dartmouth-makes-callie-brownson-first-full-time-female-football-coach-division-000108358.html


*********** While waiting for a flight in the Portland airport Friday, I heard some clapping, and as it got louder and the woman next to me began clapping, I asked her what was going on.  She pointed to one of the doorways, where World War II vets - some walking but many in wheelchairs - were returning from a trip to Washington, DC.  As the ovation grew louder, the entire crowd of waiting passengers rose to their feet  and applauded until the last old soldier was wheeled out.

I marveled at the thought that this was Portland, for God’s sake - hipster capital of America, where protest is the highest form of patriotism.  And then it occured to me that half the people in the room were probably from someplace else.

*********** Mike Tomlin is definitely catching heat from two prominent sports columnists for  the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

He needs to be held accountable for this sloppy mess of a football team, writes Paul Zeise.

http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/zeise-is-right/2018/09/16/Paul-Zeise-Mike-Tomlin-needs-to-be-held-accountable-for-this-sloppy-mess/stories/201809160227

The Steelers stink and that falls on him, writes Joe Starkey.

http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/joe-starkey/2018/09/16/Joe-Starkey-The-Steelers-stink-and-that-falls-on-Mike-Tomlin/stories/201809160251

*********** Adam Carolla is one funny guy. I didn’t know that he once played football, and you (if you know him) probably didn’t, either, but in this piece from the National Football Foundation he talks about what high school football meant to him.  It's a nice endorsement of our game.

You might know Adam Carolla from The Man Show; or maybe you’re a fan of his wine cocktail, Mangria; but most likely you know him from his Guinness World Record breaking podcast. Where you never saw him was in a high school football playoff game, because, in Carolla’s own words, “Our team stunk.”

Carolla played linebacker and guard at North Hollywood High School in Southern California.

“We knew we were playing in a pretty good league and we knew we were going to lose, but that never stopped us from trying to win,” Carolla says. “To be honest, I always found it motivational. I knew we were going to lose to Canoga Park or Van Nuys, but my mindset was that I wanted to whip the guy in front of me the whole game.”

His mental toughness came from, of all things, riding the pine his sophomore year.

“I sat on the bench in the tenth grade and it was very humbling,” he says. “I dedicated myself to being a starter after that. I had to work very hard to overcome whatever physical shortcomings that I had. When I finally made varsity it felt great, but most games we ventured into we knew we were going to lose.”

Carolla says that since team victories were so few and far between, he chose to motivate himself personally by taking each play as if it was an individual battle.

“It is a team sport, but I wanted to walk away feeling like I won my battle while the other guy felt like he lost his. It was a personal victory for me,” he says.

But Carolla did have some standout moments with his teammates, one of which followed what he considers his most memorable high school football sequence.

“We managed to win one game against Hollywood High School. At the end of the game, they were punting and I got called for roughing the kicker and my teammates were not happy,” he says. “Everyone’s looking at me because we thought we were getting the ball back and now they still have it. It was a long walk back to the ball for everyone on our team. But on the following play I intercepted the ball. That was a great feeling because I had screwed up, but after the interception all was forgiven.”

In contrast to his high school team, Carolla grew up in the shadow of some great University of Southern California squads, so he watched players like Ricky Bell and Pat Haden when he could. On the NFL front, he hated the Pittsburgh Steelers and loved the Los Angeles Rams.

“I loved Jack Youngblood and Jim Youngblood,” he says. “Two guys with the last name Youngblood on the same team. What are the odds of that?”

But even more than the on-field play, Carolla loved the meritocracy aspect of the game that promoted grit and work ethic.

“Playing football taught me a lot about discipline and teamwork,” he says. “I learned about being humble and being able to swallow your pride and get to work. I learned about pushing through pain and the delayed gratification that the two-a-days we did in one hundred degree heat would pay off in a game months away. The lessons about teamwork and overcoming adversity that come with football are really strong.”

FRID

Pop was getting old, and although at Stanford in 1929 he had some of the best players in the game, his mind often went back to the days when he was coach of the Carlisle Indians. “They were the greatest,” he said, at a dinner with Ellinger, Sasse and me.  “Thorpe and his crew. Those Indians taught me a lesson: never swear at a player. Once during a sloppy practice I cursed them.  They picked up the football and walked to the goal post, forty yards away, and held a pow-wow.  Then they walked off the field. One of ‘em, I think it was Little Boy, came back and said, ‘If coach swear at us, no more practice.’ I haven’t so much as said ‘darn’ at a player since."

***********  As usual, the Win-10 computer I'm forced to use is not suitable for man nor beast. You MAY be able to get the attachment viewable but I offer no guarantees.  It's a picture of the Sales Force at Bowden-Bishop Realty in Birmingham, Al, circa mid-60s. My Mom and Dad are front and center.  Over dad's left shoulder is a man and behind him is Bobby Bowden's Father, Jack, I believe.  You can see the family resemblance.

Bobby didn't seem destined for greatness.  Stints at Samford College and eventually West Virginia.  Bobby wasn't "one of them" at WV and he had the "For Sale" signs in the front yard to prove it.

Darrell Mudra was expected to rebuild Florida State and turn it into a Power.  I was listening to the game on the radio when FSU had Alabama reeling late in the fourth quarter, 7-3.  Fourth down, deep in their own territory, FSU...takes a Safety!.  Alabama has just enough to get in field goal range...Bama wins, 8 - 7!!!

So, FSU brings in Bobby Bowden.  Only, Bobby has a Franchise Formula that he will use to map the players he gets into this Formula.  When FSU beats mighty Pitt, the rest of the world finds out about it and there's nothing they can do about it.  Wally Woodham and Jimmy Jordan are the twin QBs who manage the Show, being just good enough to put the ball in the right place at the right time.

Bear Bryant was the first Coach whose teams would win at least 10 games a year for ten years and I believe FSU was right behind.  If FSU had a FG keeker who could've kicked a touchdown or two in critical games (with Miami), they'd have a coupla' more NtChampionships.  Bear stated that he wasn't gonna schedule a game with FSU anytime soon.

I got to talk to Coach Bowden some at Spring Practices and found him very likable.  Hell, we grew up in the same neighborhoods.  He had his Standard Answers to frequent questions - "The Option is the best play in football but you have to throw out everything else to perfect it" - but if he played some things close to the vest, he wore other feelings in bright garnet and gold letters on his chest.

I understand the unease that people feel about those Bowden years, esp. when he was abruptly shown the door.  Whenever people look at Phenom Coaches, they ask questions like, "Whatever happened to Mike White?"  They don't ask that about Bobby Bowden.

Besides, my parents worked for his dad...

Charlie Wilson
Crystal River, Florida


*********** I read a great article in The Athletic (subscription-only, but a pretty good site) about a promising 18-year-old Finnish hockey player named Jesperi (“YESS-per-ee”) Kotkaniemi, taken number three overall in the NHL draft by the Montreal Canadiens.

The story dealt with the culture shock he’s sure to experience.

On the surface, his hometown of Pori, a small city of 85,000 on the West Coast of Finland, and Montreal, with a metro population of 4 million, would seem to be as far apart as the could possibly be.

Perhaps not.

Yes, in Montreal, hockey is everything.  But in Pori, it is, too.

Montreal’s arena seats more than 20,000; Pori’s seats 6,400.  Some 40 per cent are sold as season tickets; there’s an entire section of 2,000 behind the players’ benches called the “standing section,” because although there are seats, no one sits.  It is, needless to say, raucous.

Pori is a workingman’s town whose hockey team represents them against teams from bigger, more sophisticated cities.  During Finland’s long, dark winters, hockey is the only thing going on, and people live for hockey. Described as the sort of place where “everybody knows you,” that sort of familiarity can be hard on a player when he doesn’t measure up to expectations.

“Pori, if you don’t play well, it’s a very negative place,” says Kotkaniemi.

It hasn’t been very negative with Jesperi Kotkoniemi playing, but he’s ready.  “If we don’t play well I try to just ignore those newspapers and that kind of thing,” he says.  “I think everything is just about the hockey, so I try to focus on that. I always say that everywhere I go, it’s just hockey. Of course, if we don’t play well people are upset, so then we just try to do better. Every day is a new day to be better. So I try to think about it like that.”

As with most Finns, he speaks English rather well, and in preparation for life in the second-largest French-speaking city in the world, he’s studying French.  (Will someone please tell our Latin-American baseball players about that?)

The arena has a VIP section (Finns pronounce it “WEE-EYE-PEE”) which even has a sauna. (No, NOT “SAW-nuh.” It’s “SOW(as in how now brown cow)-nuh.”)  There, spectators combine two pleasant experiences - hockey and sauna.  Yes, sauna is in the nude (always), but the sauna is high enough up in the rafters that while the bathers can see down to the rink, no one can see them.




https://theathletic.com/502669/2018/09/05/a-boy-and-his-rink-jesperi-kotkaniemis-childhood-and-how-it-prepared-him-for-montreal/


*********** WORTH WATCHING THIS WEEK (I'll be out of town, but these are the ones I'm recording.)

9 AM PACIFIC
HAWAII AT ARMY
FLORIDA STATE AT SYRACUSE
RUTGERS AT KANSAS
TEMPLE AT MARYLAND
9:30
GEORGIA TECH AT PITT
11:30
VANDERBILT AT NOTRE DAME
12:30 PM
BYU AT WISCONSIN
LSU AT AUBURN
DUKE AT BAYLOR
SOUTH FLORIDA AT ILLINOIS
1:00
COLO STATE AT FLORIDA
1:15
HOUSTON AT TEXAS TECH
3:00
EASTERN MICHIGAN AT BUFFALO
4:00
ALABAMA AT OLE MISS
OREGON STATE AT NEVADA
4:30
NORTH IOWA AT IOWA
5:00
OHIO STATE AT TCU
USC AT TEXAS
EASTERN WASHINGTON AT WASHINGTON STATE
7:00
WASHINGTON AT UTAH
7:30
ARIZONA STATE AT SAN DIEGO STATE
FRESNO STATE AT UCLA

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

Enjoyed reading your news today.  Just so you know I was one of those Americans who was furious, still am, and will ALWAYS remember.

Notre Dame was terrible on Saturday.  If Ball State finds a running game they could be real tough in the MAC.

Fresno State found out what happens when you give the ball to a fullback to throw a pass from the 4 yard line instead of giving him the ball to either run it in, or block for the guy who does.  Fresno gave an ND performance on offense, but give credit to Minnesota though, they're young and talented, and hung in there even after losing their best RB.


Have a great week!

Joe Gutilla
Austin, Texas

*********** QUIZ ANSWER - Greg Landry is a native of Nashua, New Hampshire, where he played high school football, and he played his college football at UMass.   As the QB of the Redmen (since changed to the Minutemen) he led the team to records of 7-2, 6-3 and 7-2 and was named All-Yankee Conference QB in his junior and senior seasons.

He was the first draft pick of the Detroit Lions, the eleventh pick overall and the first quarterback chosen in the 1968 draft.

He started two games his rookie year when starter Bill Munson was injured, but by his fourth year 1971, the starting job was his, and in his first year as the Lions’ full-time starter, he threw for 2237 yards and 16 TDs and a league-leading 16.4 yards per completion. He was big and strong and fast, and he ran for another  524 yards and 9 TDs.  That season earned him a trip to the Pro Bowl.

In 11 seasons as the Lions’ QB, he completed 957 of 1747 for 12,451 yards and 80 TDs.  He ran 389 times for 2502 yards and 19 TDs.

His record as the Lions’ starter was 40-41-3.  His passing yardage ranks third all-time among Lions’ QBs, and his 80 TDs rank second.

The Lions made the playoffs in 1970, 1971 and 1972, but those were the days when Minnesota dominated the division, and the Lions couldn’t get past the Vikings.

After being traded to Baltimore to serve as a backup and mentor to Bert Jones, he was pressed into service in 1979 when Jones was injured, and started 12 games. Those Colts were bad, and he wound up  throwing 457 times - the most by far of any season in his career.  He completed 270 passes for 2932 yards and 15 TDs, but  to no avail:  the Colts lost 10 of those games, and in the process he was sacked 42 times.

After the Colts’ Frank Kush let him go, he spent two years in the USFL and then returned to finish up with the Bears. In his final game, he threw a touchdown pass to Willie Gault.

In his 15 year NFL career, he completed 1226 of 2300 passes for 16,052 yards and 98 TDs. He rushed 430 times for 2655 yards and 21 TDs.

After retiring as a player, he coached for 12 years with the Browns, Bears and Lions as a QB coach, and five years with the Bears and two years with the University of Illinois as offensive coordinator.

Despite his French-Canadian surname, his maternal grandparents were Polish immigrants (his mother’s maiden name was Felixia Worsowicz) and he is in the Polish-American Sports Hall of Fame.


********** CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING GREG LANDRY
JOSH MONTGOMERY - BERWICK, LOUISIANA
KEN HAMPTON - RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
GREG KOENIG - CIMARRON, KANSAS
ADAM WESOLOSKI - PULASKI, WISCONSIN
MARK KACZMAREK - DAVENPORT, IOWA - “Nice Polish kid”
MIKE FRAMKE - GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN
KEVIN MCCULLOUGH - LAKEVILLE, INDIANA
JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
JOE GUTILLA - AUSTIN, TEXAS
TIM BROWN - FLORENCE, ALABAMA
TOM WALLS - WINNIPEG, MANITOBA
JOHN BOTHE - OREGON, ILLINOIS
PETE PORCELLI - WATERVLIET, NEW YORK
JOE BREMER - WEST SENECA, NEW YORK
OSSIE OSMUNDSON - WOODLAND, WASHINGTON

*********** MORE ON GREG LANDRY

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

http://www.nflplayerengagement.com/next/articles/where-are-they-now-greg-landry/

CATCHING UP WITH FORMER COLTS

http://www.baltimoresun.com/sports/nfl/bs-sp-catching-up-landry-20170907-story.html

*********** QUIZ - In 64 years of coaching college football, he coached at only two schools -  both of them small Catholic colleges -  and spent the last 60 of those years at one of them.

One of nine children of an Italian immigrant coal miner in Trinidad, Colorado, he first became a head coach in 1943, at the age of 16 -  when his high school coach went off to war and there was no one else to coach the team.  It was during that time, as he had to learn on the fly, that he began to question - and reject - many of the rituals and practices long thought sacred in the football coaching fraternity.

While attending Colorado College,  he didn’t play football. Instead, he coached a local high school team the entire time.

At 22, he got his first college head coaching job, at Carroll College in Helena, Montana (where Bob Petrino’s father would later become the couch). In four years there, his record was 24-6-1.

That led to the head coaching position at St. John’s University, in Collegeville, Minnesota, where he would stay for 60 years.

His coaching philosophy, at which coaches of all levels marveled,  was, to say the least, “different.” He came to call it “Winning with NO,” which meant no titles (such as “Coach”), no whistles, no hollering at players, no blocking sleds, no tackling in practices, no slogans or signs in the locker room, no playbooks, no grading films - that’s a sample.  The list of his “No’s” was long and impressive.

His practices were 90 minutes - no practice on Sundays or Mondays - and just 45 minutes on Fridays.

All his seniors were captains (“that way they can all put ‘captain’ on their resumes”).

“Calisthenics” might consist of “One perfect jumping jack.”

How did it all work out?

Well, first of all, how many other guys can you think of who lasted 60 years at the same place?

When he retired in 2012, he was the winningest coach in college football history.

At St. John’s, from 1953-2012, he was 465-132-10, with 27 conference titles

His Johnnies won national titles - NAIA 1963 and 1965 and NCAA D-III in 1976 and 2003.

In his entire career he had just two losing seasons - 3-4-1 in 1956 and 3-5 in 1967.

He is a member of the College Football Hall of Fame - he and Bobby Bowden were the first active coaches to be inducted.

Since 1993, a Trophy in his name has been awarded annually to the outstanding player in Division III.

TUESD

*********** September 11, 2001 is one of those dates that you’ll remember all your life.  The events of that day were so powerful, so moving, so emotion-evoking that they’ve enabled you to remember even tiny details associated with what you were doing when you first heard the news.

I’m still angered by it, and I remember how, from the very first, it was called a “tragedy.” 

Tragedy, my ass.  A tragedy is when a flash flood sweeps away a family’s loved one; when a young couple learns that their baby is terminally ill. 

This was no “tragedy” - it was an act of war.

I remember asking, “Where’s the rage?” We’d been attacked on our own soil - and nobody in authority seemed pissed.  Just sad. 

Google “9-11 Quotes” some time, and it’s all about sadness and tragedy and unity and blah, blah, blah. No “Remember the Alamo.” No “Remember Pearl Harbor.” 

Just crap like this:

“Even the smallest act of service, the simplest act of kindness, is a way to honor those we lost, a way to reclaim that spirit of unity that followed 9/11.”

I voted for George Bush - like I was supposed to vote for Al F—king Gore? - but I was expecting him to sound pissed, and instead what we got was a plea not to take out our anger on the Muslim community. And a pledge to get the people behind it all and “Bring them to justice.” (Right, George.  In today’s United States that would have resulted in their being put on probation and given community service.)

No sense making Americans mad, right?  Remember the video of the Palestinians dancing in the street at the news of the attack?  Has anyone seen it, even once, in the 17 years since?  Wait - you say that it showed originally on CNN?  That explains everything.

Maybe if we can no longer get pissed about the World Trade Center, we can still summon up a bit of rage over Benghazi and  those lying bastards in Barack Hussein's administration ("that awful Internet video...").

*********** Four weeks before the official start of football practice, a local Washington high school, Ridgefield,  hired a new AD.  Two weeks later, now just two weeks before the start of practice, the new AD fired the head coach.

Too late to conduct a search for a new head coach, she installed one of the current assistants as the interim head coach.

I’ve taught and coached in Ridgefield, and I know the place.  But it’s undergone a lot of change since I was there. Ridgefield is now the fastest growing district in the entire state, and its growth has mainly been due to an influx of relatively affluent Portlanders, bringing with them all the high expectations for their entitled children that that connotes. It has become a notoriously bad place to coach - unreasonably demanding parents with an administration known to, shall we say, “listen to them.”

Ridgefield has gone through five coaches in the last ten years.  The one just fired had lasted two years, going 4-5 and 1-8. HIs predecessor stayed for four years and went 19-19 during that time. He certainly could have stayed longer, but after going 8-2 in 2015, he decided to wash his hands of it all and walk away from the job, blaming parental interference.

So I had my Ridgefield story all written, deploring the situation and predicting a train wreck.

The fired coach had been a Wing-T guy, and, I figured, that was part of the problem.  I imagined a community, no doubt led by the father of a quarterback, wanting him to spread it out and throw the damn thing. 

So now, with a new guy promoted from the staff, we should expect four wides and a gun, right?

But then I read an interview with the interim coach - who happens to be the father of a player on the team - and he sounded like a knowledgeable sort. And a sensible one - to his credit, he didn’t badmouth the previous coach.  And he was close-mouthed about the offense he intended to run, other than saying that he didn’t feel he knew enough about the Wing-T to stay with it.

A little over a week ago,  they played their first game - and shocked everyone.  They defeated a neighboring school, one which consistently fields good teams, and shut them out, 19-0.

The coach’s 5-9, 200 pound son carried 30 times for 193 yards and two touchdowns.

What’s going on here? I thought.  I had to take a look at the video.  That I did, and damned if they weren’t running from I formation,  with the coach’s son at tailback.  Most of the time they had a wingback, and often they had two tight ends. They were playing pure power football.

The second game, this past Friday, was against a city school, with a much larger enrollment but very little talent.  The result was a second straight shutout, 42-0.

This time, the coach’s son ran the ball 19 times for 191 yards and three touchdowns.

Next week comes a real test, against a larger school with a great football tradition.  It’s off to a 1-1 start, but its loss was to an even bigger program, a regional lower.

That article I’d written?  I trashed it.

http://blogs.columbian.com/high-school-sports/2018/08/20/q-and-a-catching-up-with-ridgefield-interim-football-coach-chris-abrams/

http://www.maxpreps.com/high-schools/ridgefield-spudders-(ridgefield,wa)/football/home.htm

*********** I’m sorry, she might be a very nice person, but if the NFL intended to pursue political correctness at the expense of its TV audience, it’s certainly done that, forcing on it the harsh, abrasive voice of Beth Mowins.

*********** Amid all the football this past Saturday, I “allowed” my wife to watch the women’s final of the US Open Tennis on one of our sets; so I got to see all of Serena Williams’ tirade against a tennis official who’d made a controversial call against her.

And sure enough, one of the commentators said something along the lines of “you don’t make that kind of call at a time like this, with so much at stake, blah, blah, blah.”

Which got me thinking - how many times have you heard an announcer say.

“You don’t make a call like that in a game/match of this importance…”

or

“You don’t make a call like that this late in the game…”

How many times have you thought, “Why not?”

Is it a game, where the rules are applied consistently, or is it a scripted play, where things play out the according to design?

Well if you don’t “make a call like that” under certain conditions,  and it becomes known that that’s policy... wouldn’t that knowledge be factored into a team’s strategy?

Wouldn’t you call time out and remind your team, “Okay, guys - just like we discussed… it’s the last two minutes of the Game of the Century, and everybody knows they’re not going to call things close... so __________.” (You fill in the blank: FOUL, HOLD, INTERFERE)

For the good of a game’s integrity, it seems to me we shouldn’t expect officials to officiate differently depending on the conditions. Instead, we ought to turn this back on the players and coaches and tell them:

You don’t DO something like that in a game/match of this importance...

You don’t DO something like that this late in the game...

*********** With Florence appearing to take dead aim at the Carolinas and Virginia, and heavy rain expected way up the coast - how many games are going to get rained out this weekend?

*********** COLLEGE FOOTBALL THIS PAST WEEKEND


PREDICTED BLOWOUTS THAT WEREN’T-
NOTRE DAME OVER BALL STATE — But not by much.
OLE MISS OVER SOUTHERN ILLINOIS - Rebs had all they could handle.
FLORIDA STATE OVER SAMFORD - In the fourth quarter. Willie, try being a little humble. You might need it.
TEXAS OVER TULSA - Barely. The  narrow win is not exactly an encouraging result for Longhorns fans.
EASTERN MICHIGAN OVER PURDUE: Boilermakers now 0-2.  At home.  Scary start.


OTHER GAMES I WAS WATCHING
(IN ORDER OF TV APPEARANCE)
MISSISSIPPI STATE OVER KANSAS STATE - With NIck Fitzgerald at QB, the Bulldogs are really good; with OC Dana Dimel gone, Cats looked anemic on offense
ARMY OVER LIBERTY - Liberty has a QB named Buckshot Calvert;  It sort of described his accuracy
VANDERBILT OVER NEVADA  - Vandy showed that it might give Notre Dame a game on Saturday
HOUSTON OVER ARIZONA - Glad I picked Houston. Arizona looked bad, played worse. Houston is good.
DUKE OVER NORTHWESTERN - Duke is real, but lost QB Daniel Jones to a broken collarbone
SOUTH FLORIDA OVER GEORGIA TECH - Couldn't get this on TV for some reason and sorry I missed it.  Bulls proved once again that Tech can’t win on offense alone
FLORIDA ATLANTIC OVER AIR FORCE  - Hmmm. Air Force isn’t as tough as Oklahoma, and Lane Kiffin is now 1-1.
KANSAS OVER CENTRAL MICHIGAN - Could there be a streak in the making? KU hosts Rutgers Saturday.
GEORGIA OVER SOUTH CAROLINA - Definitely not the test I thought it might be.
COLORADO OVER NEBRASKA - One of the best games of the day. Cancellation of their opener meant this was the Huskers’ first game.
NAVY OVER MEMPHIS - Navy’s great second half and closing-minutes win shows that the Mids are tough
EAST CAROLINA OVER NORTH CAROLINA  - The Pirates OWN the shoe peddlers
IOWA OVER IOWA STATE - Kirk Ferentz has now won four straight over the Cyclones
MARYLAND OVER BOWLING GREEN - Maryland is now 2-0 and looking good
CLEMSON OVER TEXAS A & M - Tigers went into College Station and beat Aggies in front of 100,000+
MISSOURI OVER WYOMING - No upset as I’d hoped.  Mizzou may be a bottom SEC team, but they're still an SEC team.
KENTUCKY OVER FLORIDA - What should have been a big win for the Gators was a HUGE win for the Wildcats.
INDIANA OVER VIRGINIA - Hoosiers are now 2-0, with Ball State coming in this week
COLORADO STATE OVER ARKANSAS - Hogs led 27-9 in the third quarter, but Rams scored 26 straight to win 35-27.
MINNESOTA OVER FRESNO STATE - Gophers had to come from behind, then interecept Bulldogs in the end zone at the end.
PENN STATE OVER PITT - It was close for a half but the driving rain and the powerful Lions sent Pitt fans home in the second half.
STANFORD OVER USC - Trojans could manage only a single field goal as USC’s freshman QB took a pounding. What happened to all the great tailbacks they used to have?
CAL OVER BYU - Cal changed QBs and played great defense to down the Cougars.
ARIZONA STATE OVER MICHIGAN STATE - Hard to say how much of a role the heat (103 at kickoff) played in the upset. Good news for MSU: they held ASU to just 44 yards rushing; bad news for MSU: they rushed for only 63 yards themselves.
WASHINGTON STATE OVER SAN JOSE STATE - Cougs now 2-0 after the shutout. Eastern Washington next Saturday could be tough
HAWAII OVER RICE - Unless you stayed up late - Hawaii won 43-29 to go 3-0.  Quarterback Cole McDonald is getting well-deserved attention, and slot receiver John Ursua, a native Hawaiian who played his high school ball in Utah and has served a two-year LDS church mission, is really good.  NEXT WEEK: AT ARMY.


SPECIAL MENTION
NICHOLLS STATE AT TULANE - CAN THE COLONELS MAKE IT TWO IN A ROW AGAINST FBS TEAMS? NO

*********** With South Florida’s win over Georgia Tech,  East Carolina’s over North Carolina, Houston’s over Arizona and Colorado State’s over Arkansas, I think it’s time to take a shot at the monopoly of the so-called Power Five conferences on the big TV money.

I propose a European-type relegation system, but not for teams - for conferences.

For example, the weakest of the Power Five conferences would drop out, and the strongest of the Group of Five - in all likelihood either the American Athletic or the Mountain West - would move up and take its place (and its share of next year’s TV revenues).

*********** Think big-time football isn’t a heartless business?

After starting every game last year and throwing for more than 3,000 yards, then starting in this year’s opening-game win over North Carolina, it appears that Ross Bowers is done as the starting QB at Cal.

Saturday, former backup Chase Garbers threw for two TDs as the Bears defeated BYU Saturday night, 21-18.

“This is nothing Ross hasn’t done,” said Cal head coach Justin Wilcox.  “He’s disappointed and it’s tough. I don’t blame him one bit. He’s handled himself extremely well. It’s not the easiest position to be in.”

*********** Maybe it’s global warming - maybe not - but an awful lot of high school teams in various parts of the country had to cancel or curtail practices this past preseason because of extreme heat. Player safety and all that.

Now, I don’t know whether you would consider 103 degrees to be “extreme heat,” but I would, and that was the temperature in Sun Devil Stadium when Arizona State and Michigan State kicked off Saturday night.  It was 110 down on the field. 

But evidently, when TV says to play, you play.  What was that you were saying about player safety?

Could the effect of the heat have had anything to do with the fact that Arizona State outscored Michigan State 13-0 in the fourth quarter, kicking a last-second field goal to upset the Spartans, 16-23?????

*********** When was the last time Michigan got more votes in the weekly poll than Michigan State?

*********** Gee - I wonder where I got that idea not to kickoff deep  (haven't done it since 1980)…

Last Friday night, Union High of Vancouver was down in the San Francisco Bay Area playing El Cerrito High.

El Cerrito scored late to take a 23-20 lead.

And then they kicked off.  Deep.

And the Union return man brought it all the way back.  Final score: Union 27, El Cerrito 23.

*********** Adam Hunsucker needs to get out of North Louisiana once in a while.

I took a look at this week’s Football Writers’ Super 16 Poll, sponsored by the National Football Foundation,
and as I looked through the balloting, I noticed the listing - “Others Receiving Votes” - that followed the Top 16.  And I’ll be a son of a gun if I didn’t see “USC” in there.  And “Miami.”

Hold everything - you mean to tell me that after they managed just three points in a loss to Stanford, there was a “football writer” somewhere in the United States so clueless that he’d give the Trojans a place in his Top 16?  And what about Miami?  Did somebody see their impressive 77-0 score against mighty Savannah State and forget the way LSU abused them two weeks ago?

Fortunately, the National Football Foundation not only shows its ranking, but it shows how every one of its participating “football writers” votes.

And damned if it wasn’t one guy - one Adam Hunsucker, of the Monroe (LA) News-Star - who was responsible for both of those farcical votes. Not only did he have Miami in 16th place (West Virginia,  Mississippi State, UCF were nowhere to be found on his ballot) but he had USC in 15th place.  And in 12th place, just three places higher, was Stanford, the team that had just waxed USC Sunday.

And to think that there are people in Monroe who read this guy’s stuff in the News-Star and take it seriously.

*********** IS THIS A BAD LOOK OR WHAT?




*********** QUIZ - Joe Greene (“Mean Joe”)  is one of the greatest defensive linemen ever to play the game and is considered to be the key building block  in turning the Pittsburgh Steelers from an NFL joke into one of the most dominant dynasties in league history.

Not heavily recruited out of high school in Temple, Texas, he wound up attending North Texas State.

As a defensive tackle there from 1966 through 1968, he was a three-time All Missouri Valley Conference selection, and in his senior season, despite playing for a lesser-known school,  he was a consensus All-American.

Drafted first by the Steelers - the fourth player overall - in 1969, he and a new head coach, Chuck Noll, arrived in Pittsburgh at the same time.  They would both have Hall-of-Fame careers.

He didn’t initially like the idea of being drafted by a loser - the Steelers were really bad, then - but Noll saw in him the foundation of the strong defense. 

Noll was correct.  Although Pittsburgh was only 1-13 in his first year, his new defensive tackle was NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year, and earned a spot on the Pro Bowl.  He would go on to play on four Super Bowl champions… he went to TEN Pro Bowls… He was chosen  first team All-Pro five-times, and second team All-Pro twice…He was the NFL Man of the Year in 1979… He was twice named NFL Defensive Player of the Year… He was named to the NFL 1970’s All-Decade Team.

He became a team leader,  demanding the best from teammates who feared displeasing him.

From Wikipedia: He is widely considered one of the greatest defensive linemen in league history.His durability allowed him to play in 181 of a possible 190 games, including a streak of 91 straight to begin his career. The Steel Curtain defense is consistently ranked among the top defensive groups of all time.

Many people who didn’t even now him as a football player remember him for a famous Coca-Cola commercial in which a little kid offers him a drink of Coke after a game and he repays the kid by taking off his game jersey and throwing it to him. (KID: “Gee, thanks, Mean Joe.”)

At some point in his career, he earned the nickname "Mean Joe," a nickname that he didn’t particularly care for, saying years later, “I just want people to remember me as being a good player and not really mean.”

FRID

I'll admit, I used to roll my eyes when former Oregon State athletic director Bob De Carolis would lay out the master plan for sustainability in his athletic department.

Now, I realize he was a genius.

De Carolis wanted the Beavers to be bowl eligible. That's it. Be bowl eligible and the OSU machine would run well because playing in the postseason boosted season-ticket sales and helped grease the gift-giving wheel. It's why De Carolis designed his football coach's contract to add one additional year of job security every time Mike Riley qualified for a bowl game.

Dartmouth did what institutions often do when they need to fire someone they don’t really want to fire.

The College hired a consultant.

His name was Rick Taylor. An assistant coach at Dartmouth in the 1970s, he’d had a long career as a football coach and athletic director, finally retiring from Northwestern.

Taylor’s report noted improvements to facilities and in admissions. But Dartmouth’s nonconference schedule was too difficult. The team needed more money for recruiting. And Teevens, who also served as quarterback coach and offensive coordinator, needed to relinquish those duties and concentrate on being head coach.

In other words, the College didn’t need to fire Buddy. It needed to help him. The team lured two longtime Ivy League assistants to Hanover by offering them better salaries: Don Dobes came from Princeton to be defensive coordinator, and Keith Clark came from Yale to coach the offensive line. Teevens, who admits he can be “a micromanager,” says being forced to step back from a more hands-on role was “frustrating at times, professionally.” But it also freed him to focus on his strengths: recruiting and fundraising. “I was very, very fortunate to be allowed to continue,” he says. “If it wasn’t my alma mater, and if people didn’t look deeply in terms of what we were doing, I would have been unemployed.”

Teevens remained, and he changed.  In the first year post-Taylor, Teevens and the Big Green went 2-8, but in the eight years since then, they’ve gone 52-28.

They went 8-2 in 2014, went 9-1 and won the Ivy Title in 2015, and went 8-2 last season.

Good for Dartmouth for making the effort to turn their coach’s career around.  Not many schools would have done that, and he recognizes that his being an alumnus was a major reason why they did it.

The article is about more than Teevens’ resurrection, though.  It’s about his approach to tackling.  He doesn’t practice live tackling - ever. (The entire Ivy League now prohibits it except during spring and pre-season.) 

One of his innovations that you may be aware of is the MVP - the Mobile Virtual Player. Essentially a remote-controlled robot tackling dummy, it’s the result of a collaboration between Teevens and a Dartmouth classmate of his who was then a research engineer at Dartmouth.

The  MVP shows promise, for sure, but…

So sad that things that could make our game safer - helmets with chips in them to measure impact... robot tackling dummies… artificial turf (the robot dummies won’t work on grass)… are all way beyond the budget limitations of most high school programs.

Not to spoil Dartmouth’s - and Teevens’ - party, but I have to ask… didn’t somebody - I’m thinking youth, middle school and high school coaches - have to teach those Dartmouth kids how to tackle in the first place?

https://dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/articles/how-buddy-teevens-79-transformed-football-forever


*********** Most national college fraternities have met and agreed that beginning Sept 1, 2019, their 6,100 individual chapters (on 800 college campuses) will no longer serve hard liquor.

This means a lot less alcoholic candy - fewer sweet, fruity, go-down-easy drinks.

Since those are the kind of drinks mostly  imbibed by women, it’s going to be tough on the ladies at first.

They still won’t drink beer.  They’ll still drink sweet-tasting sh—, like hard cider and wine coolers and malt beverages made to taste like cocktails, but at least those drinks won’t have the wallop of the hard stuff they’ve been drinking.

In the long run, that’s going to be good for them.

Anything that results in fewer drunken women is likely to mean fewer “rapes.”


*********** Hugh,
 
How are you? Hopefully all is well…
 
Kaepernick  the revolutionary… sacrificing it all to sell out to corporate America for the all mighty dollar. And hypocrisy of Nike being so concerned with  “human rights”, when their shoes are made in low wage sweat shops in Asia, it’s extremely comical.   
 
And I rarely pay attention to anything coming out of Hollywood but it’s nice to see the liberal D-bags can take a break from sexually assaulting each other to make a movie on the moon landing & rewrite American history in process by not showing the planting of the American flag on the moon. It’s also refreshing to hear some Canadian actor refer to it as a “human achievement” rather than an American one.  
 
As I’m sure NASA’s research & development for those missions were funded with that “human achievement” currency & not  US taxpayer dollars. So we might look at it just a little differently.
 
Just my two cents,
Sam DuMond
Philadelphia

Sam,

I’m well and I hope you are, too.

Some “sacrifice” when it turns out that all this time he’s been on Nike’s payroll.

And Hollywood deliberately belittling the idea of American exceptionalism by depicting  the moon landing as a “global achievement” is just one more shot at us.

Nice to hear from you. 


ON THE BEACH AT OCEAN SHORES WEDNESDAY...

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

It’s been awhile, I hope you and Connie are doing well. I went to my first Penn State game this week and it was a good one. The best part for me, though, was the pregame atmosphere. I loved watching the lion run out just before the band. The band was fantastic, it’s a shame they don’t show that on TV. Listening to 105,000 sing Sweet Caroline was just awesome.

I can honestly say that my favorite part of the game wasn’t the game. I love the way McSorley plays but I would be more interested in the football if they put a fullback in there, or even lined up with a running back on either side of Trace.

While at the game I told my friend that the TV timeouts were awful, then I read your news from last week and you were spot on about how they ruin the pace of the game.

I definitely need to go again, maybe a night game next time. My friend had season tickets - very good seats in the corner of the end zone, opposite the student section.

Hope all is well

Dave Kemmick
Lancaster, Pennsylvania

Coach,

Great hearing from you.  That’s a game experience I’d love to have.

There’s nothing like a college game, and I think that’s one reason why a game at Green Bay is such an experience - the pregame atmosphere on the way to the stadium and outside Lambeau are a lot like a college game.

(Actually, with more and more noon  kickoffs,  thanks to TV,  the college atmosphere isn’t what it used to be at a lot of places either.)

*********** I think the Nike decision to feature Kaepernick in its newest ad campaign is just part and parcel of the divide in our culture between traditional old and brainwashed young.

In fact, I believe that this is - figuratively - the Shot Heard ‘Round the World: the start of the Revolution.    

It’s not black vs white, as it would appear to be, with all the Nike-endorsed black athletes who’ve been popping off lately - Curry, Serena, LeBron. (You don’t suppose Nike coordinated this, do you?)

No, it’s young vs old - look how many young white people (Mollie Tibbetts, for one), profess to hate whites, when what they’re really saying is that they hate us old, conservative (they prefer “racist, fascist”) whites. Interestingly, older black people for the most part don’t seem to have a dog in the fight.

I think that Nike knows exactly what they’re doing.  They’re aligning themselves with those who see us as the enemy.  They’re giving Trump and the Deplorables the finger.

Yes, Nike stock will take a small hit in the short run, but I suspect it will roar back as the Revolution gains momentum. 

NIke has no qualms whatsoever about blowing us oldsters off, in favor of a younger demographic that hates us and our politics.   I’m sure they’ve calculated that for every one of us who burns his Nikes, there will be two members of the 15-34 age group that will buy more Nike products, whether or not they need them, just to support The Cause.

And those people will be around to buy Nike products a lot longer than we will.

As long as the public schools do their job and keep turning out mindless social justice warriors, Nike’s strategy will hold up.

Soon enough, the Nike swoosh on one’s shoes will be the badge of membership that allows one safe passage through much of urban America.  The old “which side are you on?” business. 

Soon, it may be dangerous to wear a pair of non-Nike sneakers in public.  And since I don’t plan to wear Nikes, maybe I ought to go get a pair of Florsheim wingtips.

*********** COLLEGE FOOTBALL THIS WEEKEND

LOTS OF BLOWOUT GAMES THAT ONLY A DEVOTED FAN OF EITHER TEAM WOULD WATCH
AKA - "YOU MAIL US THE WIN AND WE’LL MAIL YOU THE CHECK"
(IN ORDER OF TV APPEARANCE)
NEW MEXICO AT WISCONSIN
WESTERN MICHIGAN AT MICHIGAN
GEORGIA STATE AT NC STATE
UCLA AT OKLAHOMA - COULD BE UGLY
WILLIAM AND MARY AT VIRGINIA TECH
PORTLAND STATE AT OREGON
ARKANSAS STATE AT ALABAMA
RUTGERS AT OHIO STATE - HARD TO BELIEVE THIS IS A BIG TEN GAME
BALL STATE AT NOTRE DAME
WAGNER AT SYRACUSE
LAMAR AT TEXAS TECH
SOUTHERN ILLINOIS AT OLE MISS
EAST TENNESSEE AT TENNESSEE
NORTH DAKOTA AT WASHINGTON
YOUNGSTOWN STATE AT WEST VIRGINIA
SC STATE AT CENTRAL FLORIDA
SAVANNAH STATE AT MIAMI
SE LOUISIANA AT LSU
BAYLOR AT UTSA
SAMFORD AT FLORIDA STATE - THE HOKIES ARE GONE; YOU CAN GO BACK TO YOUR SWAG SURFIN’ NOW, SEMINOLES
ALABAMA STATE AT AUBURN - ARE YOU SERIOUS?
SOUTH ALABAMA AT OKLAHOMA STATE
TULSA AT TEXAS
SOUTHERN UTAH AT OREGON STATE
UCONN AT BOISE STATE - HOPE YOU ENJOY THE SIGHTS, HUSKIES; THE GAME WILL BE BAD


WATCHING FOUR GAMES AT A TIME WITH DISH P-I-P


GAMES I’LL BE WATCHING - (at least in part)
(IN ORDER OF TV APPEARANCE)
MISSISSIPPI STATE AT KANSAS STATE
LIBERTY AT ARMY - MY UPSET PICK OF THE DAY
NEVADA AT VANDERBILT
ARIZONA AT HOUSTON - I’M PICKING HOUSTON
DUKE AT NORTHWESTERN - BOTH TEAMS COMING OFF GOOD OPENING GAME WINS
GEORGIA TECH AT SOUTH FLORIDA
AIR FORCE AT FLORIDA ATLANTIC - LANE KIFFIN COULD BE 0-2 BY SATURDAY EVENING
KANSAS AT CENTRAL MICHIGAN - I’M BETTING ON THE CHIPPEWAS
GEORGIA AT SOUTH CAROLINA - COULD BE A REAL TEST FOR THE BULLDOGS
COLORADO AT NEBRASKA - HUSKERS GOT RAINED OUT; BUFFS OPENED WITH A BIG WIN
MEMPHIS AT NAVY - NAVY IS STILL STRONG OFFENSIVELY, BUT CAN THEY STOP MEMPHIS?
NORTH CAROLINA AT EAST CAROLINA - ONLY BECAUSE I WANT TO SEE UNC GET BEATEN
IOWA STATE AT IOWA - A RIVALRY THAT’S UNDERAPPRECIATED ELSEWHERE; ALWAYS A GREAT GAME
MARYLAND AT BOWLING GREEN - JUST TO SEE IF EVERYBODY ON BOWLING GREEN IS PROPERLY EQUIPPED
CLEMSON AT TEXAS A & M - HOPING THAT DABO CAN PUT ONE ON JIMBO
WYOMING AT MISSOURI - AN UPSET PICK
KENTUCKY AT FLORIDA - SHOULD BE A BIG WIN FOR DAN MULLEN
VIRGINIA AT INDIANA - TWO HALFWAY DECENT POWER FIVE  PROGRAMS TRYING TO RISE
ARKANSAS AT COLORADO STATE - I THINK THAT THE RAMS WILL GIVE THE HOGS A GAME
FRESNO STATE AT MINNESOTA - GOPHERS MAY BE VERY GOOD
PENN STATE AT PITT - THEY’RE PLAYING IN PITTSBURGH, AND I THINK PITT WILL FIND A WAY
USC AT STANFORD - AWFULLY EARLY IN THE SEASON FOR THIS LONG-TIME RIVALRY - GO CARD!
CAL AT BYU - CAL BEAT UNC, BYU BEAT ARIZONA - I’M GOING WITH CAL
MICHIGAN STATE AT ARIZONA STATE - MARK DANTONIO, A REAL COACH, BEATS HERM EDWARDS, A CEO
SAN JOSE STATE AT WASHINGTON STATE - CAN THE COUGS AND THEIR NEW QB OPEN THE SEASON 2-0?
RICE AT HAWAII - YES, THIS WILL BE A BLOWOUT, BUT HAWAII’S OFFENSE MAKES IT WORTH WATCHING


SPECIAL GAME
NICHOLLS STATE AT TULANE - CAN THE COLONELS MAKE IT TWO IN A ROW AGAINST FBS TEAMS?

*********** RIP Burt Reynolds.  I’m not what you’d call a movie goer, but damn, I loved his films:  Deliverance… Smokey and the Bandit… Cannonball Run… and, best of all, The Longest Yard - that rarest of all creations, a good football movie.

Will there ever be another like him? A likeable movie star, a man’s man who the whole time he was acting seemed to me to be ready at any time to turn to us, his audience, and laugh and say, “Can you believe they pay me to do this sh—?”

And never forget, he did play football at Florida State - well before it became a football power.  His roommate there, the legend goes, was Lee Corso.

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

Had a great time in South Bend this past weekend.  The pep rally on Friday night was pulsating and put Irish fans in a festive mood.  Tailgating Saturday afternoon got them feisty.  And by game time they were in a downright fervor!  I've attended 5 ND games in the past, and in this one the Irish fans were the loudest and more into the game than I've ever seen before.

It was great to see the Irish beat Michigan but they still have work to do.  Michigan on the other hand needs to get back to what Michigan teams have done best over the years...run the dang ball.  In the second half I saw more of it but for some reason they didn't stay with it.  It cost them the game.

Joe Gutilla
Austin, Texas

*********** Mater Dei of Santa Ana, California, the top program in Southern California - and perhaps in the country - is back at it.  Last week, it beat national power Bishop Gorman of Las Vegas, 42-0, and  it’s outscored its three opponents 133-14. 

But its record is just 2-1  after it had to forfeit its opening game, a 42-14  win over Bishop Amat,  after discovering - and reporting - that it had used an ineligible player  in the game.

Cryptically, a news release from the school attributed the player’s ineligibilty to a misunderstanding of “transcripts from his native country (not the United States).”

Hmmm.  This is not soccer.  Or basketball.  And it’s not like the kid was a Dominican, here to play baseball.  So where TF do you suppose he came from?

The worst part of it is, as usually happens in these case, the kid probably got in at the end of the game, when - or should I say “if”? -  the coach cleared the bench.

WHY I DON’T REFER TO THIS FEATURE AS “TRIVIA” AND why I WISH YOU WOULDN’T, EITHER.

(I wrote this back in 2000, when I started “A Look at Our Legacy” and it still bears repeating.)

I sat down with my Board of Directors* and decided that the word "Trivia" in association with the sort of people I've featured here was doing them a disservice.   Since it’s my hope that this feature might interest coaches in the rich history of our game, it seemed to me that "trivia", a word associated with normally useless but occasionally interesting facts, was undercutting my intentions.  I definitely  don’t consider the people I write about, or their contributions to our game,  to be trivial. 

*No such thing; it’s just play-acting on my part.

*********** QUIZ ANSWER - John Merritt was known in the coaching profession as “Big John.”

He spent his entire career coaching HBCU (look it up) programs, and in head-to-head meetings with the great Eddie Robinson, he was 11-9-1.

He was a native of Kentucky and a graduate of Kentucky State, where he played his college football, and his first head coaching job was at Jackson State. In 11 seasons there, he compiled a record of 63-37-5; his best-known player there was future all-pro Willie Richardson.

But he’s best  remembered for his accomplishments in a 21-year career at Tennessee State, from 1963 through 1983, where he won 172 and lost only 33, with 7 ties.

Tennessee State tried hard to entice him to leave Jackson State, and when he finally accepted their offer, he took along with him both offensive coordinator Alvin Coleman and defensive coordinator Joe Gilliam, Sr. "It was probably the biggest move in black collegiate athletics," he later recalled. "Never before had an entire coaching staff left a (black) school and gone to another."

At Tennessee State he had five undefeated seasons and five one-loss seasons. His “worst” season was 1975, when the Tigers went 5-4.  He produced such standout pro players as Ed "Too Tall" Jones, Eldridge Dickey, Richard Dent, Waymond Bryant, Cleveland Elam, "Jefferson Street Joe" Gilliam, Jr., Claude Humphrey, Joe "Turkey" Jones, James Marsalis, and Israel Lang. (Richard Dent would become the first player from a historically black college to be named Super Bowl MVP.)

He was a legendary PR man, who spent countless hours out in the community promoting his program. His work took him into the white community as well, where he was well liked and respected; the Mayor of Nashville and the Governor of Tennessee were regulars at Tiger games.

In 1982, Centennial Boulevard, which runs through the Tennessee State campus, was renamed to honor John Merritt.

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

When he retired, he was ninth all-time in career wins at all levels of college football, with 235.


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

*********** In his book "Black College Football" (1992), Michael Hurd relates the oft-told story  of the time coach Merritt was at Jackson State, and the bus was about to pull out on a road trip. Trouble was, star receiver Willie Richardson wasn't on board; now Coach Merritt was on the spot, because he had threatened the team earlier in the day, "The bus is leaving at 7:30, and I don't care who's not on it." Suddenly declaring that he had forgotten his cigars (he was rarely seen without one, even on the sidelines), Coach Merritt ducked inside his office, where for the next several minutes players watched him peeking out through the drapes until finally he saw Richardson board the bus. Then he emerged from the building, got on the bus himself, and barked out to the driver: "Let's go! I don't give a damn who's not here!" No one ever said Coach Merritt was stupid. Forgetful, maybe, but not stupid.

*********** QUIZ - He is one of the greatest defensive linemen ever to play the game and is considered to be the key building block  in turning the Pittsburgh Steelers from an NFL joke into one of the most dominant dynasties in league history.

Not heavily recruited out of high school in Temple, Texas, he wound up attending North Texas State.

As a defensive tackle there from 1966 through 1968, he was a three-time All Missouri Valley Conference selection, and in his senior season, despite playing for a lesser-known school,  he was a consensus All-American.

Drafted first by the Steelers - the fourth player overall - in 1969, he and a new head coach, Chuck Noll, arrived in Pittsburgh at the same time.  They would both have Hall-of-Fame careers.

He didn’t initially like the idea of being drafted by a loser - the Steelers were really bad, then - but Noll saw in him the foundation of the strong defense. 

Noll was correct.  Although Pittsburgh was only 1-13 in his first year, his new defensive tackle was NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year, and earned a spot on the Pro Bowl.  He would go on to play on four Super Bowl champions… he went to TEN Pro Bowls… He was chosen  first team All-Pro five-times, and second team All-Pro twice…He was the NFL Man of the Year in 1979… He was twice named NFL Defensive Player of the Year… He was named to the NFL 1970’s All-Decade Team.

He became a team leader,  demanding the best from teammates who feared displeasing him.

From Wikipedia: He is widely considered one of the greatest defensive linemen in league history.His durability allowed him to play in 181 of a possible 190 games, including a streak of 91 straight to begin his career. The Steel Curtain defense is consistently ranked among the top defensive groups of all time.

Many people who didn’t even now him as a football player remember him for a famous Coca-Cola commercial in which a little kid offers him a drink of Coke after a game and he repays the kid by taking off his game jersey and throwing it to him.

At some point in his career, he earned a nickname by which everyone knew him - one that he didn’t particularly care for.  Years later,  he said, “I just want people to remember me as being a good player and not really mean.”

TUESD

*********** Props to Josh Montgomery, of Berwick, Louisiana a Nicholls State grad who picked Nicholls State to beat Kansas.  I had my doubts, but he persisted.

Meanwhile, a professor at the KU School of Law is proposing that KU give up football.  There are those who will say that they already did so, unofficially, years ago.

*********** COLLEGE FOOTBALL WRAP-UP

OPENED AGAINST A POWER 5 OPPONENT AND WON

ALABAMA (Louisville)  - Alabama is in a class all its own
AUBURN (Washington) - If they can get their offense up to the level of their defense, they'll be very tough
BYU (Arizona) - Surprised an Arizona crowd expecting big things from the new coach
CAL (North Carolina) - Bears could be good.  UNC missing a lot of shoe salesmen
CINCINNATI (UCLA) - Cinci rode the horse - Michael Warren rushed 35 times for 141 yards and three TDs
LSU (Miami) Unspectacular QB play - it is, after all, LSU - but great defense and a decent running game
MARYLAND (Texas) - An inspired performance by the Terps + a great coaching job by interim head coach Matt Canada + a classic Texas underperforming by the Longhorns = two straight Maryland opening game wins over Texas
NOTRE DAME (Michigan) - Irish looked good
OHIO STATE (Oregon State)  - Buckeyes are very good. Beavers are not.  Yet.  For what it’s worth, though, Oregon State’s Artavis Pierce rushed for 168 yards on 11 carries and two TDs (of 80 and 78 yards).
OLE MISS (Texas Tech)  - An upset and a convincing win for Matt Luke in his first season as the head coach with the “interim” removed.  Especially after MIchigan poached his QB, Shea Patterson.
VIRGINIA TECH (Florida State) -  a Top Ten performance on both sides of the ball
WEST VIRGINIA (Tennessee) - The ‘eers are a scoring machine

*********** GOT EVERYBODY’S HOPES UP, THEN LAID AN EGG

ARIZONA - Loss to BYU a huge disappointment for Zona fans who’d been promised new and spectacular things with QB Khalil Tate and new HC Kevin Sumlin
FLORIDA STATE - Couldn’t have happened to a nice guy than new Seminoles coach Willie Taggart
LOUISVILLE - Not sure why Bobby Petrino thought it was a good idea to talk trash beforehard.
MIAMI - And Mark Richt thought his QB postion was settled and solid.
MICHIGAN - A Bo Shembechler or Gary Moeller or Lloyd Carr team that can’t run the ball? Unthinkable.
TEXAS - Tom Herman can’t be resting easy in Austin.
UCLA - A big letdown for Bruins’ fans who’d been expecting to see offensive fireworks, if not a win

*********** SPECIAL MENTION: PENN STATE, which had to score with :42 remaining to go into overtime against Appalachian State.  Yes, the Lions won, and no, this wouldn’t have been as big an upset as App State’s historic win over Michigan. Back then, App State was an FCS school - now it’s an FBS member.

*********** EXTRA SPECIAL MENTION: FCS power Villanova, the suburban school, beat FBS Temple, the city school, in the Philadelphia college football championship.  BIG win for the Wildcats, after four straight losses to the Owls.

*********** MEH - Auburn-Washington was not a classic.  It was more like a pro game - a lot of passing, very good defense, not much rushing.  God, I hate to watch a “running” game that doesn’t have a Tight End… or an H Back… or a “Sniffer”… or a Fullback.   (Will somebody please pass that along to Washington coach Chris Peterson?)

*********** BOY AM I HAPPY - I never have liked Florida State - not entirely sure why - but I definitely dislike their new coach, slickster Willie Taggart, who so graciously consented to spend one whole, entire season at Oregon before bailing to take the Seminoles’ job.  He’s the definition of a snake oil salesman.

So as I type this I’m taking great pleasure in watching Virginia Tech dominate Mr. Taggart’s new team and embarrass (if that’s possible) Mr. Taggart.

*********** WHO’S DOING THE COACHING? AWARD - To whoever is coaching the Michigan QBs.  It can’t be Jim Harbaugh, because the guy can coach quarterbacks, and I believe that if he had been coaching Shea Patterson, the much touted QB transfer from Ole Miss, Patterson would have had two hands on the ball, and he wouldn’t have fumbled, killing the Wolverines’ final drive with :45 left.

*********** GOLDEN KNUCKLEHEAD AWARD - To the player from Bowling Green whom I’d rather not name - he knows who he is - who to my knowledge was the first college player whose fashion sense was so strong that he simply had to challenge the rule - one year old but only now being enforced - that players must wear knee pads and the knee pads must cover their knees.

But in challenging the rule, he  had to go and compound his offense by adding in a bit of the anti-authority attiude that’s all too common today.

I damn near split a side when I heard the official announcing an unportsmanlike conduct penalty against him (and Bowling Green) - for “Refusing to comply with official’s instructions to leave the game.”

There he was, caught being illegally equipped, and when he was told he had to leave the game because he was improperly equipped, he had to go and cop an attitude.  What the hell - isn’t that the way everybody responds to authority thse days?

Not that Oregon needed any help, but the penalty kept a Ducks’ drive going.

*********** HAWAII is real… The Warriors (is it still “Rainbow” Warriors?) jumped out to a 28-0 lead over Navy at the end of the first quarter, and they had them 38-14 at the half.

The Middies did fight back, but when you’re a running team, you can’t afford to get behind like that.

(More about the Warriors’ run and shoot on Friday.)

*********** I was very disappointed with Todd Blackledge’s comments on the ABC telecast of the Miami-LSU game when the officials were reviewing whether a Miami defensive back was guilty of targeting.

To me, it was clearly targeting, and I’m all for throwing guys the hell out until they and their coaches get serious about eliminating it.

But Blackledge, who saw the same thing I did, had to play defense attorney and show the hardship card: “Sure would be a shame to have him ejected from his first start.”

Shame, my ass. I say it sure would be a shame to see him get away with a shot like that.  Guaranteed, if he did he’d do it again.

What you tolerate, you encourage.

I still think that football needs a penalty box.  Watch how fast coaches clean this sh— up when they have to play with 10 men for two minutes.

*********** If there’s such a thing in the world of sports as a Deep State, the apparel companies have got to be at the very bottom of it.

It’s really hard to think of anyting that a single one of them has done for the good of sport itself.

Now come strong rumors, as yet unconfirmed by Nike,  that Colin Kaepernick has been signed to a new contract with the shoe giant that will feature him in an ad campaign, create his own an apparel line, and make donations to something called a Know Your Rights “charity.”

The ad campaign slogan:
“Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.”

Right.  Sacrificing everything.  So how much of all that NFL money he made do you suppose Mr. Kaepernick put away before voluntarily ending his NFL career?

Would he be of any interest at all to the sh— disturbers at Nike if he’d just decided to remain a relatively unknown (and uncontroversial) backup quarterback, instead of  “sacrificing everything” to put on his side show?

I have no idea whether there’s any truth to the rumors, but knowing Nike, it makes sense.  I’ve worn Nike for years - support the local company and all that - but if this is true,  I’ll go barefoot before I’ll wear anything made by those turds.

https://www.sltrib.com/sports/2018/09/03/nike-gives-colin/

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

A slow start to our first game last Friday, but we got things rolling as the double wing kept pounding.  It was 6-6 with three minutes to go in the half and we put on a great end-of-half drive.  Capped it with bootleg for a touchdown with :04 on the clock.  The second half was all Trojans football, and the final score was 40-6. 

Offense is great, but defense is what won the game for us.  We allowed 4 yards on 24 rushes.  Less than 75 total yards.  This against a team that had 22 seniors and had projected this to be a "statement" game for them. 

We have loads of work to do, but none of it is effort.  Fine tuning.  And we have kids who will do just that.  I love coaching these guys.

Todd Hollis
Elmwood High School
Elmwood, Illinois

Coach,

That’s a great start, especially on defense.

I hope you continue to get better

Have  a great game tonight!


*********** Friday night there was good football -

Northwestern and Purdue put on a good show in front of a good crowd at Purdue.  The Wildcats’ 31-27 win gives them a 9-game win streak.

Wake Forest, led by a true freshman named Sam Hartman, scored at the end to force overtime, then beat Tulane 23-17 in OT.

Stanford avenged last year’s loss to San Diego State.

Then there was the  Army-Duke game. 

I was conflicted.  I have a daughter and son-in-law who are Duke grads, and after suffering with the Devils’ football program over the years I greatly admire Coach David Cutcliffe for what he’s done there, and for the kind of man he is.  But I have also suffered for years along with other Army football fans, and I was awaiting a good showing from the Army team, and a good game,

I didn’t get either.  I left at halftime to go watch a high school game, then came home and watched the remainder.

Sheesh.  It was an ass-kicking. The boys in blue took it to the future soldiers.

Duke had superior receivers, an outstanding running back, a solid quarterback and a good offensive line and they pretty much stayed vanilla.  I think that they could have put a score on Army if it weren’t for "Coach Cut’s” sense of sportmanship.

As for Army’s offense (or lack thereof - Duke actually outrushed them) I can’t understand how a team that runs the triple option and knows its unique needs and can choose from among dozens of good high school option quarterbacks just can’t manage to find - and then prepare - two of them. (Navy seems to be able to.)  Or even just one.   It was great to have Ahmad Bradshaw the last couple of years, and they made great use of him, but everybody in the world knew that they were going to have to replace him - and when they had to, it turns out they didn’t.

Their new QB throws well enough, but so what? He’s playing on a triple-option team.  His passing is only going to help augment a strong running game, which wasn’t in evidence.

I’ve heard a lot about how strong the fullback position is - it really is -  but I don't see how having four good fullbacks is a particular strength, in an offense that only uses one of them at a time.

The problem is quite likely the offensive line.

Duke certainly did have a good defense and a good scheme - but Army did not look to me like a potential 10-3 team.  Not with Hawaii, Oklahoma, Air Force and Navy left to play.  Actually, Liberty, the next opponent, will not be easy.

One final quibble: why, when you’re a ball control team as Army is, and you’re playing a quick-strike passing team, as Army usually does, do you win the toss and defer?????

*********** A youth team in Western Pennsylvania filed false papers so that a kid who was too old - and also lives outside the team’s assigned boundaries - could play.

As a result, the kid, who’s 14, had been playing with mostly 10- and 11-year olds. And injuring several of them.

Oh - and not that anyone would have been suspicious of wrongdoing, but  in addition to being three years older than the other kids, he’s 6-2 - and he weighs 275.

https://triblive.com/local/regional/14031897-74/west-mifflin-youth-football-team-banned-after-falsifying-forms-for-too-old-player

*********** I watched a high school game Friday night and came away as convinced as ever that one of the major ways a team beats itself - besides turnovers, stupid penalties and poor tackling - is stupid play calling.

Two examples:

(1) 3rd and 1 - You’re at midfield.  You’ve just made nine yards on two running plays.  So what the hell - why not throw a bubble screen? (Brilliant call.  It fell incomplete.)

(2) On your own 20, 4th and long, wind at your back, 20 seconds left until the end of the quarter.  CALL A TIME OUT IF YOU HAVE TO!!!  But, no-o-o-o-o.  Let’s let the clock run out so we can change ends - and punt INTO the wind. (The punt travelled 14 yards.  Set up with good field position, the opponent scored in four plays.


*********** On the August 24 page I included the following correspondence from a former player who’s now coaching his son’s youth team…

Need some advice. So my team of 8 year olds is very small in numbers - just 13 kids. It's youth football so I need to play everybody. I am struggling mightily to put together an o-line with some of kids being insanely green and still learning contact. I can get to a 5, maybe even a 6 man decent line(I'm including Ends in that.) So I'm thinking the best thing I could do is run out of spread formation. So I wanted to get your thoughts. Do I run just everything out of spread? Or would you run open wing? I always remember you telling me you could line a guy up at receiver with no arms and the defense would still cover them. Well I got a couple that might as well have no arms!

Also should say that we had our first scrimmage yesterday, and despite huge pressure from wherever I hid these kids on the line we moved the ball against a really good experienced team. But once they found my weak kids they blitzed them the whole time and penetration killed us. My thought is if we can bring it down to 9v9 or better yet 9v8 we can really do well.

Thank you Coach!

Welcome to adaptive coaching!   I would venture to say that 90 per cent of whatever “innovating” I’ve done over the years was simply adapting to the talent on hand.  (Several years ago a couple of disaffected kids quit the team on the Tuesday before Homecoming, leaving us with only one running back. And running from Stack formation, that one running back ran for more than 250 yards - and we won the game.)

Your thinking is spot-on.

My suggestion in this case is that you go to Open Wing, and use the Twins to get “must-play” players into the game.  That means that you now only need nine bona fide players.  There is always the chance that defenses will cover both of them, making it a 9 on 9 game, and they might even drop a safety back, making it 9 on 8 in your favor.

(If they don’t cover your twins with two people, and you have a player who can throw, you can always sub in a couple of better players at the twins for a play or two  and throw a bubble or smoke to that side.)

Now, if you need to “hide” yet a third kid, you can  widen your wingback as a “wide wing” - a flanker - to his side.  Now, you’re playing with only 8, really - and you may find the defense facing you with 7 (3 cover guys and a safety).






The first results are in…

Coach Wyatt,

We went on the road for our first game ever last night. 3 practices in the Open Wing under our belt. We fought like hell, but came up a PAT short, lost 20-18.

Despite being dramatically smaller in size and numbers we physically took it to them with the wedge. It demoralized the other team and fired our guys up. 3 times they had to change nose tackles, because they left the game. Then we scored all 3 touchdowns on XX45C. I set it up time and time again and it worked every time. Tons of things to work and improve, but we have a strong game to build on.

Thank you for your help!!

*********** Read this on the Internet: I can’t believe Trump is going to run for a second term in 2020 with McCain’s funeral not finished yet.

*********** I could actually support some parts of Shariah Law that called for cutting off the hands of the damned speech coaches and all the TV  types they've taught to use their hands when they talk.


*********** Can't wait till  the next time the Seahawks play at home…

Paul Allen, whose $20 billion net worth makes him one of the richest owners in all of pro sports, owns teams in two of the most f—king left wing cities in the United States - the Portland Trail Blazers and the Seattle Seahawks - and it’s just become known that back in July he donated $100,000 to help elect Republicans in the House of Representatives.

Seattleites, especially the multitude of them who’ve moved in from elsewhere in the last 20 years, will ignore the fact that in 1996 he stepped up to buy the franchise to keep it from being moved to Southern California.

Even those who love the Seahawks  and know what he did to keep them in Seattle will now automatically hate him because he donated money to those fascist Republicans.

Expect protests and demands that he sell the team.  Now.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seahawks-owner-paul-allen-gives-100000-to-help-republicans-keep-control-of-u-s-house/



*********** Good afternoon Coach,

I hope you are enjoying your weekend. I am just giving you an update of our game last night. It was not good. We were able to move the ball at anytime. We had over 250 yards rushing, completed 1 of 4 passes. Honestly Coach, we should have won. We had 6 turnovers, the QB either fumbled the snap, or the backs would drop the pitch or muff the Super XX handoff. Those 6 turnover led to all of their touchdowns. I am super frustrated with the turnovers. I tried 3 different QB's and went through every single A and C back I had, and the results were all the same. I am not sure what I am going to do. During practice the backs spend anywhere from 20-30 minutes in group time before spending another 20 minutes in team. What am I doing wrong? I wish I could send some film your way but our youth league doesn't allow us to film. I have thought about punishing the kids in practice for the the fumble snaps and dropped exchanges, but I don't want to run them off.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Coach,

I hope it’s not too late, but this is something that should start on day one, as a part of team culture. You have to start out eliminating the ways that any team - even a good one - will beat itself, and the first one on the list is turnovers.  

I am always amazed at the number of practices I watch where people - coaches as well as players - accept fumbles casually.

This tells me that they are not addressing this major cause of losses.

Fortunately for you, it’s still early in the season. And following a game which demonstrates how fumbles can destroy a good team effort, this is a perfect time to institute your  brand-new Zero Tolerance for Fumbles policy.

You have to instill in your team the idea that turnovers are repugnant and won’t be tolerated.

That means that you must convince anybody who carries the ball that he’s privileged to carry the TEAM’S ball - that there are plenty of others on the team that would love to have that chance, but they have less glamorous jobs. They have grunt work to do - they have to block for him. Until it’s drilled into them, ball carriers have  to be reminded - often - that they owe it to their teammates to protect “the team’s ball,” that that is their Job One, and that it is selfish of them not to do so. Say it until they get sick of hearing it. And then say it some more.

ANY time the ball falls to the ground, coaches have to pitch a fit. It is not something that you ever accept casually and then go on about your business as if nothing happened. You have to deal with it RIGHT NOW.  Do not be casual and accepting. It will not cure itself. I don’t normally want players getting on each other but I make an exception where fumbling is concerned. I don’t mind at all when teammates get on a guy who fumbles. That runner simply must move “Don’t Fumble!” to the front of his brain, ahead of anything else that might be going on in there.

When there is a fumble, pitch a fit - then  remind everyone on your team of how serious you are and how serious fumbles are by having everyone on the team do five up-downs or five pushups ANY time there is a fumble of ANY sort in practice. The point is that the entire team suffers when someone gets careless with the ball.

Convince your running backs that you are serious by making it an absolute , consistently enforced rule that if anyone fumbles, he comes out of the game - for a time that’s up to you to decide.

No runner is so good that he’s earned the right to fumble. I once pulled my star running back, a 1000-yard rusher, from the last game of his senior year and sat him down for the rest of the game after he’d fumbled for the third time. How could I face my team if I’d let him stay in and he’d fumbled again and we’d lost? He was pissed, of course, but just as I preach, the team comes first.  My obligation was to the team. We didn’t fumble again. We won.

That’s the mental part of it. Never let up on this, because even veteran players can get complacent. Condensed: you have to be willing to be anal and tough. It’s an unpleasant but sometimes necessary part of being a leader.

After work on the attitude toward fumbles  comes work on the mechanics.

You have to teach the proper way for the center to snap and for the QB to take the snap and to protect the ball and make the handoff or toss. And you have to rep these things until they’re almost automatic. And then continue to rep them.

Any time you run a play, even in group work, you need to have a center snapping to the QB. For the center, making a consistent  snap is far more important than blocking drills. Occasionally, put a nose man on the center.

For the exchange, handoff and toss mechanics, you can refer to  my new playbook.  It’s also covered in my QB Hockey Stick video...

You have to teach the running backs to take handoffs, catch tosses, carry the ball in traffic (both hands covering both points of the ball until they’re in the clear) and in the open field (the four points of contact: hand covering the point, ball touching forearm, biceps, ribs).  The coaches have to be insistent on their carrying the ball in the outside arm. Runners have to be drilled on being able to hang onto the ball when someone’s trying to pry it from their grasp.  And they have to learn how to fall without letting go of the ball or trying to break their fall with the arm that’s carrying the ball.

For fumble-prevention drills, look at my Practice Without Pads video.

In my opinion, 20 minutes is way too much group time when you’re only spending 20 minutes on team time. I wouldn’t know what to do with backs only for 20 minutes.   Spend way more time in team work.

In sum:  not nearly enough coaches devote nearly enough effort to prevention of fumbles, when they’re a major cause of losses.

Old football truism: First avoid losing - then win.

Good luck as always and let me know how it goes.

*********** QUIZ ANSWER :  Len Dawson is a great example of the importance of persistence, and of   being in the right place at the right time.

He played 19 years as an NFL quarterback for three different teams, but he failed with the first two teams and didn’t experience success until he landed with the third one - and once he did, he spent 14 years with them. 

In high school in Alliance, Ohio, he was the outstanding back in the state his senior year, but he passed up Ohio State - “That wasn’t me - I was a passing quarterback!” he would say years later -  to play college ball for Purdue, where they threw the ball.

In his three years at Purdue, playing both ways, he led the Big Ten in passing.  It was also while at Purdue that he met an assistant coach named Hank Stram whom he would join up with years later, to their mutual advantage.

He was a first-round draft choice of the Steelers, the fifth player taken overall, but after the Steelers acquired Bobby Layne, he became expendable, and he was traded to the Browns.

His luck was no better in Cleveland, and after two seasons, they released him.

That’s when he reunited with Stram, by then in his third year as head coach of the Dallas Texans in the American Football League.

And that’s when things turned around for him.  In his first season with them, the Texans defeated the Houston Oilers to win the AFL title, and he was named League MVP.

In all, in his 14 seasons with the team - most of them after the franchise moved to Kansas City - he led it to three league championships and a Super Bowl victory, in which he was named the MVP.

He was twice named first team All-AFL and twice named second team All-AFL.  He led the AFL in passing touchdowns four times, and six times led the league in passer rating.

He was named quarterback on the All-Time AFL team.

In 1973, he was named NFL Man of the Year.

He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1987.

For years after he retired as a player Len Dawson was a TV sports guy in Kansas City, and served as a color commentator for the Chiefs’ radio network.

********** CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING LEN DAWSON
JOSH MONTGOMERY - BERWICK, LOUISIANA
KEN HAMPTON - RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
GREG KOENIG - CIMARRON, KANSAS
MIKE FRAMKE - GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN
ADAM WESOLOSKI - PULASKI, WISCONSIN
TIM BROWN - FLORENCE, ALABAMA
JOE GUTILLA - AUSTIN, TEXAS
MARK KACZMAREK - DAVENPORT, IOWA - Another great Strat-O-Matic card Len Dawson
DENNIS METZGER - RICHMOND, INDIANA
MIKE BENTON - COLFAX, ILLINOIS
OSSIE OSMUNDSON - WOODLAND, WASHINGTON
TOM DAVIS - SAN CARLOS, CALIFORNIA
SHEP CLARKE - PUYALLUP, WASHINGTON

*********** What a guy!

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/just-because-len-dawson-enjoys-a-sweet-cig-during-super-bowl-i/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9iGf0DMpwA

Greg Koenig
Cimarron, Kansas

*********** Hi Coach,

I still find this picture hilarious.  Years ago, when I competed in olympic weightlifting, there was an old masters lifter at one meet.  Great guy.  Just before we started warming up, he was outside in the parking lot, smoking a couple of Marlboros.  One of the guys called out to him "Hey Don, time to start warming up"  Don casually stubbed out his last cigarette and replied "Ok".  He won his division.

Mike Framke
Green Bay, Wisconsin


Len Dawson catching a puff on the sidelines

Coach-  Those were different times, as this photo of me (the guy with the ’stache) from 1971 will attest.



And,  back before they let the TV cameras in the locker room, here’s Chuck Bednarik celebrating the Eagles’ 1960 NFL championship game win over the Packers - after having played every down on both offense and defense…



WHY I DON’T REFER TO THIS FEATURE AS “TRIVIA” AND I WISH YOU WOULDN’T, EITHER.

(I wrote this back in 2000, when I started “A Look at Our Legacy” and it still bears repeating.)

I sat down with my Board of Directors* and decided that the word "Trivia" in association with the sort of people I've featured here was doing them a disservice.   Since it’s my hope that this feature might interest coaches in the rich history of our game, it seemed to me that "trivia", a word associated with normally useless but occasionally interesting facts, was undercutting my intentions.  I definitely  don’t consider the people I write about, or their contributions to our game,  to be trivial. 

*There's no such thing; just play-acting on my part, pretending to be big-time.

*********** QUIZ - He was known in the coaching profession as “Big John.”

He spent his entire career coaching HBCU (look it up) programs, and in head-to-head meetings with the great Eddie Robinson, he was 11-9-1.

He was a native of Kentucky and a graduate of Kentucky State, where he played his college football, and his first head coaching job was at Jackson State. In 11 seasons there, he compiled a record of 63-37-5; his best-known player there was future all-pro Willie Richardson.

But he’s best  remembered for his accomplishments in a 21-year career at Tennessee State, from 1963 through 1983, where he won 172 and lost only 33, with 7 ties.

Tennessee State tried hard to entice him to leave Jackson State, and when he finally accepted their offer, he took along with him both offensive coordinator Alvin Coleman and defensive coordinator Joe Gilliam, Sr. "It was probably the biggest move in black collegiate athletics," he later recalled. "Never before had an entire coaching staff left a (black) school and gone to another."

At Tennessee State he had five undefeated seasons and five one-loss seasons. His “worst” season was 1975, when the Tigers went 5-4.  He produced such standout pro players as Ed "Too Tall" Jones, Eldridge Dickey, Richard Dent, Waymond Bryant, Cleveland Elam, "Jefferson Street Joe" Gilliam, Jr., Claude Humphrey, Joe "Turkey" Jones, James Marsalis, and Israel Lang. (Richard Dent would become the first player from a historically black college to be named Super Bowl MVP.)

He was a legendary PR man, who spent countless hours out in the community promoting his program. His work took him into the white community as well, where he was well liked and respected; the Mayor of Nashville and the Governor of Tennessee were regulars at Tiger games.

In 1982, Centennial Boulevard, which runs through the Tennessee State campus, was renamed to honor him.

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

When he retired, he was ninth all-time in career wins at all levels of college football, with 235.

FRID

In honor of Sports Illustrated's 60th anniversary, SI.com is republishing, in full, 60 of the best stories to ever run in the magazine. Today's selection is "The Disciples Of St. Darrell On A Wild Weekend," by Texas native Dan Jenkins. Though he had joined SI just the year before, Jenkins was already building a reputation as the nation's finest college football writer. In this piece he returns to his home state and tags along with some die-hard fans of the Longhorns -- some of whom just happened to be high school friends of his -- as they engaged in a weekend of partying and pigskin. It originally ran in the Nov. 11, 1963 issue.

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