FRIDAY,  JUNE 23,  2017  - “One of the mysteries of the ages is why the political left has, for centuries, lavished so much attention on the well-being of criminals and paid so little attention to their victims.”  Dr. Thomas Sowell

Colschen, who is the running backs coach for the Highlanders, made quite an impact in the high school football community this past season with a simple gesture of compassion. The junior varsity team he was coaching took a knee near the goal line ― and subsequently suffered a loss ― against Katy Tompkins in September after an opposing player went down with a serious injury with mere seconds left on the clock.

"We're here to teach kids, and there's a lot of lessons learned through football and sports," Colschen told The Courier last fall. "When I looked across the field and saw their players together praying, I saw tears in their eyes and their coaches had tears in their eyes. There was not going to be a win-win here."

The USS Fitzgerald is an Arleigh Burke class destroyer with a top speed well in excess of 30 knots. Speed is helpful in preventing collision because it allows you to put more distance between you and a dangerous ship in the same amount of time. (Yes, speed can also be dangerous.)

She is powered by four gas turbine engines with over 100,000 horsepower available to turn her propellers.

Gas turbines are expensive and burn lots of fuel but the Navy uses them because they can provide an immense amount of torque in a very short period of time. Torque translates to acceleration and acceleration is important if you need to get out of the way of something fast.

The USS Fitzgerald is highly maneuverable with a very tight turning radius.

(You’ve got to see this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Vih4tGmqjs )

The fault,  Konrad argues persuasively, likely lies with communications.

On the ACX Crystal, as on all container ships, , the captain is in compete command at all times.  He sees all, knows all, does all.

On the USS Fitzgerald, however, as on all Navy ships, responsibilities are widely dispersed and delegated among several parties, and there is  a chain of command to be observed in communicating even such a matter as a large ship bearing down on you.

Armed with that information, a ship as fast and agile as the USS Fitzgerald could easily have avoided the collision.

But somehow, Konrad suggests, the  need to act may have become lost as it was transmitted up the chain. 

The Captain  wasn’t even informed of the impending collision and in fact was injured because he was in his quarters at the time, rather than on the bridge.  Nonetheless, it is longtime Navy policy that the Captain is responsible for what happens to his ship, and this will almost certainly be a career-ender for him.

Sound at all like a head football coach with a big staff? 

Obviously, there are advantages to delegating responsibilities, but at the same time there are dangers.  There are also great advantages to being small and flexible: any head football coach will tell you how important it is to have your hands on the wheel - or very close to it -  and to have a streamlined chain of command.

Think about this before you try to set up an organizational structure along the lines of an NFL or big-time college staff: when something goes wrong, it’s your career that’s on the line.

When you do delegate, you’re no better than your weakest subordinate.   Or the chain of command itself.

http://gcaptain.com/uss-fitzgerald-fault/

*********** Evidently some unelected judge-for-life has decided that it’s unfair to a defendant to have  a jury see him/her wearing handcuffs or ankle restraints.  The idea is that  in  a system supposedly based on the presupposition of innocence,  the sight of the shackles might make the jurors prejudge the defendant.

Funny how the defendants never gave that a thought back when they were getting those tattoos on their necks and foreheads.

*********** Malik Zaire, who once showed some promise as Notre Dame’s quarterback,  is transferring to Florida.

Florida coach Jim McElwain,  asked whether bringing in Zaire might somehow be unfair to the quarterbacks already on the Gators’ roster: 

“I was the guy they always tried to replace at Eastern Washington, so I get it.”

*********** Kavell Bigby-Williams played two years of basketball  at a JC in Wyoming then  this past season at Oregon, backing up Jordan Bell and Chris Boucher at forward.  He averaged 3 points and 2.8 rebounds, but he did block 28 shots.

Now, with one year of eligibility remaining, he’s announced he’s transferring to LSU.

“At this point in my career,” he tweeted, “it’s solely a business decision…”

Spoken like a true student-athlete.

But, uh… Considering what he’s shown so far, you have to wonder what business, exactly, he could  be talking about.

*********** New OU head coach Lincoln Riley has been given a contract  that will pay him $3.5 million a year. 

It’s not exactly a rags-to-riches story.   He was already making $1.3 million as the Sooners’ OC.

*********** University of Washington point guard Markelle Fultz is almost certain to be the number one pick in the NBA draft.

Couple of red flags:

You want 65 per cent free throw shooter playing point guard for you?

If he’s such a difference maker, how come the Huskies only won nine games?

Following up on LSU’s Ben Simmons last year,  doesn’t it seem strange that for the second straight year the NBA’s top draft pick would be a guy  who couldn’t even get his college team to the playoffs?

*********** I was reading the obituaries the other day and read about a guy named Jim Schmitz who’d died recently.  He was 73 and it sounded as if he was quite a guy:

“Jim had a great life fishing and hunting North America, a suite at the 50 yard line at the Seahawks, Super Bowls, and a summer residence on Babine Lake in the bush in Canada.

“His adventures are not done yet! His ashes will be going with family fishing and hunting exploits, including his grandson’s first moose hunting trip in Alberta, Canada.

“No flowers, please. Instead, take a kid hunting or fishing in honor of Jim.”
 
*********** Why all the fuss about nonexistent Russian interference in our elections - but crickets about $30 million spent by California liberals to influence people in Georgia to elect a guy to Congress - a twerp who didn’t even live in their District?

*********** A 20-year-old Vancouver, Washington guy has been accused of filming co-workers - female co-workers - in the shared employee locker room.  He was discovered  when one of his fellow employees noticed his cell phone sitting in one of his shoes, and found, on closer inspection, that it was filming.

The guy’s name - no, this isn’t a porn film - is Perry Beaver.  Really.

http://www.columbian.com/news/2017/jun/20/man-accused-of-filming-coworkers-in-employee-locker-room/

***********  “I didn't come over on the Mayflower, but I came over as soon as I could.”   Anton Cermak, running for mayor of Chicago, responding to a rival’s slurs about his ethnicity. (He won.)

*********** Bill Dana died. If you’re old enough, you remember him playing a Hispanic character named Jose Jimenez.

Like so many comedian, he was discovered and brought to the public’s attention by Steve Allen, an early late-show host and one of the most talented of American entertainers.

One famous exchange between Allen and Dana, in his role s Jose Jiminez.

Steve Allen:  “I understand you own a ranch…

Jose Jimenez: “Yes, the name of my ranch is the Bar Nine Circle Z Rocking O Flying W Lazy O Crazy 2 Happy 7 Bar 17 Parallelogram 4 Octagon 9 Trapezoid 6.”

Allen: “Do you have many cattle?”

Jimenez: “No. Not many survive the branding.”

***********Good morning Hugh,

Sorry I missed wishing you a Happy Birthday, and a Happy Father's Day!   From what I read it appears both were extremely enjoyable for you and Connie.  Belatedly Happy Birthday and Happy Father's Day!

Great to see the picture of you and Connie with Mike and Cielo.  I've known Mike since our high school football days in Clovis, CA.  We lost track of one another after high school, but believe it or not it was a guy named Coach Wyatt and his double wing offense that got us reconnected!  Mike's wife Cielo is courage defined.  He and I would talk on the phone when they were going through her cancer treatments.  What Mike and his boys were able to do for her was amazing, and I couldn't be more happy for all of them.  Mike and I still stay in touch, and are actually planning to attend this year's Army-Navy game.

I'm very familiar with Linfield College.  A coaching friend of mine  that I'm sure you've heard of (or maybe even met having been coaching in the Pacific Northwest for as long as you have) used to face Linfield every year when he was the head football coach at Willamette.  Mark Speckman.

Now... there's a coach with an inspirational story!  

I met Mark years ago while coaching the club football team at the University of San Francisco.  
We got to know one another while working a youth football camp in NorCal.  What an incredible man.  I've followed his coaching career with great interest.  Everywhere he's been he's been a success with that Fly Offense of his.  Currently he's the Assistant Head Coach at UC Davis.

QUIZ:  That gentleman would be Marshall Goldberg.  My dad and my uncle saw him play for the Cardinals while they were growing up in Chicago.  

Have a great week!

Joe Gutilla
Austin, Texas

Coach Gutilla is so right on Mark Speckman.  Recognized as the leading authority on - if not the  inventor of - the Fly Offense, he was born without hands.  His inspirational story goes back to what he says his mother would tell him whenever he was having problems as a kid (such as trying to tie his shoelaces): “Figure it out.”

They ought to make him Secretary of Figuring it Out, and send him out to talk to all the whiners and complainers who think it’s the job of the  government to make their lives easy!

If you've never heard him speak (or even if you have) you need to check this out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiorA6Mna54

TUESDAY,  JUNE 20,  2017  - “Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.” Plato

***********   I thank everyone who was kind enough to wish me Happy Birthday or Happy Father’s Day - or both.

Father’s Day is wonderful because the thing I’m proudest of is our four children… and the people they’ve married and brought into the family… and the grandchildren they’ve given us.  My three daughters all married men who are great fathers, and my son, with a nine-year-old of his own, is experiencing the joys of fatherhood. It enrages me when I hear of young men who make babies and then cut out and have nothing to do with those children, but it also saddens me because that selfish, immature decision will cost them some of the most rewarding moments a man can have.

So many of the birthday wishes are from people I’ve met in some way through football.  Many are from coaches.  Youth, high school, college or pro,  as football coaches we share a bond that can only be understood by someone who’s been through it. The people I’ve come to know through football are a blessing. They’ve enriched my life and I’m thankful beyond words.

The biggest events of my weekend were not my birthday or Father’s Day, but first, being with our daughter Cathy and son-in-law Rob Tiffany and their family at the graduation of our grandson, Mike Tiffany, from Cedar Crest High School in Duvall, Washington.  The ceremony was really well done - even the speeches by the students.  Especially impressive was a speech by a faculty member.  My big takeaway from it: “Rather than ask how much this opportunity will cost, ask how much it will cost to miss this opportunity.”  Sure hope some of the kids were listening, but if not - no matter.  I was.  Never too old to learn something.


The second biggest event took place Saturday morning in Seattle, where long-time friend Mike Foristiere brought his team from Mattawa, Washington, about three hours away, to compete in a spring football jamboree. Mike and I correspond often, going back to when he was a young pup starting out coaching in Boise, and he was kind enough to introduce me to his players, including his youngest son, Rock, who’s the A-Back and Middle Linebacker.  But what really put me over the top was when Mike told me that his wife, Cielo, had come along, and was on her way over to our sideline to see me.  She is a great young woman.  She and Mike have raised three fine sons, including one, Randy, who’s now at West Point.  Not all that long ago, her life was in grave danger when she was diagnosed with a form of cancer known as spindle cell sarcoma.  At the very least, there was concern that if could cost her a leg.  She and Mike had to make several trips back and forth from Boise to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and it was touch and go for a couple of years until she was pronounced cancer-free. Now, she looks great.  Cielo is tough and resilient, and I admire her courage, but I also admire the way their three boys, Ross, Randy and Rock pulled together to do their share around the home during a difficult time, and I salute Mike for his devotion to his wife.



*********** If you’re following the College World Series… Check out the Oregon State catcher, Adley Rutschman.

Strange first name, but if you know anything about Northwest sports, the first thing that comes to mind when you see that name is Ad Rutschman.

Ad's real name as Adolph, but he’s Adley’s granddad.

For 24 years, Ad Rutschman was head football coach at Linfield College, and for 13 years he was also Linfield’s head baseball coach.

Outside the Northwest, Linfield is well-known in small-school circles.  Inside the Northwest, Linfield is the small-school gorilla.  Year-in and year-out, Linfield is the team to beat.

From 1968 to 1991, his Linfield Wildcats were 183-48-3.  During that time, they won 12 Northwest Conference championships, and three NAIA National Championships.

He took his 1971 Linfield baseball squad to the 1971 NAIA World Series.

He is believed to be the only coach to win national college titles in both baseball and football.

His influence on football in the Northwest has been enormous. The coaching tree of guys who played for him and then went on to coach high school football in Oregon is more like a giant Douglas Fir.

AD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_Rutschman

ADLEY: http://www.oregonlive.com/beavers/index.ssf/2017/05/oregon_state_catcher_adley_rut.html


*********** Stuff we used to joke about because it was so absurd…

In Oregon they’re going to give people a third choice on their driver’s licenses (besides “Male” and “Female”)


*********** It’s okay for them to continue calling themselves The Slants.

They’re a band made up of Asian-Americans. Their  name so offended some people that the government, assuming the role of  protector of the offended  and the guardian of all that’s correct, refused to register it as a trademark.

But on Monday the Supreme Court ruled - unanimously - that no government agency has the power to do that.

What’s this got to do with football?

Well, see, there’s this professional football team in Washington, D.C. called (omigod - I can’t believe I’m actually gong to print this) the Redskins…

And up to now, unable by other means to persuade the team to change its name, the government had been resorting to the exact same refuse-to-register-the-name tactics that the Supreme Court just said isn’t legal.

Sounds to me as if they’ll be the Redskins, at least until the next Democratic administration.

Actually, I was sorta hoping they’d become the Washington Swamp. 

*********** In less than a week the Oregon strawberries will be done for another year.  Back to the dreck that they sell in supermarkets. You know, the kind they grow in faraway places like California, or even Mexico:  hard and firm so they can stand up to  all the handling - but when you cut them open, the cores are solid  white.  And dry.  And tasteless.  Might as well be cardboard on the inside.



But not these Oregon strawberries.  Slice these suckers  and they’re red and juicy and sweet all the way through. Without the cardboard innards, here’s no way you could ship them any distance, so the only place you see them is at roadside stands

*********** Let’s see…

The Portland Thorns (that’s women’s soccer)  just had  Gay Pride Night…

The Seattle Storm (that’s women’s basketball) will be holding a Stand With Planned Parenthood Night…

The NBA champion Golden State Warriors may decline an invitation to visit the White House…

And Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh, that Great Uniter,  has announced that he plans to invite a prominent Washington couple to be “honorary captains” at one of Michigan’s games this year. (HINT: they are such avid football fans that the male member of the couple once said that if he had a son, he’d have to think twice about letting him play football - and as Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces, he attended only one Army-Navy game in eight years)

Isn’t it great to be able to go to a game where everybody can put politics aside for a while?  Isn’t it a great feeling to know that we’re all on the same side?


*********** When I think of parents nowadays who leave even the most enormous of decisions up to an 18-year-old without so much as giving him/her input (“We don’t want to pressure him”) I think of Mike Krzyzewski.

He was, in his words, “conned” into going to West Point.

But, in his words, “Other than marrying my wife, it was the best decision I ever made. Or, more accurately, it was the best decision my parents ever talked me into. Or conned me into."

Famed writer John Feinstein wrote about how it all came about…

Krzyzewski readily admits he wasn't the least bit impressed or tempted when the new coach at Army, a 24-year-old novice named Bob Knight, showed up on his doorstep on a June evening in 1965. Knight had come to Chicago to visit Loyola Academy to talk to coach Gene Sullivan about one of his players.

While they were talking, Sullivan mentioned that the leading scorer that season in Chicago's Catholic League was still undecided about where he was going to go to college. Knight called Al Ostrowski, Krzyzewski's coach at Weber High School who, in Mike's words was, "blown away," by the thought of one of his players going to Army. That evening, Knight visited William and Emily Krzyzewski and their younger son.
"The thing is, my parents were overwhelmed by the notion that I might have the chance to go the United States Military Academy and then serve my country," Krzyzewski says. "They thought it was an honor just to have coach Knight come to their home to talk about it.

"I didn't feel the same way. I was NOT blown away by the thought of going to Army, not at all. I did NOT want to go into the Army for four years, no way. It really had nothing to do with Vietnam, it had more to do with the fact that I knew I wanted to be a coach. I didn't think going to Army and being in the Army was going to get me there."

Knight suggested the Krzyzewskis take a few days to think about Mike's decision. For the next couple of days, William and Emily staged an evening ritual.

"They would stand in the kitchen talking, knowing I was in the next room listening. They spoke Polish to one another and I didn't understand very much. But there's no word in Polish for 'stupid,' or for 'dumb.' So, I would hear, 'Mike stupid; Mike dumb.'

"I knew what they were doing. They were goading me. Finally, I just walked in one night and said, 'Okay, okay, I'll do it.'

His eyes glistened just a little at the memory. "Other than marrying my wife, it was the best decision I ever made. Or, more accurately, it was the best decision my parents ever talked me into." He smiles one more time. "Or conned me into."

FRIDAY,  JUNE 16,  2017  - “What do you despise? By this you are truly known.” Michelangelo

Elon
Houston
Oklahoma State
Vanderbilt (4)
Villanova
Wake Forest

Mark McKechnie is executive director of Youth, Rights and Justice, a nonprofit defense and advocacy firm in Portland.

"Most of our work is representing individual clients," says McKechnie, who has 18 years training as a social worker and is court-appointed to represent juveniles and parents in juvenile court. "We'd have represented someone like Luke if charged in Oregon.

"Research shows the longer someone goes without engaging in these type of offenses, the less likely they are to do it in the future. After a couple of years pass and the person hasn't committed the offense, (he) is very unlikely to do so.

"The recidivism rate for juveniles adjudicated of a sex offense is less than 3 percent. Multiple studies across multiple states, including Oregon, all landed in the 2.5 to 3 percent range in terms of re-offense rates — and those percentages are usually figured by arrests, even without conviction."

"There is a body of evidence that when treated like criminals — required to register as a sex offender — it has no effect in terms of committing another sex offense, but it creates a risk.

"When they have to answer the question, 'Have you ever been convicted of a sex crime,' and they have to answer, 'Yes,' it makes it more difficult to get housing. They're more likely to wind up homeless, not accepted in school, in jobs and so on. It's important for them to be held accountable and required to do treatment, but a very small percentage are dangerous. For the most part, a young person who creates a sex offense is in a low-risk category."

"A recent study out of South Carolina looked at registered vs. non-registered juveniles," Stanulis says. "It shows the idea behind it is flawed. We need to round up suspects, but we find out 96 percent of the cases occur with somebody in-family. Registration is useless, because (sex abuse) rarely happens with someone (the offender) doesn't know.

"The Department of Corrections did a five-year followup (on sex abusers); around four percent re-offended a sex offense. The unintended consequences are, they end up committing more other crimes than they would have they been non-registered.

"Look at the average apartment lease. If you're a registered sex offender, they won't rent to you. You'll have trouble getting federal student loans as a felon. You'll have a hard time finding a place to live, find it hard to go to school. As an 18- to 21-year-old young man, you become a sex offender rather than boy who committed a sex offense. We label people and they become what they did. That's the crime he committed, not who he is. Registration causes more harm than it fixes.

"The real issue here ultimately is, do we want them to succeed or want them to fail? Registration is simply not necessary. It satisfies our need for revenge, under the idea that sex offenders never get well, which is not true. The vast majority do not re-offend. That's not to say there are not serial pedophiles out there, but they're the exception rather than the rule."

After his sex abuse conviction, Heimlich entered a diversion program, received two years of probation and successfully completed two years of sex offender treatment.

...even the most obtuse father has to ask himself: Have I been the man my children deserve?

For dads with daughters, the question can be particularly disquieting as we contemplate a sexual revolution that has lost sight of any boundaries. In theory it’s all gloriously empowering. But for those who regard human sexuality as a profound gift, and la différence as a key to appreciating this gift, it’s astonishing how judgments that would have been elementary to our great-great-grandmothers today elude the most privileged and well-educated.

For young men: Does it require a Stanford degree to know that sexual contact with an unconscious woman is a line a man does not cross? As for being drunk himself, if he had no notion he might be doing something wrong, why did he make a run for it when the cyclists interrupted him?

For young women: This may sound impolitic, but loving moms and dads say it anyway. What happened here is a lesson in the vulnerability of women not in control of themselves because they are drunk.

The straw-man rejoinder is that this suggests the woman was “asking for it.” To the contrary, this is a refusal to allow ideology to deny a fact of life. The physical reality is that a woman’s inebriation removes a critical barrier to assault and humiliation.

In a 2014 piece for the Weekly Standard, Heather Mac Donald noted that when the social default for unmarried sex was “no,” the woman didn’t have to explain herself. “No” was sufficient. The irony is that this default meant the woman held most of the cards when it came to deciding whether a relationship would become sexual.

Today, Ms. Mac Donald notes, the default has become “yes”—and the woman who resists is both on her own and on the defensive. For men, of course, this has been a most welcome shift. And no doubt for some women, too.

Then again, if all women are yearning for is strings-free sex, why does it seem to require so much alcohol? Might one answer be the loneliness that comes from giving fully of yourself in the hope of finding intimacy—and in return getting only intercourse?

Perhaps. Then again, most dads accept that part of the job is a willingness to be the unfashionable one; that is, to love enough to speak unpopular truths when the world cheats your children with fifty shades of grey. For all the complaints about “toxic masculinity,” genuine masculinity seems hard to come by. Surely the greater male dysfunction of our time is perpetual adolescence, and a culture that encourages the man-child.

So this Father’s Day, looking over the three greatest blessings in his life, this dad pines for the day when we might again speak honestly and openly about the profound differences between male and female sexuality, when the heart might be taken as seriously as the orgasm—and when young men pursuing young women might even rediscover the marvelous possibilities of moonlit summer evenings.


ALONG THE LINE (FROM YOUR LEFT TO RIGHT) : Leon Hart, Ziggy Czarobski, Marty Wendell, Bill Walsh, Bill “Moose” Fischer, George Connor, Jim Martin

IN THE BACKFIELD: Emil “Red” Sitko, John “Pep Panelli, John Lujack (QB), Terry Brennan

ALL-AMERICANS: Sitko; Lujack; Hart; Fischer; Connor, Martin

(SOMEDAY I’LL TELL YOU ABOUT JIM MARTIN. QUITE A GUY.)

One of the great Detroit Lions’ teams that Leon Hart  played on.  (Look at the shoulders on him)

One thing stands out: There are no black players in the picture. The Redskins and Bears had no black players in 1952, either. So far as I can tell,  there were only 18 black players in the entire NFL.  The Rams and Browns had the most, with four each. Very few were linemen.



*********** The things you come across when you’re doing research… Bill Walsh, the center on the great 1947-1948 Notre Dame  teams, was drafted by the Steelers in 1949, and played center for them from 1949-1954.  Based on this photo from 1951, the last year the Steelers ran the single wing, he almost certainly was the last single wing center in NFL history. 

(And check how he’s preparing to snap the ball.  That ain’t gonna be no spiral snap.)

In a 1999 interview with Jim Sargent, of pro football researchers, he tells about learning how the Steelers snapped the ball:

"The Steelers were single wing in those days, and that's the interesting story.

"John Michelosen was our coach, and he had taken over for Jock Sutherland in `48. John was young, about 32 or 33. He was a real nice man, but he emulated Jock, who was always real stern."

Walsh continued, "I was a single wing center in high school. In Sutherland's system, which was Michelosen's, you grabbed the ball with your fingertips on the laces, your thumb on the laces, then your index finger went along the seam, and your other hand went under the ball. You sort of ‘flipped' it back. The ball rotated two and a half times to the tailback or the fullback.

"The backs took the ball on a lean, and they had their hands in such a way that with Sutherland's method, the ball was rotating in such a way that it would hit the upper hand and would drop down. If you had a spiral, it could go through. I was a single wing center in high school, and a T-formation center in college for four years, and I'm drafted third by the Steelers.

"Heck, I'm thinking, `Single wing, Wow!'

"Then my coach, Chuck Cherundolo, who was the center for the Steelers the year before me, took me up on the field that first Sunday, and showed me how they did it, and I said, `How?'

"Later, I found out you can do anything with that. I wouldn't want to go back to the spiral."

http://www.profootballresearchers.org/archives/Website_Files/Coffin_Corner/21-01-783.pdf

***********  QUIZ:  A native of San Antonio, he was all state in high school in football and basketball and was considered a major league baseball prospect.

He enrolled at SMU, at the time a Southwest Conference power, and he was an All-American tailback.  His performance in a near-upset of national champion Notre Dame - he ran for 115 yards, threw for 146, and scored three touchdowns - was called by Texas sportswriters the greatest athletic performance by a Texas athlete in the first half of the Twentieth Century.

Drafted first by the New York Giants, he had a steady if unspectacular career as a man who could do a lot of things.  He started out as a running back but after suffering a knee injury was moved to flanker back, a relatively new position, by offensive coordinator Vince Lombardi.

He was captain of the Giants for eight years, and evidence of the respect in which he was held by his teammates is the fact that fourteen of them named sons after him.

His own son and namesake was a very good soccer player, one of the first well-known American stars.

TUESDAY,  JUNE 13,  2017  - "I don't care what the crybabies say now because they didn't have to make the decision." Harry S. Truman (on the decision to drop the Atomic bomb)

"Apple is a $30 billion company, yet we've got less than 30 major products. I don't know if that's ever been done before. Certainly the great consumer electronics companies of the past had thousand of products. We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully."

Nearly one-third of American adults say they are less likely to watch a National Football League game because of the growing number of Black Lives Matter protests that are happening by players on the field, a Rasmussen poll found.

Thirty-two percent polled online and by telephone said they’re willing to skip NFL games this year because of player protests over racial issues, the pollster said on Tuesday. Only 13 percent said they were more likely to watch the games because of the protests, and 52 percent said the protests had no impact on their viewing decisions.

Twenty-eight percent of African Americans said they were more likely to tune-into an NFL game because of the protests, compared to 8 percent of whites and 16 percent of other Americans, the poll found.

Whites were twice as likely as blacks to say they are less likely to watch this year.

I began to remember a few things about Percy Haughton back around 1915 in his contest with Yale.  I happened to mention the fact that Yale had a big, fast, hard-charging line.  “I only wish they were twice as fast,” Haughton said.  “We’ll let them through and then cut them down.”  That was the way it happened.  That was the start of mousetrapping.

FRIDAY,  JUNE 9,  2017  - “The smallest good deed is better than the best intention” John Wooden

*********** When I first heard the news of Bob Stoops’ retiring, the strange timing of it made me immediately think that there must be some bad news coming next.  But when OU followed right up with the announcement that Coach Stoops’ successor would be the current offensive coordinator -  well, schools don’t do that if a head coach is leaving under a cloud.

More likely, it seems to me, is that he figured it’s better to go on his own terms, when he’s still relatively young,  than to wait until the day when they get tired of him, as usually happens;  and doing it at this point, with spring ball behind them, he was in a position, it seems,  to name his successor.  Not many coaches get to do that.

A few people have commented on his being only 58, but in looking back over the years, a surprising number  of really good coaches got out of the game before they turned 60:

Bobby Dodd (58), Dana X. Bible (55), Bill McCartney (54), Dutch Meyer (54),  Darrell Royal (52), Ara Parseghian (51), Paul Dietzel (51), Frank Broyles (51), Bud Wilkinson (47), Frank Leahy (45) 

Earl Blaik was 61 and Tom Osborne was 60 when they retired.

Bud Wilkinson did come back after several years in retirement to coach the NFL St. Louis Cardinals, but it didn’t work out well.

*********** Thought you’d like this.  It’s from legendary Illinois coach Bob Zuppke’s book, “Coaching Football” (1930)


It looks a lot like today’s Pistol, run from a Double-Wing. 

Note, though, that while the “QB” (that was “Zupp's” fullback) is right in the middle of the formation, he’s NOT back of center.  It’s an unbalanced line to the right ("Toronto"), and the center has to make his snap at an angle.

If there's such a thing as having a good experience when you lose, I guess you could say I had one on Friday night. We opened on the road in Elma, Washington, a logging town about 2-1/2 hours' ride to the north. I must confess to having a great deal of trepidation when I took the job at Washougal, Washington,  then learned that we had to open at Elma, a town with a proud football tradition (state AA champions in 1997, runners-up last year) and a following that any team would be proud to have. It is not the sort of opponent you would normally choose for your first game with a brand-new team. But visiting there, it was clear I was in a town where football was important. I got the sense of playing somewhere in Texas: the facilities were first-rate, and AD Steve Bridge did a great job of accommodating his visitors. The fans started filling the large stadium an hour before game time, and with a half-hour to go until kickoff it was packed, while a long line of people still waited to buy tickets. The fans were loud and rabid but not abusive, and appreciative of the football played by both teams. Their team, the Elma Eagles, was well-coached, as you might expect, and they played the hard-nosed football typical of logging towns. Unlike a lot of teams nowadays, though, they went about their jobs in a workmanlike, sportsmanlike fashion, keeping their mouths shut and playing football. Elma is a class act. We stung them with 14 early points and two early goal-line stands, but, playoff-seasoned, they never lost their poise. They just kept coming at us, finally defeating us 28-14. Their QB, an athletic 6-3, 220-pound junior named Kyle Basler, is a good-looking prospect. We held him somewhat - 175 yards on 22 completions in 32 attempts - but he threw for two scores and he ran for 75 yards. The loss notwithstanding, it was an encouraging opener for our kids. Overall, we played well. The kids competed, and the Lord watched over us and no one got hurt.  

I would point out that those were not "early days."  The NFL had been in operation for 30 years. College football had been played for nearly 90 years.

Our game was not invented in the year 2000.

"The History of American Football," by Allison Danzig is a classic.  Get this - it was published in 1956 - the time of Landry and Lombardi and the Giants.  There’s been a lot of toolbar since then, but it’s a big book, and there’s an awful lot of football in there.  I don’t know that you’d call it a “good read” but I go back to it, over and over.

Also by Allison Danzig, “Oh How They Played the Game,” is a good read, lots of stories from different times in the past.

"Great College Football Coaches of the Twenties and Thirties” by Tim Cohane is great.  Obviously there are great differences between then  and now, but I’m always struck by the resemblances.

TUESDAY,  JUNE 6,  2017  - "The longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, That God governs in the affairs of men."  Benjamin Franklin

FRIDAY,  JUNE 2,  2017  - "It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong."  Dr. Thomas Sowell

I spent a few minutes yesterday talking with our area's newest Chevrolet dealer in his showroom. He's Curt Warner, new owner of Curt Warner Chevrolet in Vancouver, Washington. He's the same Curt Warner who not so long ago played running back for the Seahawks and Rams, and before that, played on Penn State's 1982 National Championship team, finishing in the top ten in that year's Heisman Trophy balloting. I noted that, like my kids, he was a small-town guy (Pineville, West Virginia), and I also noted that he was a three-sport athlete in high school, earning all-state mention two years in a row in football, basketball and baseball. He is opposed to one-sport specialization, feeling that college is time enough to decide which sport to concentrate on. Curt Warner, on his way to a successful career in business, is an excellent example of the "scholar-athlete" the NCAA likes to brag about.

TUESDAY,  MAY 30,  2017  - "If I were to sum up what I've learned in 35 years of service, it's improvise, improvise, improvise." General James Mattis

 
************ It was a beautiful Memorial Day weekend in the Northwest, and you might like the photos I took of the kids planting flags on the graves of veterans, a Memorial Day tradition at the Camas Cemetery..

https://www.facebook.com/hugh.wyatt.7

*********** Jason Whitlock is wise to ESPN…

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/sports/article152829509.html


*********** P.J. Fleck is a good coach and I believe he was a good choice for Minnesota. 

But at some point, there could be an image problem.

First of all, unless they win - and keep winning -  the “Row the Boat” business will soon enough become a cliche.

And, jeez - does this photo make him look just a bit like Pee Wee Herman?

*********** I’m merely supplying the setup - you’ll have to provide your own punchline.

Citing a study that supposedly shows that one in every 137 teens is transgender, Hallmark is “coming out” with a line of cards to “celebrate” transitioning to the “gender” of your choice.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3555256/posts

*********** WTF? The Patriots and the three Republican amigos - Kraft, Belichick and Brady - must have been catching hell for their support of President Trump - so now they’re trying to mend fences, by sponsoring some sickness called the “Gay Bowl.”

http://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/nfl/patriots-to-sponsor-lgbt-‘gay-bowl’/ar-BBBuByQ?OCID=ansmsnnews11

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTfiz3jPwTg

*********** It’s a sport icon.  It’s been the site of Olympics, Super Bowls, and national championship football games. It was the first California home of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

All as “Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.”

Now, though, according to Sports Business Daily, it’s about to get a new name, with United Airlines set to pay more than $70 million for the naming rights to the stadium, now owned by USC.

According to the article,  “Memorial Coliseum” will still be in the new name somewhere. Whew.

Still unconfirmed is a report that under the terms of the agreement United will provide training to  stadium security in how to drag unruly spectators down the Coliseum steps feet-first.

*********** I’m saddened by the deaths of two guys I greatly admired.

First was Jim Bunning,  an all-time great pitcher, a great family man (nine kids) and a good Republican Congressman and Senator from Kentucky.

Second was Frank DeFord. He was far better than just a sports writer - he was a writer who wrote about sports.  A Baltimore guy, he was part of the “Princeton Pipeline” that ran through Gilman School straight to Princeton, and after graduation he landed a job with Sports Illustrated. Whenever I saw his byline on a story, I read it first. 

He wrote a few novels, as well. One,  “Everybody’s All-American, “ was based on the life and times of North Carolina Tar Heel great Charlie “Choo-Choo” Justice, and was later made into a forgettable movie that didn’t even closely resemble the book, other than the fact that it was sort of about football.

His first novel,  “Cut ’n’ Run,” could only have been written by someone who’d lived in Baltimore when the entire city had Colt Fever.  I found it hilarious, because I’d lived in Baltimore during those times, and knew what he was writing about.  Essentially, it’s about a black guy in a menial position in a stock brokerage firm (a menial position was about as high as blacks could get in any big Baltimore firm at that time) who somehow (I don’t remember how, but I think it was through some bookkeeping mistake) manages to become the owner of record of a quantity of Baltimore Colts season tickets, and then (as I remember) because Colts’ tickets were better than currency in Baltimore, uses this as leverage to move up in the organization. 

Frank DeFord had a unique ability to get players to confide inhim.  Observed Bryan Curtis, writing in “The Ringer,”

In a 1999 profile on Bill Russell’s emergence from self-imposed exile, Deford got Celtics great Tommy Heinsohn to say that Russell “won 11 championships in 13 years, and (Boston) named a f— king tunnel after Ted Williams.”

***********  Hey Coach Wyatt,

I wanted to let you know I  have taken over as head coach of another youth football team here. The age level is 11, 12. & 13 year olds and they have not run the DW before.

Anyway, the defensive staff from the team is returning. I've worked with them myself in the past and they are good coaches. While they will run the defense, they will help me with the offense in practice.

The DC  has an issue with the Double Wing blocking because his son is on our team, is going to be playing high school ball and has been taught hand blocking for three years and he doesn't want to teach our way of blocking and confuse his son or have to re-teach the hand blocking. Basically he said if I insist on our DW blocking, he'll go along with the Double Wing blocking but his son "just won't play offense!”

This is really concerning for me to deal with because he's a good athlete and I hate to lose a very good lineman. I talked to the dad about it to hopefully try to get him to understand that understanding and knowing how to block multiple ways has got to be helpful for his son as he moves on, but he disagrees and doesn't want to waste all the time that they spent the last several years teaching it the other way.

So...my dilemma: Do I acquiesce and teach the hand blocking so I can keep his son on the offense, or do I stick to my guns and run my DW and just let his kid stay on defense?

Any guidance you can give, any experience you have had with this type of situation would be appreciated.

Coach,

First of all, good luck with the new job.

My initial inclination would be to tell Dad to take a hike, BUT ---

Assuming your D.C. is a good guy and a good coach and his son is a good kid, I don't think it would be good for you or for the team for the two of you to lock heads.

I think you can deal with this if the D.C. is willing to compromise, being sure to let him know that there is a point where you can't give in without changing your philosophy. And at the same time, it's good for both of them to get experience with shoulder blocking because there are still a few places (Stanford, Wisconsin) where they use shoulder pads.

But it is possible, I think, to draw the line closer in.

If it's head-up (drive) blocking, go ahead and use the hands. Simply punch with both hands. By the time they get their hands into the defender and make contact, it will look almost the same as "picks in the pecs" anyway. The main thing is that either way, they do their blocking with their feet. Once they make contact they have to stay welded to the defender. (Pushing the man away is not blocking.)

If it involves pass blocking or hinge blocking, let them use the hands. (This is not a problem. This is sound.  We do this anyhow.)

And if it involves downfield blocking or blocking out in space,   let them use the hands. They probably already do this anyhow because it's almost impossible to get pads on a man in the open field as it is.

BUT - if it involves a block at the point of attack - a down block, a double team or a kick out - it MUST be a shoulder block. With the correct shoulder. Lots of hand-blocking teams still teach this. The kick out blocker hits with the near flipper, helmet in the hole. This is essential not only to make sure they get proper leverage on the defender but also to stay welded to him. You don't want to simply shove the defender out of the way, because he'll just get back into the play.

With the double team it's shoulder blocking, helmets on opposite sides of the defender's helmet, shoulders together, hips together. We are not trying to turn a defender, but to push him backward into the linebackers.

Besides technique, there is also the issue of where you'll have the least conflict over this, and that might be by playing the son at more of a hands-blocking position.

First of all, most of our kickout blocking is done by our guards, so maybe guard is not for him.

There's a lot less need for shoulder blocking at tackle.

The easiest way out would be to put his son at center, where so much of the blocking is passive and there isn't that much real need for shoulders.

*********** Sorry, Massachusetts.  Get back, Vermont.  Not so fast, Minnesota.   Where do you think you’re going, California. You're losers!, all of you! Make room at the front of the line for Washington.  When it comes to leftist infestation, we got you.

We vaulted to the front last week thanks to a great effort by Evergreen State College. It’s a small liberal arts college of about 4,400 students, most of whom, based on video of their antics, are totally out of control and displaying no evidence whosoever that they're prepared to go out into a civilized society and do anything productive to justify their existence.

It all started when someone suggested a twist on the school’s annual “POC Day of Absence,” in which “People of Color” would traditionally go off campus and do whatever.

This year, someone got the bright idea that the POC’s would remain on campus, while the whites would clear  out.

Bret Weinstein, a professor of biology, objected, and stated that he intended to remain on campus, saying in an email that “you may assume I will be on campus during the Day of Absence. On a college campus, one’s right to speak — or to be — must never be based on skin color.”

And then the sh— hit the fan.

Meeting with the president, the “students,” in some of the most disgusting displays of ugliness and disrespect I’ve seen anywhere, verbally assaulted the poor schlub.

So bad was it that when it was all over, the President, saying he was “grateful to the courageous students who have voiced their concerns,” all but turned the college over to them, promising…

to hire a full-time Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Officer to investigate claims of discrimination;

to expand annual training for campus police to address “anti-black racism, de-escalation, minimizing use of force, serving trans and queer students, sexual assault response and responding to the access of special needs students with disabilities;”

to require “annual mandatory training for all faculty beginning in the fall of 2017” to cover “subjects including but not limited to institutional racism, and the needs of students of color, LGBTQIA students, undocumented students, victims of sexual assault, and students with disabilities;”

to hire full-time coordinators to oversee the Trans & Queer Center;

to support undocumented students.

Oh - but he couldn't promise he'd fire professor Weinstein. He's still got his job, but  he's been advised by campus security that for his own safety, he should meet with his classes off-campus.

WE’RE NUMBER ONE!

https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/32824/

*********** CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING GEORGE PLIMPTON

MARK KACZMAREK - DAVENPORT, IOWA
TOM DAVIS - CAN CARLOS, CALIFORNIA
JOE GUTILLA - AUSTIN, TEXAS
JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
JERRY LOVELL - BELLEVUE, NEBRASKA

*********** It was an exhibition game, and George Plimpton got in for four snaps.  On first down, with Bill Curry snapping the ball, he handed to fullback Don Nottingham, who was stopped for no gain. But the opponents were penalized after one of them took a shot at his head. On the next play, he handed off to Jack Maitland for no gain.  On his third play, he threw incomplete.  On his fourth play, he picked up six yards on a quarterback draw.

And that was that.  George Plimpton never took another snap in the NFL.  He wasn’t a football player - he was a writer famous for what came to be called “participatory journalism” - writing about something after having actually participated in it.

For Plimpton,  participating in football  meant posing as an actual player, going to training camp with the Detroit Lions, and actually playing in an exhibition game.  Plimpton wasn’t exactly the sort of writer you would pick to pose as an aspiring pro football player.  He was tall and sort of gawky.   He was a Harvard graduate with an advanced degree from Cambridge, and he was on the staff of the highly-literary Paris Review.  And, a true Massachusetts blueblood, he spoke with the insufferable lockjaw New England prep-school accent recognizable to anyone who’s spent time, as I have, among the elites.   He would have been as out of place on a pro football team as John Kerry asking if he could “buy me a hunting license.”.

And then he wrote about his experiences, turning out the best-selling “Paper Lion,” which inspired a movie of the same title in which he was played by Alan Alda..

It was 1971, he attended the Baltimore Colts’ training camp at Westminster, Maryland,  and I had driven over from Hagerstown, where I lived, to watch.  At one particular session, they were running the Oklahoma drill, and Plimpton was the runner.  Or should I say victim?

At the snap signal, the offensive lineman simply flopped to the grass, leaving poor Plimpton at the mercy of the defender, one Ray May. May, the third member of a great  Colts’ great linebacker corps  that also included Mike Curtis and Ted Hendricks, showed Plimpton no mercy.  It was ugly. 

That Colts’ experience produced “Mad Ducks and Bears.”  And Plimpton followed that up with any number of other first-hand experiences in other sports.

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-09-26/sports/bs-sp-catching-up-ray-may-20130926_1_baltimore-colts-pittsburgh-steelers-super-bowl-v

*********** QUIZ - Although he was a dentist, and was frequently referred to as "Doctor", as a coach he produced powerful football teams, noted particularly for the hard-nosed brand of single-wing ball they played.

He was born and raised in Scotland and didn’t arrive in the United States until he was 18; he played in the first football game he ever saw.

His college team lost only one game in his freshman year, and then, with a new coach named Glenn “Pop” Warner, went undefeated for the remaining three years of his college career.

After graduation, with a degree in dentistry and service in World War I behind him,  he took a coaching job at a small Pennsylvania college.  Over the next five years, coaching in the fall and practicing dentistry the rest of the year, he compiled a 33-8-2 record. He beat his former coach two years in a row, and was the choice to succeed Warner when he left to take a job on the West Coast.

With the exception of his first year coaching his alma mater, he never lost more than two games in a season, and only four of his teams lost as many as two games. His 1937 team, with its "dream backfield,” is considered to be one of the great college teams of all time. He left after the 1938 season, unwilling to go along with the school’s decision to  de-emphasize football. HIs overall record in 15 years was 111-20-12.

He spent two years coaching an NFL team before enlisting in the Navy (at age 53) at the outbreak of World War II, and after the war he took over as head coach of another NFL team, in his adopted city.   Because he was extremely popular among the local fans, and because his single wing helped make his team a winner, the team’s owner years later would give him credit for keeping the team solvent and allowing him to remain its owner.

His death was particularly tragic.  In 1947 his team made it to the playoffs for the first time in its history, but in April, 1948, while on a scouting trip, he was found wandering and in a daze, his car in a ditch beside a road in Kentucky.  Several of his former players arranged to bring him back home, where he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Surgery was unsuccessful, and he was dead within days.

His team was the last to run the single wing in the NFL.

FRIDAY,  MAY 26,  2017  - "War must become as obsolete as cannibalism."  Andrew Carnegie

TUESDAY,  MAY 23,  2017  - "We get very lucky when we're at good places."  Mike Krzyzewski

*********** Sunday, we had lunch at one of my favorite places in the entire Northwest - the Olympic Club, in Centralia, Washington.  Centralia is just off I-5, about halfway between Portland and Seattle.  When the railroads came and opened up the Northwest, Centralia,  served by four major lines,  became a major rail center, and also prospered as the railroads carried away the coal from its nearby mines and the timber from the surrounding forests.

Located across the street from the town’s historic railroad station,  the Olympic Club is a trip back in time, to the days when a town’s railroad station was its center of activity. The Olympic Club was built in 1908, during a decade in which the town’s population exploded from 1600 in 1900 to 7300 in 1910.  It doesn’t take a genius to see how a boom like that would have provided demand for the “services” such an establishment might offer, and it’s fun to imagine what a typical Saturday night might have looked like.

I first saw it in the 1970s, and it was  mind-blowing. Stupefying.  A step into the past. You walked in off the street and into a bar whose mahogany-and-leaded-glass opulence wouldn’t have been out of place in San Francisco during the Gold Rush days.   But it was totally unexpected  and  out of character in Centralia, a nice enough but  unexceptional working-class town.  And then,  if you walked through the bar, you passed through swinging doors and  into another sort of past: there, in a large, high-ceilinged room, heated by a giant wood stove, in a scene out of the Old West, old guys sat around a  table playing cards.  Behind them was an even larger room, a pool room,  smoky and busy with the quiet, purposeful activity of serious pool shooters.  The Olympic Club really was a throwback.  How long, I wondered, could a place like this survive?

Enter the McMenamin Brothers.  Starting out in the Portland area, they got in on the Northwest’s craft brewing business when it was in its infancy, and chose to grow not as brewers but as restaurateurs, building a string of brewpubs, no two of them alike other than in the products they served.  Paying careful attention to quality of product and service,  they began to combine their growing expertise in the food and beverage industry with what today’s people like to  call “repurposing,” buying unwanted buildings that once may have served as schools, retirement homes or, in one case,  poor farms, and turning them into warm, welcoming places providing food, drink, lodging and music.

In 1997, they acquired the Olympic Club and the hotel that houses it, and then applied their magic touch.  In this case, that meant doing only what was absolutely necessary, which I remember hoping would be very little.  To my delight, other than the fact that they now serve food and drink in the area where the guys once played poker,  the place is almost exactly as it was when I first saw it, only better.

The food, drinks and service are undoubtedly better.  The atmosphere is better. The bar remains the envy of any big city restaurant anywhere. The old wood stove, although no longer used, still stands where it always did, a reminder of earlier days before central heat. (I found out that it’s a “Round Oak Stove,” made in Michigan and once the standard of its industry.) There’s lots of seating inside, and on nice days, you can sit outside on the terrace and watch the trains go by.

Other than the absence of smoke, the pool room hasn’t changed a bit from when I first saw it.  There are at least  five full-sized tables - the old kind, with leather pockets.  One of them is a snooker table (extra large, with tiny pockets). There are two standard-size shuffleboards ($5 an hour.  Big deal.)

Sorry, no arcade games.

Finally, (for men at least), no trip to the Olympic Club is complete without a visit to the men’s room and a look, close-up, at its giant porcelain urinal, a twin arrangement  with a flushing mechanism fed by a two-inch copper pipe.  I’d call it a Washington landmark right up there with the Space Needle.

https://www.mcmenamins.com/olympic-club



THE OLYMPIC CLUB BAR, CENTRALIA, WASHINGTON



LEFT - THE OLYMPIC CLUB'S OLD WOOD STOVE           RIGHT - STEP RIGHT UP, GENTLEMEN

************ In intensity, Oregon-Oregon State may not approach Clemson-South Carolina or Alabama-Auburn as an in-state rivalry, but there’s enough feeling there that when a player transfers from one rival to another, it gets peoples’ attention.

Fifteen months ago, when Oregon running back Thomas Tyner announced that he was retiring for medical reasons - slow-to-heal shoulder injuries - it was accepted with regret, and the Ducks moved on.

Tyner had come out of Aloha, Oregon High as one of the top running back prospects in the country.  A multiple state sprint champion, he had the speed to go with good size - 6 foot, 200 -  and playing against good competition in the state’s highest classification, he once scored 10 (TEN) touchdowns in a single game.

He got off to a decent start in his freshman season at Oregon, gaining 711 yards and scoring 9 touchdowns on 115 carries.  HIs longest run was 66 yards.

In his sophomore year, he started five games, but with only two fewer carries than the year before, he gained just 573 yards and scored only five TDs.

And  he suffered a severe shoulder injury that led to his decision to give up football.  He officially “retired”, and since the reason was an “incapacitating illness or injury,” the Ducks no longer had to count him against their limit of scholarships.

Now, though, after more than a year away from football, he’s had second thoughts about playing. But evidently, because of some NCAA rule he can’t return to Oregon; he can, however go elsewhere , and play immediately, and still have two years of eligibility.

In the case of Thomas Tyner,  who grew up in Portland and remembers being taken to Beavers’ games when he was little,  "elsewhere" meant Oregon State.

He may have to walk on at first, but  if he still has it, after two years away from football, it could be a huge win for both Thomas Tyner and the Beavers.

Ironically, if Tyner does wind up playing for Oregon State, he would become the highest-rated high school prospect ever to play for the Beavers.

http://www.oregonlive.com/sports/oregonian/john_canzano/index.ssf/2017/05/canzano_thomas_tyner_prepares.html

The 10 TD Game: http://247sports.com/Video/Thomas-Tyner-2013-RB-10-TD-game-Aloha-HS-653353?View=Full

*********** A British sniper shot and killed an ISIS sniper - from A MILE AND A HALF AWAY!!

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/05/report_brit_special_forces_sniper_takes_out_isis_sniper_15_miles_away.html


*********** The NFL is said to be considering easing off on its penalties for excessive celebrations.

Other than a bunch of jackass wide receivers and defensive backs, I’m not sure who the beneficiaries of an increase in celebrations might be.

Not other players.

Not people who would rather watch football.

Not Americans who grew up in a time when modesty was the partner of success.

Not the league or its network partners who’re concerned about the increasing length of games.

And certainly not youth coaches, who will be the first ones impacted by the monkey-see, monkey-do phenomenon that prompts little kids all over the country to mimic the antics of their NFL heroes.

https://www.thescore.com/news/1305780

*********** Harvard has announced there’ll be no more overdue book fines at the school’s libraries because, says a university spokesman,  “we have witnessed firsthand the stress that overdue fines can cause for students.” 

They haven’t yet witnessed, apparently, the stress that waiting for those overdue books to be returned can cause for the students who would also like to use them. 

Maybe the simplest thing to do when someone wants to check out a book only to discover it’s out - and overdue - would be to provide them with the name and address of the poor stressed-out student who’s got it so they can take them some milk and cookies.

*********** Unlike most schools, Yale does not have commencement speakers.  I don’t know who made that decision or when or why, but after the sight of spoiled brats at Notre Dame defiling the dignity of their graduation ceremony by walking out on the Vice-President of the United States, it sure turned out to be a good call.

Instead, Yale’s graduating seniors celebrate Class Day on the day before graduation - and that’s when they have a speaker.   No headlines to be made by walking out on the Class Day speaker. Besides, they’re usually people whose speeches you’d be a fool to miss.

This year’s Class Day speaker was Theo Epstein, a Yale graduate (Class of 1995) and president of the Chicago Cubs,  the man given credit for building the Cubs and, before them, the Boston Red Sox.

One choice bit of advice to the about-to-be graduates…

“Some players, and some of us, go through our careers with our heads down, focused on our craft and our tasks, keeping to ourselves, worrying about our numbers or our grades, pursuing the next objective goal.   Other players, and others among us, go through our careers with our heads up, as real parts of a team, alert and aware of others, embracing difference, employing empathy, genuinely connecting, putting collective interests ahead of our own. It is a choice.”

While acknowledging that baseball is a game - a distraction - there are times, he said, “when a game that is built around overcoming failure can teach us all a few important lessons.”

One of those times, he said, came in Game Seven of this last year’s World Series - which ended with the Cubs’ extra-inning victory win over Cleveland.

For much of the game, things were looking good for the Cubbies, but  Cleveland tied things up.   And then it started to rain. And rain. And rain.

During the rain delay Epstein, who had been sitting in the stands, said that when he went down to the clubhouse, he noticed that his players were all sitting together  in a small room. There, one by one, they shared words of encouragement.

“During rain delays,” Epstein said,  “players typically come in off the field and head to their own lockers, sit there by themselves, change their wet jerseys, check their phones, think about what has gone right and wrong during the game, and become engrossed in their own little worlds.  That would have been disastrous for our team during Game Seven — 25 players sitting alone at their lockers, lamenting the bad breaks, assigning blame, wallowing, wondering. Instead, they had the instinct to come together. Actually, it was not an instinct; it was a choice.”

Epstein said that whenever he thinks back on the Cubs’ win, he thinks of that rain delay.

He told the graduates that one day he’ll tell his two sons, “that we all have our rain delay moments. There will be times when everything you have been wanting, everything you have worked for, everything you have earned, everything you feel you deserve is snatched away in what seems like a personal and unfair blow. This, I will tell them, is called life. But when these moments happen, and they will, will you be alone at your locker with your head down, lamenting, divvying up blame; or will you be shoulder to shoulder with your teammates, connected, with your heads up, giving and receiving support?”

*********** Seattle, once a rough, tough town that grew strong because of loggers and fishermen and gold miners headed to Alaska, might very well now be the fruitiest city in the United States.

First, there’s His Honor, the Mayor.  He’s  one of the few male mayors in the United States with a “husband.”  His Honor, who’s been lauded far and wide by the LGBT “community” for the way he’s led “the fight” (for such things as gay marriage), suddenly finds himself with a real fight on his hands, as a series of middle-aged men, one  after another, comes forward with allegations that, back when they were just little fellows, they were introduced to the beauties of man-boy sex by His Honor.

And then there’s the Seattle Police Force, protecting the public from “Community Members.”

I’ll let station KIRO explain…

When Seattle police officers write use of force reports they no longer call a suspect a suspect.

“Community member” is the new term. Several officers say the term is offensive, explaining their work with violent suspects.

Sources point to the suspect who shot three officers last month after a downtown Seattle armed robbery. When officers involved in that incident were writing their use of force reports they were required to refer to the shooter, Damarius Butts, as a “community member,” not a suspect, police sources said.

Police fatally shot Butts after they said he shot the officers.

“I think this is all in an effort to make sure our report writing sounds politically correct,” Seattle Police Officers' Guild Kevin Stuckey told KIRO 7.

We know from the history of ADHD that the school environment matters enormously.  In fact, although the disorder causes other life problems, ADHD was essentially unrecognized before the era of universal schooling.

My own research suggests how critical such factors are. The hunter-gatherer children I studied in the 1970s in Botswana had a lot to learn - how to determine the age of animal tracks, for example, or where to dig for tubers - but they learned on the move, in playful groups. When economically developed cultures started asking children to sit still for seven hours a day, we soon discovered that a minority of them - 10% or more, especially boys - couldn’t do it.

Anthropologists view ADHD as a “mismatch” disorder - due to a discrepancy between the world we evolved in and our world now.  So what is the solution, aside from medication? We could give children a break.  We have long known that frequent recess and play improves attention: such activity is routine in countries such as Finland and Japan.

Yet Olga Jarrett of the Georgia State University College of Education, writing on the website of the US Play Coalition, a play-advocacy group, has shown that the recent trend in the US has been, absurdly, to abolish recess, dismantle playgrounds, and ignore nature.  This is no way to reduce the number of children, now in the millions, on medication for ADHD.

"It was kind of miserable," Baker said of the start of his OSU baseball career. "Every game was getting rained out."

So one dreary day during spring practice, Prothro coaxed Baker into coming to a team meeting.

"I didn't see any harm in attending a meeting," Baker said.

When he arrived, the entire team was there, and Prothro had written the depth chart on the chalkboard. Second-string tailback: Terry Baker.

"That's not bad -- I hadn't even gone out yet, and I'm second-string tailback," Baker said. "Whether it went to my head or whatever, or whether it was baseball being so miserable at that time, I went out for spring practice, and the rest is history."

FRIDAY,  MAY 19,  2017  - “There are no coincidences.  Coincidences are God’s way of remaining anonymous.”  Reverend Andrew Young

Players and Parents,

As you begin to look for cleats for the upcoming season, my expectation is that you will wear team colors as much as possible. When it comes to cleats, all black or all white are always safe choices; and I would be fine with blue as well.

One way to think about your purchase is to ask yourself this question: Do I want these shoes so I'll look cool or stand out? If so, I would encourage you to reconsider your purchase. Remember that the word uniform means the same. I am not in favor of drawing attention to oneself through uniform adornments (arm bands, head bands, flashy cleats, etc.). Instead, each player should strive to honor his uniform through outstanding attitude and effort.

If you have questions about particular cleats, please send me a picture before you purchase them. I will reply with my approval or disapproval asap.

“There are three attributes to a good leader. Competence, confidence and compassion. You have to be competent in whatever you’re doing. You need to have the confidence that says when you make a mistake, admit it, learn from it and move forward. Finally, if you’re not compassionate, if you don’t understand that no one gets anywhere by themselves, if you don’t understand that you’ve got to take care of those that are around you, you’re never going to make it as a leader.”

She admits she has come a long way in her leadership, as in her early years, she was all about command and control.

“I had to do everything. I had to do it to get it right. I was terrible at delegating. So I was written up every year for not delegating. I was exhausted because I was trying to do everything or someone else would do it and I would do it over. I had to stop that. One day the light bulb went off — ‘OK, I’ve got to take a breath. I’ve got to try this.’ And it worked. You have to learn to trust people. You have to learn to let go. Being a single mom broke that habit because there’s just not enough hours in a day for you to raise your child, work, do your family obligations. It’s a sign of strength that you are mature enough to ask for help. Growing up, I often thought that asking for help was a sign of weakness. It’s actually a sign of strength.”

But while she’s better at delegating, she’s still impatient, and when she doesn’t see colleagues carrying their weight, she’ll quickly move.

“I’m quick to fire. You can’t change people, really. You can try and develop people. If they don’t want to learn whatever skill you’re trying to teach them or that the team needs them to have, you can only go so far before that becomes dead weight and the rest of the team becomes resentful.”

“Whatever Adam asks me to do, I’m going to do everything I can to do it better than anyone else and get to the next level. That’s just how I’m wired. It’s born out of this experience where I had to prove myself on a daily basis. But if you demonstrate enough results, people can’t ignore that. You get respect.”

http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2017/05/08/Opinion/From-The-Executive-Editor.aspx

*********** Somehow,  despite heat in Phoenix…  cold and snow in Minneapolis…  rain in Seattle.  They managed to build stadiums and finish on schedule.

But not in Los Angeles, where the Rams and the Clippers - er, Chargers - are due to share the greatest Pleasure Dome since Kublai Khan (just to see if there are any literary types out there) starting in 2019.

Make that “were” due.  Change that opening date to 2020, with the announcement that rain this past winter - rain, for God’s sake! - is going to cause the construction of the new, as-yet-unnamed stadium to be delayed by a year.

That means that the Rams will play three seasons in the Coliseum instead of two, while the Chargers will play three seasons in the StubHub Center, a soccer stadium built to hold 30,000.  (How is the NFL going to spin it when they still have empty seats?)

The news gets even worse for Rams’ fans.   The team was planning to “roll out” a new uniform design to coincide with the stadium opening.  But with the news of the stadium delay, Rams management “remains in talks with Nike and the NFL” over whether to go ahead with the redesign as scheduled, or postpone it, too.

I say go ahead.  I’m not sure that fans can stand the excitement of a new stadium AND a new uniform at the same time.

http://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/19410632/the-new-stadium-chargers-rams-los-angeles-delayed-1-year-2020

*********** Maybe the next time Donald Trump talks with Putin I can get him to ask if I can have the dealership for the Pacific Northwest…

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/pn_5dMHsCPE?autoplay=1&hd=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&start=14&end=178

*********** You guys who lobbied hard for the College Football Playoff - you should be happy.  You won.

As a result, we’ve had a couple of years of that “True National Champion” business you said we needed.

Now, happy or not, I think you’ll join the rest of us - those of us derided as “purists” because we sort of enjoyed football the way it had gone on for, oh, 100 years or so - with the season ending with an assortment of bowl games as a reward for good play, with players having fun and half the teams ending their seasons with wins.  And then, afterward, a couple of polls presuming to tell us who some sportswriters - or coaches - thought was the best team, and a winterful of arguments to the contrary.

I think you’ll join us because not even you guys who were delighted to learn we would finally have a playoff can be happy with the news that this year, “a musical guest” (one can only imagine what that means) “will perform at halftime” of the Big Game.

No more college bands.  They’re so Twentieth Century.

We’re talking extravaganza, guys.  Bigass halftime shows.  Super Bowl-style.

Funny how at the very same time that college football has addressed the problem of over-long games by putting an absolute limit on the length of halftimes, the “ultimate game” of college football will be played by teams that will have to stop play and sit idle for 30 or 40 minutes so that a “musical guest” can “perform.”  All to juice up viewership by luring the eyeballs of people who don’t know sh— from shinola about college football into glancing at the set  because their favorite band will be playing at halftime.

***********  Maybe you saw the news: 17 NBA teams plan to enter “franchises” in the “NBA 2k eLeague.”  (Evidently, in keeping with Apple and its iPads and iPhones - and with the first names of certain professional athletes -  the title is intentionally case-dismissive and there is some arcane reason for the small “e” and capital “L.”)

Each team will “start” five “players” - actually, professional eSports gamers - who will wear their “team’s” colors and play as avatars in video games,  competing for considerable sums in prize money.

Okay so far?  How about this - the competition will be broadcast live, in front of “live crowds.” (There are dead ones?)

Well, they got them to watch poker.  To watch BBQ cookoffs.   Maybe they can get them to watch this.

After all, I remember the days, long ago, when it was accepted wisdom that “the public” would never watch five black basketball players playing five other black basketball players. Wrong.

Now, my inclination is to predict that “the public” will NOT watch five nerdy white guys playing video games against five other nerdy white guys.

Bear in mind, though, that I’m a guy who’s spent more than half of his adult life in the long-ago, never imagining that I’d live to see the day that “the public” would unblinkingly accept the notion of one man calling another man his “husband.”

(Colleges are “fielding” eSports teams, too.  Or should that be “Arcading?” They don’t seem able to decide whether to bring them under the auspices of their athletic department or their computer science department.  And just wait until Title IX requires them to “arcade” womyn’s teams.)


*********** I don’t want to get too deeply into trying to simplify what could be a complex legal matter, and I sure don’t want to get any lawyers pissed at me, but…

It does appear that some lawyers who have represented former NFL players in their suits against the League could be collecting double fees,  at the expense of the players whom they represent.

As I understand it, here’s how it happened:

As part of the NFL’s settlement, a fund of $112.5 million was set aside to pay players’ legal fees.  Fair enough.  The players get to keep their share of the rest of the settlement.

But prior to the settlement, thousands of players had already entered into contracts with lawyers calling for contingency fees (legal fees to be paid contingent on their winning the case) of as much as 45 per cent of any proceeds.

So if those contracts hold up - in fairness, some law firms have lowered their fees and some have dropped them altogether - it means that some lawyers will be paid not only from the NFL’s fund, but also from the money the players receive.

Stay tuned.

http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2017/05/08/Law-and-Politics/NFL-player-liens.aspx


*********** A great management (and head coaching) tip from Bob Moran, of Charleston, South Carolina, Tournament Director of the WTA Volvo Car Open…

“”’Thought’ and ‘Know’ are two different things.   If there’s an issue or a problem, or something doesn’t get done, it almost always includes the word ‘thought.’ I thought so-and-so was doing it.  I thought this was being taken care of.  I thought.

“ So if we’re in a staff meeting and someone uses that word, we discuss it. We want it to be ‘I KNOW that's completed.’ or “I KNOW so-and-so' ds taken care of that.’”

*********** A recent poll showed that a HUGE number of working-class Americans say that they often feel like strangers in their own country.

Tell me about it. Practically every weekday afternoon, and all day on the weekends, our street is parked solid with the cars of people who deliver their little boys and girls to the nearby athletic fields, then set up their lawn chairs and sit back to watch the little five-year-olds kick a round ball.



In our town, soccer long ago passed baseball by.   Now, even softball, once seen by so many dads as a free ticket to college for their little girls, is suffering, too.

This whole thing’s been driven, I submit, by the increasing feminization of our society, and abetted by the concussion hysteria aimed at killing off football. And as I walk my dog past the fields and listen as the pretty people cheer on their little darlings, I shake my head at the realization that I could just as easily be walking the streets of another country.

I’m reading Richard Ben Cramer’s biography of Joe DiMaggio, and in it the author wrote about baseball’s solid hold on the America of the early 1930s, when DiMaggio was growing up : “In most towns, you couldn’t fill a phone booth with the boys who didn’t play ball.”

Nowadays, in a lot of towns, you could fit all the baseball players in a phone booth.  If you could find a phone booth.

*********** CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING DON MCCAFFERTY:

GREG KOENIG - CIMARRON, KANSAS
DENNIS METZGER - RICHMOND, INDIANA
JERRY LOVELL - BELLEVUE, NEBRASKA
ADAM WESOLOSKI - PULASKI, WISCONSIN
JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
TOM DAVIS - SAN CARLOS, CALIFORNIA
KEVIN MCCULLOUGH - LAKEVILLE, INDIANA
JOE GUTILLA - SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
MARK KACZMAREK - DAVENPORT, IOWA
JOSH MONTGOMERY - BERWICK, LOUISIANA

*********** A Cleveland native, Don McCafferty played at Ohio State under Paul Brown before entering the service in World War II.

After the War, he played one year in the NFL and then embarked on a coaching career.

He spent 11 years as an assistant at a Kent State before making the jump to the NFL.

McCafferty was an assistant with the Baltimore Colts for 11 years,  first under Weeb Ewbank then under Don Shula. Known by the players as the “Easy Rider” because of the way his personality contrasted with that of the hot-tempered Shula,  he was Shula’s offensive coordinator for seven years. Two of the other members of Shula’s staffs during that time were Chuck Noll and Bill Arnsparger.

Don McCafferty succeeded Shula as head coach and had immediate success, winning the Super Bowl in his first season. Going into his third season as an NFL head coach, he was 21-6-1, with a Super Bowl win to his credit.  But then a new owner, Robert Irsay, and a new GM, Joe Thomas, came on the scene,  and  when his team got off to a 1-4 start and he was ordered by Thomas to bench his QB, John Unitas, he refused and was fired.

He was hired the next season by the Detroit Lions, and took them to a 6-7-1 season, good enough for second place in the NFL Central.

And then, the following summer, while mowing his lawn, he suffered a heart attack and died.  He was just 53.


*********** John Unitas liked Don McCafferty.  They had a nice working relationship because McCafferty let him do what he did best - quarterback the team.

Tom Callahan, in his book, “Johnny U,” tells of how McCafferty, on arrival from Kent State as an assistant to Weeb Ewbank, asked, “John, do you want any help on Sunday?”

Unitas replied, “Mac, if you’re positive they’re going blitz, let me know.  Otherwise, sit back, relax, and enjoy the game.”

And then, Ewbank was fired and replaced with Shula.

Call it a power struggle or whatever, but Shula tried to control his quarterback.  Already acknowledged as one of the greats of the game and used to calling his plays, Unitas didn’t take well to the dictates of a guy barely three years older than he was who’d never been a head coach.

McCafferty apparently served as a buffer between the hard-headed coach and the equally hard-headed quarterback, but things between Unitas and Shula never got better.

But Unitas remained the ultimate team man and as long as he played for Shula, he concealed his dislike of the coach from his teammates.

Defensive lineman Fred Miller emphasized that in an interview for Callahan’s book. “I’ll tell you just exactly what John told me,” he said. “This was years later now, when Shula had that opening of his restaurant in that downtown hotel.   I went to it.  Most of the guys who were still in the area showed up. About a week later I saw John somewhere and I asked him, ‘How come you didn’t go to Shula’s grand opening?’  He looked at me and said, ‘If that son of a bitch was across the street and his guts were on fire, I wouldn’t walk over and piss in his mouth.’ That’s the first time I ever knew how John felt about Shula.”

*********** Coaching changes run in an eternal cycle:   the hardass disciplinarian’s act wears thin, and he’s replaced by the good guy, called by one and all a “player’s coach.”  And then the player’s coach loses control of the team, and he’s replaced by a guy who’ll “bring some discipline” to the club.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

In “Sundays at 2:00 With the Baltimore Colts,” by Vince Bagli, Colts’ linebacker Stan White, who played college ball at Ohio State and in 1970 was the Colts’ 17th - and last - draft pick, remembered his first year with the Colts.  It was Don McCafferty’s third (and last) year:

Don McCafferty was the coach, and he was the reason I was drafted at all. He had gone to Ohio State, and had coached at Kent State, and I was from Kent. The general manager who signed me was “The Duke,” Don Klosterman.   But by the time we got to training camp, Bob Irsay had bought the team, and Joe Thomas was in charge.

The team had trained in Westminster (Maryland) before then; now, they were training in Tampa for the first time.  Carroll Rosenbloom (the former owner HW) made that deal.  He was trying to move the team down there before he sold it.  It was a mistake.  Tampa was a party atmosphere, and the players treated training like it was a lark. They thought they could win anyhow.

McCafferty believed in letting them be adults. That’s the way he treated players, and they took advantage of it.  He was an easy rider, easy to play for. He had replaced Shula in 1970. For the first year or two, the guys were just happy to be away from a disciplinarian, but then they started to take more and more advantage.  They would tell him they weren’t going to be in by curfew, and he could take the hundred dollar fines out of their checks.  Joe Thomas saw all those guys going out ‘cotton spottin’ all night long.

From Tampa, we went out to Golden, Colorado for a few weeks, right next to the Coors brewery.  When the season started, the team just wasn’t ready to play, and it cost all those guys their jobs.

TUESDAY,  MAY 16,  2017  - "All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it."  H. L. Mencken

Dodd wanted - no, needed - younger and more knowledgeable assistants, coaches who could produce better football players, as well as improve Tech’s recruiting. Ray Ellis and Dwight Keith were older, contemporaries of Dodd.  They were also his good friends.

Furthermore, Alice Dodd’s best friend was Dwight Keith’s wife, Randa, and they were quite close to Martha Ellis. All three couples enjoyed each other’s company, especially on Saturday nights after games, when they all met at the Dodds’ for a steak dinner.

“We were all close back in those days,” Dodd said.  “When you only have a small coaching staff like we had, you become close.

“And when you get together on a Saturday night after getting beat on Saturday afternoon, you don’t want to be around anybody but your coaching staff and their wives.”

So the decision was excruciating, but necessary.  And Dodd knew he had to make changes to regain a competitive edge.

*********** A friend wrote…

I was listening to some chatter about WSU on Fox radio and the guy had done an interview with Mike Leach. So after the interview the lead
guy was talking about how scenic it is at WSU, the stadium being on a beautiful lake and all. Yep. I recall that water but I what I saw wasn’t Wazzu.
Is there water at WSU stadium?

Um, no...  He's undoubtedly thinking of Husky Stadium and confusing the Cougs with the Huskies.

WSU is located in the Palouse area of Southeast Washington. The Palouse is a beautiful area, but it doesn’t have any significant bodies of water one could call "lakes."

The Palouse has few trees, and with its random dimples and humps, it looks like a links course for a giant.   It was originally grassland, but the soil is unbelievably rich and deep and so it's a very productive wheat-growing region.

The Palouse was the home of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce.   The Appaloosa horse - the "Nez Perce horse" - got its name from the area.

COUGAR COUNTRY - THE PALOUSE                                                      HUSKY STADIUM AND LAKE WASHINGTON




*********** Without any conclusive studies whatsoever to back up the extravagant  claims that “Hawk Tackling”  is a safer and more effective method of tackling, I have my suspicions  that it’s about to be forced on us.  I think the only thing that’s prevented that from happening already is that tackling low, as it advocates,  does seem to be at cross purposes with USA Football’s “Heads Up Tackling,” which we ARE forced to learn about.

One of my objections to the “technique” is that it runs counter to one very important defensive principle: Stay off the ground!

With Hawk tackling, one shot is all you get - miss, and you’re on the ground.   Dead wood.  Out of the play.

As for safety - any way you look at it, the head is low, and since it’s impossible to be precise with your aim,   a miss  in one direction almost certainly means a missed arm tackle; but a miss  in the other could mean a broken neck.

It does seem to me that Hawk tackling is ideal if you’re coaching NFL defensive backs. A lot of those guys see themselves as coverage specialists and don’t like to tackle anyhow (can you say "Deion?") ;  concerned about  the  risk of injury and the potential end to their  multimillion-dollar careers, it’s a great way for them to at least look like they’re trying to tackle.

And get this, from the Chicago Tribune:

Hawk tackling has raised safety concerns too. Rugby is dealing with its own head injury crisis — the concussion rate in England's top professional league has more than doubled over the last two seasons — and Dave Gan, an assistant football coach for O'Fallon Township High School near St. Louis, said inexperienced players who employ the technique are in danger of sustaining a catastrophic spinal injury.

"I just worry that striking with the shoulder, you'll end up in a bad position with your neck," said Gan, who prefers the Heads Up approach. 

FRIDAY,  MAY 12,  2017  - “If you get the objectives right,  a lieutenant can write the strategy.”  General George C. Marshall

*********** One of the things I emphasized at my recent Kansas City clinic was if it’s going to help you get better,  that you have to be willing to make some change, and I listed just a dozen ways I’d changed since I started running the Double Wing back in the early 90s.

1. I SQUARED UP MY WINGBACKS  - Got the idea from Mike Emery, at Fitch HS in Groton, Connecticut.  I don’t see how you can run a good “reach” play or keep your wingbacks from being held up at the line when you’ve got them turned in at 45 degrees.

2. I ELIMINATED MOTION ON SUPER POWER - Did this years ago in response to guys who were anticipating Super Power the instant I sent a man in motion.  Why help them out? 

3. I TEACH MY RUNNING BACK ON SUPER POWER TO PUSH ON THE BACK OF THE TACKLE -  I got this from John Irion, now coaching at Granville, NY HS.  It keeps my back from getting too much depth - a definite no-no - it keeps him close to his primary interferer, and it pretty much eliminates bouncing outside

4. I TEACH MY PULLING LINEMEN TO “RUN THE CIRCLE.” - This one came to me while I was watching spring practice at Duke and I saw defensive linemen running around a hoop made with PVC pipe.  Why not offensive linemen? At all costs you have to keep your backside linemen  from turning their shoulders on Super Powers:  if you’re running Double Wing and your pulling linemen are getting in the way of your running backs, that’s probably why.  Best way to cure it is to start running the circle drill. And making it an everyday drill. 

5. I TEACH MY QUARTERBACK THE HOCKEY STICK - His path on just about every play we run  is approximately the shape of a hockey stick; this means I no longer have him lead through the hole on Super Powers.

6. I HAVE THE B-BACK SLIDE SIDEWAYS ON 6-G - Until he gets the ball, that is. Originally, I had him run directly at the point of attack the instant the ball was snapped.   Got this idea from watching a kid in Abington, Pennsylvania having success running the play this way.

7. I SNAP THE BALL ON “GO” - Every stinking time. This was something we (Greg Koenig, Brad Knight and I ) pretty  much came to agreement on at a camp in Beloit, Kansas a few years ago.  It’s worked fine for all of us.  One less thing to have to teach, one less  thing for the kids to have to remember.   And we NEVER jump.

8. I COUNT THE STEPS ON PASS ROUTES - I comes as close as we can come to uniformity of timing among receivers. I guarantee you it;s easier for a receiver to avoid defenders when he’s counting steps then when he’s trying to estimate distance visually.

9. SUPER CRISS-CROSS IS NOW MY STAPLE COUNTER - (“SUPER”) is my code for the QB to toss the ball.  Super XX looks exactly like Super Power and the ball handling is much easier to teach and much safer than a handoff exchange.

10. I NO LONGER TEACH THE SHOESHINE - For some time, we’ve had backside tackles cut off and turn back.  Why not tight ends? It works fine. What the hell - it’s going to be outlawed one of these days, anyhow.

11. ON SUPER POWER, I LET THE PULLING TACKLE FIND A HOLE - Sometimes, it’s not as wide as the intended  “point of attack.”  So what?  Nothing wrong with our running back following our tackle up through a better, closer hole.

12. WE NOW PULL THE BACKSIDE GUARD ON 6-G - (which then makes it 6-G-O) -  Just as with our pulling tackle on Super Power, he slides sideways until finds a hole - and he heads upfield immediately.

And then it hit me - this is just 12 of the many things I’ve been doing differently, and unless people have been attending my clinics faithfully, they haven’t had a way to keep up.

This is where  my “EVOLUTION OF AN OFFENSE” video comes in.

It covers an awful lot of ground - including most of the drills, techniques, plays and formations that I’ve added or changed since my first video in 1995.

I’ve been selling the “EVOLUTION OF AN OFFENSE” DVD for $49.95 and it’s been a good enough seller - but not nearly enough Double Wing coaches have seen it, nor have they been to any of my clinics or camps, which means that in many cases they’re running a 20-year-old Double Wing. Still plenty good, you understand - but not as good as it can be or ought to be.

So, for a limited time, I’m offering a SPRING SPECIAL - just in time for your pre-season planning -

“EVOLUTION OF AN OFFENSE” at HALF PRICE!  $24.95

I’d rather see this video get into the hands of twice the number of coaches at half the price.

And if you’re new to the Double Wing and you purchase my basic package - I’ll include EVOLUTION OF AN OFFENSE at no charge.

http://www.coachwyatt.com/EVOLUTIONDVD.html


*********** For much of this past Monday and Tuesday, I stood on a narrow bridge, with traffic whizzing by, and watched the replacement of an old railroad bridge with a new one.  When the railroad that uses it happens to be the main line connecting Spokane and points east with Portland/Vancouver and the West Coast, you can’t take your sweet time.

Just as the railroad said it would, it took 32 hours to replace a steel truss bridge that had served since 1908 - when the population of our town  was 1,100 (it’s now more than 20,000) - with a new one.  That’s how long service on the main line - up to 50 trains a day - was interrupted.

When I first read about the project, several years ago, I tried to imagine how they could pull it off without tieing up traffic for months - which wasn’t an option.  The route in question runs alongside the Columbia River for a couple hundred miles to Pasco, Washington, where it hooks up with another BNSF line farther to the north between the Seattle area and Pasco.  In the event of a long shutdown caused by the bridge project, all eastbound BNSF traffic would have to be re-routed over that northern route - which goes over, around and through the Cascade Range, with curves and grades and tunnels that all limit the speed, the length, the weight and the height of cargo that can be carried.

The solution was to do 90 per cent of the preliminary work right there, on site, without interfering with rail service, leaving only the actual replacement to be done while holding up traffic.

First, they built two “temporary” bridges paralleling the current bridge, one on each side.   The term “temporary” does not in any way imply that these bridges were not stout:  they were strong enough to hold enormous cranes and other equipment, as well as, eventually, the old bridge and its replacement.

On one of the temporary bridges (the civil engineers probably have a term for them) the new bridge truss, built and constructed someplace I know not where, was assembled, bolted together. (No more rivets, as in the older truss.)

Meanwhile, the other temporary bridge was made ready for the placement on it of the old railroad bridge.

Once the new bridge was ready to go, the old bridge, rails and all, was disconnected and jacked up off its supports.  And then came the near-miraculous part.

Thick steel rods connected to the old bridge ran through hydraulic jacks, rather small things that looked like old Electrolux vacuum cleaners. They didn’t make a lot of noise, but they were powerful enough to drag that sucker, that old bridge, along greased tracks atop I-beams until it was completely over the temporary bridge, and placed on heavy iron stands.  There, it will await dismantling.

What was amazing was that you couldn’t tell movement by looking at the bridge, but by golly, it was moving. You could by looking at the jack’s piston.  It would push maybe six inches in a couple of minutes, and then they’d reset it, move the plate that it was pushing on, and repeat.

Finally, with the old span out of the way, it was the new bridge’s turn.

In similar fashion, the new bridge was also slid into place, then bolted onto a new, stronger support. Once that was done, the railroad guys took over and connected the rails.  That was actually quite an operation, too.  One large section was a 40-foot reinforced concrete span, positioned precisely by the operator of a giant crane, then bolted in place with splicing plates.  Then there was the matter of making sure things fit on the other end - that called for a circular saw that cut though the rail in a matter of minutes (allowing for having to replace blades).

All that remained then was to pour and tamp down the ballast, running the locomotive and the hopper cars that carried the ballast back and forth until everything was just so, and the new bridge was ready to go. 

And then, the job finished, everyone left, and the trains began to run again.  No ribbon cutting, no nothing.

Just another day at the office.


THE OLD BRIDGE (THAT WOULD BE THE RUSTY ONE IN THE FOREGROUND, IF YOU HADN'T SUSPECTED) HAS BEEN DISCONNECTED AND SITS ON ITS PIERS,  READY TO BE PULLED SIDEWAYS ONTO THE TEMPORARY BRIDGE THAT THE GUY NEAREST US IS STANDING ON. THE I-BEAM BEHIND THE GUY IS ONE OF THE "TRACKS" THAT THE BRIDGE WILL SLIDE ALONG. THE NEW BRIDGE SITS ON ITS TEMPORARY BRIDGE, READY TO MOVE INTO PLACE


THE OLD BRIDGE HAS BEGUN TO MOVE, PULLED  ALONG ITS "TRACKS" (GREASED I-BEAMS)  BY  RODS CONNECTED TO  HYDRAULIC JACKS (THE ORANGE CYLINDRICAL DEAL IN THE RIGHT FOREGROUND)


THE OLD BRIDGE RESTS ON THE TEMPORARY BRIDGE AWAITING DISMANTLING; THE NEW BRIDGE IS NOW IN PLACE AND CONNECTED TO A 40-FOOT LONG CONCRETE SECTION THAT COMPLETES THE SPAN. 

*********** I was talking with a few of the guys watching the replacement of the BNSF railroad bridge over the Washougal River, and one of them mentioned that it would be a great thing for a high school class to witness.

Amen, I said. Instead of trying to con them into thinking that everyone needed to go to college, even if it meant going into debt to get a worthless degree, schools could show them the beauty and action and worth of the construction trades.

And at the same time, we could point out to them the many things required by the job.  A basic knowledge of math, of course. But every bit as important, an ability to take directions and carry them out unquestioningly; an ability to work well with others; an ability to be on time -  and to be there on time every day.

I thought of so many resemblances to football:    The job was a classic example of long, careful preparation, well before the big event (off-season work) … of the importance of timing - making sure that things were done in the correct sequence… of guys seemingly standing around, doing nothing (on the sidelines) , but then, ready on a minute’s notice,  jumping into action when it was their time… of real, football-type teamwork, with all manner of people charged with doing a lot of different jobs, responsible for doing those jobs well, and depending on others to do their jobs well… If there was any complaining about the job they had to do, I sure didn’t see it… And with the possible exception of the operator of a bigass crane (it had six counterweights, weighing 15 tons apiece and rented, I was told, for $2000 an hour), there were no stars.  Just a bunch of guys who knew their jobs and took pride in doing them well…  Guys to whom the respect of their coworkers mattered a lot.

Maybe American workmanship is dead in some places, but it’s sure alive with these guys.

On second thought, better hold off on that classroom field trip. I can just imagine the irate calls to the principal if the school  had permitted a class to observe an activity which was oh, 99.875 per cent male.


*********** Part of the National Football Foundation’s series “I am a Football Mom”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4SBCWPD_Gs


*********** Q. I see on the playcard for 66 SP the  playside linemen's rule is G-O-AL. Gap-On-? What does AL stand for? Attack Linebacker?

It means “Angle - Late.”  It’s a way to let him know that if there’s nobody in his inside gap, and nobody on him (or if he’s in doubt about whether a man is on him), he comes off at an angle - but not right away. He doesn’t fire out immediately and leave a gap in our front.  First he takes a jab step in place, and then comes off at an angle.   This is important -  he doesn’t fire straight out at a linebacker directly over him. He comes inside at a 45 degree angle, blocking anything in his path.

I remember in one of your films that you mention that a kid that does NOTHING hurts the team less than one who fires out into space.  At least he doesn't create a gap for a linebacker to run through.  We always preach "no cracks in the wall" to help drive this home.  That set of stones has to stay together.


Todd Hollis
Elmwood, Illinois

*********** Does Exxon Mobil have ANY other commercials than the one that plays - over and over - that grating rendition of "The Farmer in the Dell?"


*********** There are lots of reasons why I like Jason Witlock.

Here's another one...

https://twitter.com/whitlockjason/status/862794382000312320


***********  You have GOT to see this - an AVLB (Armoured Vehicle-Launched Bridge)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWMrY49qqDw

*********** My connection with Tom Nugent was a very loose one: years after Phil Petry started for him at quarterback as a sophomore against Oklahoma, and then beat Navy - quarterbacked by Roger Staubach, who'd won the Heisman the year before  - he played for me.  At tight end.

I wrote this back in the fall of 2006...

The other day I heard from a former player I hadn't heard from in over 30 years. I have written about him, though, because he was one heck of a player, and he had quite an influence on my career. His name is Phil Petry, and he came to me as a guy who had been a legendary high school player in our town - Hagerstown, Maryland - and had gone to the University of Maryland, where he started some games at quarterback in his sophomore and junior years before his life got off track for one reason or another. And then  there he was, a few years later, back in Hagerstown with his act together, the local hero ready to play for my team, the Hagerstown Bears. An awful lot of people in town expected him to play quarterback.  To be honest, he really was good, and I was getting a little pressure from the team's owner, because unquestionably, Phil at quarterback would be a big attraction. (And in the minor leagues of any sport, that’s always a consideration.) The problem was, I already had a quarterback.  A pretty good one.  Fortunately, as I wrote earlier, Phil volunteered to move to tight end. In his letter, though, Phil gently corrected me...

Hugh, I found the article (on your site) written about the Hagerstown Bears that my friend told me about and I found out things about myself I didn't know. I do remember that I didn't volunteer to play tight end. You asked me if I was a football player or just a quarterback. We went from there, and what could have been a power struggle turned into a mutual respect based on our love and knowledge of the game. I will spend some time reading your web site and educating myself.
 

(Phil wrote) I thought the writing was very correct in every way. I was flattered by the things you said and I didn't know about the records against Chambersburg. And you are right I wanted to play football that year and I was intrigued about playing another position. You had me working out at halfback and I am truly glad you came up with the tight end. I made all league that year at TE. And led the league most of the year in catches. I had to train Chuck to read the backers the same as I did. He learned quickly and it was like shooting fish in a barrel. I remember we had a scrimmage in Chambersburg I think. And at the half Chuck had not thrown a pass to me and I asked him how many eligible receivers we had and he said 5 and I then asked him to name them. When he said TE I said really??? he got the message and started to use me. And the rest is history.

Somewhere, King Corcoran is smiling - if not laughing hysterically. To his dying day, which came last month the age of 65, the much-mythologized Maryland quarterback had folks believing he led the Terps to a 27-22 victory over Navy and the great Roger Staubach in 1964.

Actually, the QB that day was Phil Petry, pride of Hagerstown, who accounted for all three of the offense's touchdowns by throwing for two and running for another. (The last six points came on a game-winning 101-yard kickoff return by Kenny Ambrusko.) As for King, there's no indication in any of the newspaper accounts that he even stepped on the field.

So how did one of the highlights of Petry's career turn into one of the highlights of Corcoran's - to the extent of being mentioned in King's obituaries (as well as on his Wikipedia page)?

"Well," Petry says, "knowing him, he probably waited 20 years and then started telling people he beat Roger Staubach. As time passed, people would forget the details of the game - or maybe they wouldn't be old enough to remember them... and - so he made himself the star, as he usually did in his stories. He had very high self-esteem, all these visions of grandeur."

It was a good game for Corcoran to make himself the star of. Staubach had won the Heisman Trophy the year before, when the Mids went to the Cotton Bowl and were ranked as high as second in the nation. What quarterback wouldn't want be able to say that, on a given Saturday, he outplayed the future Dallas Cowboys legend?

But just as it's forgotten that Petry, and not Corcoran, was Maryland's quarterback that afternoon, it's forgotten that Staubach hit 25 of 39 passes for 231 yards and two TDs against the Terps, breaking the school record for completions in a game - by six. (Petry, on the other hand, was a modest 6-for-9 for 81 yards.) Translation: Maryland might have gotten the "W," but nobody outperformed Roger.
"Corcoran Conquers Staubach" is typical of the tall tales spun by King - whose friends, it seems, were nice enough not to ask too many questions. He was, after all, such an engaging guy - and sure could tell a yarn.

Another of his fables involved his brief stint with the Philadelphia Eagles in the summer of 1971. According to his version, he was competing for a roster spot with King Hill - imagine two Kings in the same training camp - and one day Hill, the veteran, told Corcoran, the rookie, to pick up some balls on the practice field. Corcoran, nobody's slave, refused, then declared his intention to take Hill's job. A few days later, the Eagles cut the free-spirited rook (who went off to play for the Norfolk Neptunes).

It's a great story, you have to admit - especially the this-town-ain't-big-enough-for-two-Kings part. There's only one problem: Hill's last season in Philly was 1968. So whoever told Corcoran to pick up the balls - if, indeed, anybody did - it wasn't King Hill.

Corcoran was your basic Legend in His Own Mind. He was a hero in the bombs-away minor leagues - and even threw 31 touchdown passes one year to lead the World Football League (the XFL of the '70s) - but his sip of coffee with the Boston Patriots in 1968 produced nearly as many interceptions (two) as completions (three).

(Former Dolphins quarterback Don Strock, a Pottstown, Pa., native who saw King play for the local Firebirds, once summed him up thusly: "I learned by watching King Corcoran that you can't learn anything by watching King Corcoran.")

Phil Petry, by the way, went on to play some semipro ball himself for the Hagerstown Bears. He isn't bothered in the least, he claims, that Corcoran retroactively inserted himself into the 1964 Maryland-Navy game.

"It doesn't change my life one way or the other," he says. "But I'm grinnin' from ear to ear that all this is coming out now. Besides, my friends here still introduce me as the guy who beat Staubach when he was a senior.' "

TUESDAY,  MAY 9,  2017  - “No war is over until the enemy says it's over. We may think it over, we may declare it over, but in fact, the enemy gets a vote.” Secretary of Defense James Mattis

ESPN last week laid off around 100 reporters and on-air personalities, and BTIG media analyst Rich Greenfield said the net's main challenge is that "subscribers are falling, eyeballs watching are falling, and they have way, way overspent on sports rights." He said, "They are scrambling to reduce costs. There is no other way to read it."

Conservative talk show host Steve Deace concurred, saying, "This is the evolution of how media has evolved." However, he added politics "certainly has played a role in how deep the cuts had to be."

Deace: "It has hastened their demise. When your business model is collapsing, the last thing you do is narrow your potential base."

BUZZFEED's Steven Perlberg wondered how ESPN became "such a flashpoint conservative meme."

Deace and Republican strategist Matt Mackowiak claim that they "trace the beginning conservatives’ criticism" of the net to its coverage of Michael Sam, who publicly came out as gay prior to the '14 NFL Draft. Deace said, "They drove this into the ground" (BUZZFEED.com, 5/2).

YOUGOV's Paul Hiebert cited data from the market research company that a quarter of all current ESPN customers are "considering cancelling their cable subscription at some point in the future." However, there also is "some truth to the idea that conservatives have grown cold" to the net. YouGov's numbers "show that ESPN impression scores among Republicans have dropped" by half in the last four years. Democrats have "kept a relatively stable view of the network during the same period."

This comes as Caitlyn Jenner in '15 was given the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage at the ESPY's, while ESPN fired MLB analyst Curt Schilling in part for "posting controversial content" on social media. In both cases, Republican sentiment toward ESPN "declined" (YOUGOV.com, 5/3).

In Chicago, Mike North writes the net hiring Ray Lewis in '13 was the "beginning of ESPN's negative ratings." The company will continue to lose subscribers "unless they start to give the flyover states some representation" (Chicago DAILY HERALD, 5/5).

http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Daily/Issues/2017/05/05/Media/ESPN.aspx


***********  I have a good understanding of how you block your reach play after watching the 2011 camp DVD and comparing it to the wristband play cards. Can you explain to me why you prefer to hand off instead of pitch the ball?

Do you consider that play in the superpower family or is it a stand alone play that has complement plays with it?

Obviously you can boot off of it. 47C could be married to it. Possibly 6 G-O. Would you consider 3 trap at 2 not in a series with 88 reach because of the severe change in the B  Back's path?

Coach,

I have from time to time let the runner go into slightly more motion (“Ripper”) and tossed the ball and it’s been okay, but I keep coming back to using the handoff.

The three main reasons for the handoff on the reach sweep-

1. Done with sudden, quick motion, it means that even after the ball is actually handed off, it can still look to the defense like any one of several plays.

2. It sets up the bootleg

3. It enables the “follow” - the QB sweep.  This is what the QB is instructed to do anyhow if he misses the handoff.

Reach isn’t a stand-alone play. I actually consider RIP 88 Reach to be the Godfather of the “RIP” family - Counter, G, Trap, Bootleg.  I want defenses to be conscious of the Reach play whenever they see motion.

The Trap, I should point out,  fits right into the family because when the ball’s snapped and the QB pivots as if to hand off on the reach sweep the defense momentarily loses sight of the B-Back.

*********** QUIZ:  A native of Lawrence, Massachusetts, Tom Nugent started out as a high school coach in Virginia after World War II, then got his first college head coaching job at VMI.  While there, he invented the I-formation.  The formation proved so successful that it  came to the attention of coaches at bigger programs, including Notre Dame’s Frank Leahy and USC’s John McKay, and today, in various forms,  it’s considered a staple of offensive football

From the VMI, he moved south to Florida State, which had only begun playing football six years earlier.  Not long before that, it had been a women’s college; now, it’s a national power.

At FSU, two of his best known players were Burt Reynolds, who scarcely played because he injured his knee, but would go on to become a famous actor, and Lee Corso, who served under him as a graduate assistant for one season, then as a full-time assistant for seven more seasons, and now, retired as a coach himself, enjoys great fame as a TV sports personality, especially on college football GameDay.

After six years at Florida State, he moved on to a Maryland.  I had the good fortune to be living in Baltimore at the time and to witness first-hand his football ingenuity, which included the “Typewriter huddle,” cross-country passes on kickoff returns, and increasing his kicker’s jersey number after every made extra point and field goal.  He also recruited Darryl Hill, the first black player to play major college football in the South.

Tom Nugent was never an assistant coach.  He was head coach at three different places, and left all of them with a winning record.  His overall record was 89-80-3.

http://www.nolefan.org/garnet/garnet09.html

http://www.footballfoundation.org/Biography.aspx?id=17456

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1991-11-06/sports/1991310214_1_nugent-gator-bowl-penn-state

*********** CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING TOM NUGENT…

GREG KOENIG - CIMARRON, KANSAS
MARK KACZMAREK - DAVENPORT, IOWA - My college coach opened the door for Bobby Bowden at FSU by having 2 horrible seasons prior (that was Darrell Mudra - successful everyplace else he coached)
JOSH  MONTGOMERY - BERWICK, LOUISIANA
JOE GUTILLA - AUSTIN, TEXAS
ADAM WESOLOSKI - PULASKI, WISCONSIN
JOHN BOTHE - OREGON, ILLINOIS
JERRY LOVELL - BELLEVUE, NEBRASKA
JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
KEN HAMPTON - RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
TOM DAVIS - SAN CARLOS, CALIFORNIA
KEVIN MCCULLOUGH - LAKEVILLE, INDIANA


*********** Tom Nugent was almost the first to put players' names on jerseys...

From the Washington Post in 1961…





*********** Then there was  “Chile Bean” - When Bernardo Branson, a Maryland soccer player from Chile, first showed off his place-kicking ability, Lee Corso, then a Maryland assistant, was impressed.  “When he booted it,” Corso said, “It looked as if he could drive it through a brick wall.”

The Maryland players liked him - called him “Chile Bean” - and the fans loved him.  Or at least they loved the number gimmick.

Tom Nugent excited Maryland fans by making Bramson his "human scoreboard" - adding to his jersey number every time he scored with a kick.

Against South Carolina in the second game of the experiment, he started out wearing 3 (earned the week before against Oklahoma) then changed it to 4 and then 5 with extra points,  then to eight with a field goal, and then, finally, 9.

By season’s end, his number was 44.


Above Left: Pre-season, Bernardo Bramson wears Number 0.  Holding for him is QB Phil Petry, who would later star for me in Hagerstown, Maryland.
Above Right: On the Maryland sidelines, Bramson’s number is changed to “3” after making a field goal in the opening game.


*********** Although there are numerous reasons for which Tom Nugent should be known around Maryland - including being the coach who integrated Maryland - and ACC - football,  there is definitely one reason that a lot of Terp fans aren’t aware of. 

From 1917 to 2014, Maryland beat Penn State only one time - and Tom Nugent was the coach who did it.

It was for good reason that the esteemed college football analyst, the late, great Beano Cook, once predicted on a pregame show that Penn State would beat Maryland that day.  “Why?” he asked, rhetorically. Then he answered his own question: “Because Penn State ALWAYS beats Maryland.”

In 1961, when a Nugent-coached Maryland team beat Penn State, 21-17, it was the Terps’ only win over the Nittany Lions in the 20th Century.  In fact, after that win, the Terps would lose 28 more times (with one tie in there), before finally winning again, 20-19, in 2014. 

*********** From Sports Illustrated, September 23, 1963…

Maryland Coach Tom Nugent, the most inventive mind and fastest mouth in football and a man totally unappreciated by Clemson's Howard, will have a team good enough to knock off either Clemson or Duke and interesting enough to watch if it never wins a game. Nugent now has a "shifty I offense" (Howard says that sounds like Nugent) in which the wingback will occasionally shift into the line to become a split end and the split end will drop off to become a wingback, the good of which only time and Tom Nugent will tell.

Maryland also has Darryl Hill, the first Negro ever to play in the ACC, ready to start at wingback. He is a 165-pound transfer from Navy, and he "moves," says Nugent. Even better are Dick Shiner at quarterback and Tailback Len Chiaverini, who led the ACC in rushing last year with 602 yards. Maryland's line will be smaller and faster than last year's and could be pushed around quite a bit. But Shiner's arm and Nugent's guile will take the Terrapins a long way.

https://www.si.com/vault/1963/09/23/616511/the-south#

founder of Maryland, George Calvert, Lord Baltimore.    I love the Maryland flag, and I wish that Underarmour (founded by a former Maryland football player named Kevin Plank) would come to its senses and realize it doesn't look good plastered  all over the Maryland football helmets.







*********** Tom Nugent’s “typewriter” huddle in its original form.  It was VERY radical.  At that time, EVERYBODY was in a closed huddle.  The only question was whether to make it circular or rectangular.




















*********** Maryland quarterback Dick Shiner, who until 2014 was the only Maryland quarterback ever to beat Penn State, is shown in a 1963 photo with assistant coach Lee Corso.  Ironically, the two stars of the Maryland victory over Penn State were both Pennsylvanians, Shiner from Lebanon and receiver Gary Collins from Williamstown.  Shiner went on to a solid if not spectacular NFL career.  Collins starred in the Cleveland Browns’ last NFL championship game win (1964) and is one of the best players not to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Dick Shiner: http://www.baltimoresun.com/sports/baltimore-sports-blog/bs-sp-catching-up-shiner-20131127-story.html

Gary Collins: http://www.cleveland.com/browns/index.ssf/2013/07/cleveland_browns_100_best_all-_50.html
 

FRIDAY,  MAY 5,  2017  - “When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought."   Steve Jobs

The U.S. State Department issued a travel alert for Europe on Monday, saying U.S. citizens should be aware of a continued threat of terrorist attacks throughout the continent.

Malls, government facilities, hotels, clubs, restaurants, places of worship, parks, airports and other locations are all possible targets for attacks, the State Department's alert said.

Which, it seems to me, covers just about every square inch of Europe.

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN17X2CV

 
*********** I don’t normally print emails that coaches send me after clinics, but this one I had to print…

Thanks so very much for having (us) there to experience the Double Wing Offense.  The 5 coaches who were at Chappell’s for dinner on Saturday evening treated us like we had been with them for years. 

A lot of you guys understand the feeling I had when I read the email - It’s like getting a letter from a stranger complimenting you on the type of kids you have on your team.

I’m pleased and proud of the sort of brotherhood that we’ve been able to create over the years and it’s always gratifying when coaches new to our system experience it - and then become a part of it.

SEEN AT LAST WEEK'S CLINIC

(LEFT) Coaches Greg Koenig of Cimarron, Kansas and MIke Benton of Colfax, Illinois.  Coach Benton celebrated his birthday at the clinic.
(RIGHT) Coaches John Cruse and Dave McFeely of Bradford, Ohio and Kyle Ross, of Polo, Missouri



(LEFT) Brady Brewer, Rodger Williams and Bryan Brewer, of Rio, Wisconsin; (RIGHT) Two great Iowa coaches - Brad Knight of Clarinda and Kirk Ferentz of Iowa City -  have their pictures taken together at Chappell's







(LEFT) Some of the MANY helmets on the ceilings at Chappell's

*********** Chappell's is a must stop for coaches.  Most of the Omaha area has a helmet up....always fun to send your kids around to try and find helmets they recognize.

Jerry Lovell
Bellevue, Nebraska












*********** This might tell you something…

Dartmouth College, an elite Ivy League school in Hanover, New Hampshire, conducted a survey of students to determine their openness to having a roommate with opposing political views.

Among those who indentified as Republicans (there can’t have been that many at an Ivy League school), 69 per cent said they’d be open to the idea. 

Among the far more tolerant, far more inclusive, far more open-minded  Democrats, only 39 per cent said they would.


*********** Secretary of Defense James Mattis dashed the hopes of a handful of service academy athletes who harbored aspirations of playing professional sports after graduation when he announced in a memo that all graduates of service academies (and ROTC programs at other colleges) must first serve a minimum of two years of active duty before they may be permitted to consider offers from professional sports organizations.

This reverses a policy announced just a year ago by  Ashton Carter, perhaps the worst Secretary of Defense in our nation's history.

"The military academies and ROTC exist to develop future officers who enhance the readiness and lethality of our military services," he said.  "During their first two years following graduation, officers will serve as full-fledged military officers carrying out normal work and career expectations of an officer who has received the extraordinary benefits of an ROTC or military academy education at taxpayer expense.”

My take:

GEN Mattis is right. The argument has been advanced that it would be “good PR” for the academies to be represented in the NFL and other such leagues - that it would help recruitment. 

I call bulls— on that.

Yes, I suppose there is an outside chance that some service academy graduate running down under kickoffs or on an NFL team's practice squad (which is where most of these guys wind up) might actually help academy recruiting, but I doubt it. Besides, it's not as if the academies need any help in that area. More than 10,000 kids every year - highly qualified kids, I might add - compete for a little more than 1200 slots at each of our three defense-department service academies. (The Coast Guard Academy and the Merchant Marine Academy are not part of the Defense Department.)  The American taxpayers then spend close to $500,000 to train them as officers - not as professional athletes.

Every one of those slots is precious, and we shouldn't be filling them with people who aspire to be pro athletes.

It’s not good for the morale of the other cadets and midshipmen, who already think that athletes receive special breaks.

And it’s sure to bring into question by some the need for service academies in the first place. (Most people don't know this, but there is, and always has been, a powerful group of liberals who would love to shut the academies down or greatly reduce them in size, importance and influence.)

Some in favor of the "pro pass" are sure to bring up  Alejandro Villanueva, a West Point graduate who now starts on the offensive line for the Steelers.  Only one problem:  “Ali” definitely did not get a pass in order to play pro football.  He served in the US Army for four years, and during that time he saw more combat than many soldiers see in a 20-year career.

Something else that isn’t mentioned in these articles: they mainly talk about football players, but this being the 21st Century in which we’re forced to say, despite all evidence to the contrary,  that all sports are of equal importance, "PR" passes for "pro athletes" have gone to soccer players, minor league baseball players, and women in assorted sports.   Pardon my cynicism, but I rather doubt that a guy playing Class A baseball or MLS soccer is inspiring many youngsters to want to one day be  Army officers.  I mean, if the military is such an important career, why aren’t you out soldiering instead  of batting .243 here in River City?  (Unless, of course, the object is to recruit more people who’ll bail right after their graduation.)

https://www.google.com/amp/www.military.com/daily-news/2017/05/02/mattis-slams-door-on-military-academy-athletes-turning-pro.html%3Fvariant%3Dmobile.amp

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-service-academy-athletes-owe-us-before-they-go-pro/2016/06/02/98f2c1ec-283d-11e6-b989-4e5479715b54_story.html?tid=a_inl-amp&utm_term=.3509e0da3d05


***********  A great thing about putting on a clinic is the good questions that it produces afterwards.  One such question regarded a blocking rule.

Q. I see on the playcard for 66 SP the  playside linemen's rule is G-O-AL. Gap-On-? What does AL stand for? Attack Linebacker?

It means “Angle - Late.”  It’s a way to let him know that if there’s nobody in his inside gap, and nobody on him (or if he’s in doubt about whether a man is on him), he comes off at an angle - but not right away. He doesn’t fire out immediately and leave a gap in our front.  First he takes a jab step in place, and then comes off at an angle.   This is important -  he doesn’t fire straight out at a linebacker directly over him. He comes inside at a 45 degree angle, blocking anything in his path.

Q. So if the playside tackle gets an outside shade, like a 5 tech, is that considered On?

Most likely,  “Yes.”

For a tackle, a 5 tech (touching his outside half)  is as good as “ON” and he and the TE will be double-teaming that 5 (who, because of our tight splits, is also a 7 where the TE is concerned!)  If it’s a gray area,  if there’s any doubt on the tackle’s part,  we want him to hang around - to keep alive the possibility of a double team before leaving his post. (Therefore, when in doubt, we “Angle Late.”)  We have never been hurt by an uncovered tackle who’s slow off the ball.  We have, however, been hurt by a tackle who fires right out and leaves a gap in our front.

The graphic below shows what a right tackle would see as “GAP,” “ON” or “QUESTIONABLE.”  If it’s questionable, his orders are: “ANGLE LATE”





*********** Listening to Hillary enumerate the reasons why she lost  reminded me of an old joke that made the rounds back when I was in marketing with a beer company.  

Seems a big dog food manufacturer decided to introduce a new dog food.

It had all the nutrients any dog could possibly need - good for teeth, coat, etc. - and it could  be sold at a lower price than its competitors and still be profitable.

The manufacturer’s  advertising agency put together a terrific marketing plan, from name, to logo, to package design, to advertising, to sales incentives, to store displays.

The sales force was called in for a big kickoff meeting, then sent out into the field to get the product into stores nationwide. Advertising commenced on radio and TV and in newspapers and magazines, and the product began to fly off the shelves. Stores called for immediate reorders, and the factory had to be put on a second shift just to keep up.

This went on for a couple more weeks until suddenly, the orders stopped coming in.

Alarmed, the head of the company sent his chief assistant out into the field to find out what was going on.

After a few days, having hear nothing, the boss telegraphed his assistant: “WHAT HAVE YOU FOUND OUT?”

The assistant’s reply was terse:

“THE GODDAMN DOGS DON’T LIKE IT.”


*********** From the National Football Foundation’s most recent newsletter:

Rogers Redding, the national coordinator of College Football Officiating, provides insights about rules changes and the mindset of college football referees. The CFO is the national professional organization for all football officials who work games at the collegiate level.

"Length of game" is a topic under active discussion among conference commissioners, athletics directors, television people and other stakeholders of college football. The NCAA football rules committee has also been looking at this, as game times have crept up over the last several years.

Since 2008, when games at the FBS level averaged three hours and nine minutes, game time on average in 2016 stretched to three hours and 22 minutes, an increase of 13 minutes. Of course, this is an average that washes out a lot of detail. But it is clear that with a growing number of teams running high-powered offenses that generate more plays and more touchdowns, the overall length of games has naturally gone up.

In discussing this trend, the rules committee has not settled on an optimum game length. But the general sense is that times as long as three and a half hours would not be good for the game. As the committee seeks ways to deal with this, we find very little support for making rules changes that would take plays out of the game. And so we look for ways to manage the length of the game by addressing how to manage the dead-ball times. Officials are charged with the responsibility of being efficient in handling dead-ball intervals and plays where the game clock stops, such as incomplete passes.

One point of emphasis for the officials this year will be to have better control of the length of halftime. By rule the halftime is 20 minutes, but there are often some delays in starting the countdown. Also, current rules allow the schools to mutually agree that the halftime will be longer than 20 minutes. One small but perhaps significant editorial change for 2017 is this: the teams will be allowed to agree on a shorter halftime, but they may not make it longer than 20 minutes. And the Referees are being instructed to start the 20-minute halftime countdown as soon as the first half ends, per the language of the rule. The hope is that these steps will halt the trend for longer game times.

*********** Back in the 1980s, when cable television was in its infancy, two things came on the scene that revolutionized sports reporting:  USA Today and ESPN.

The shame is how good they could have been.   Now, they’ve become irrelevant.

Both thought they were too big to fail - that they were so big and powerful they could do anything they wanted.

ESPN thought that it could keep forcing their $7 a month charge onto every basic cable subscriber, many of whom never watched sports.

Trying to keep up - er, down - with what it perceived as a changing demographic, the Worldwide Leader gave us Hip Hop sports coverage, female play-by-play, and a host of loathsome former athletes serving as analysts.

USA Today downsized, in actual size and in literary value. 

Both turned left politically and lectured us on the right way to think. (Gay athletes are to be admired.   “Caitlin” Jenner gets an ESPY.) 

I cancelled my subscription to USA Today almost five years ago and I’ve never missed it, and I can’t remember the last time I watched anything on ESPN other than football games and College Game Day.

http://theweek.com/articles/694772/how-espn-went-from-powerhouse-bloodbath
 
*********** CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING BILL YEOMAN

JOSH MONTGOMERY - BERWICK, LOUISIANA
RALPH BALDUCCI - PORTLAND, OREGON
KEN HAMPTON - RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
GREG KOENIG - CIMARRON, KANSAS
DENNIS METZGER - RICHMOND, INDIANA
ADAM WESOLOSKI - PULASKI, WISCONSIN
MARK KACZMAREK - DAVENPORT, IOWA
JERRY LOVELL - BELLEVUE, NEBRASKA
JOHN BOTHE - OREGON, ILLINOIS
KEVIN MCCULLOUGH - LAKEVILLE, INDIANA (when i first started coaching a lot of teams were running "the  veer"......the Wacker/Morton how-to book really gave me a chance to study it and learn about it......you had to learn the offense to try and defend it......it seemed like every clinic i went to i would listen to a "veer" coach to learn more about it)
JOE GUTILLA - AUSTIN, TEXAS
KC SMITH - WALPOLE, MASSACHUSETTS
TRACY JACKSON - DALLAS, OREGON
TOM DAVIS - SAN CARLOS, CALIFORNIA


*********** Sent along by Ken Hampton, of Raleigh, North Carolina - a link to a great site managed by a West Point graduate named Phil Burns

Some great photos and stories about the 1948 Army team (and Captain Bill Yeoman) from the West Point yearbook, “The Howitzer.”

https://forwhattheygave.com/2013/05/02/1948-team/




QUIZ: Bill Yeoman played center and linebacker for Army in the years following World War II. In his three years at West Point, he snapped the ball to two Hall of Fame quarterbacks (both, coincidentally named Arnold) - Arnold Tucker and Arnold Galiffa - and he captained the 1948 Army team. 

After graduation he served as an officer in the US Army, attaining the rank of captain, but in the words of his Army coach, Earl “Red” Blaik, “he was bitten early by the football bug,” and in 1954 he resigned his commission and joined Duffy Daugherty’s first staff at Michigan State. The Spartans went 3-6 that season, but the next season they went 9-1, won the Rose Bowl game, and finished Number Two in the nation.  After eight seasons at Michigan State, during which the Spartans had only two losing seasons and four Top Ten finishes, Yeoman accepted a job at the University of Houston, which had only begun playing collegiate football 15 years earlier, in 1946.

There, he would rock the very foundations of football: he introduced a new, high-scoring triple option attack that revolutionized offensive football and came to be known as the Houston Veer; he recruited Warren McVea, the first black athlete to play football for a major college in the state of Texas;  and not only took the Cougars into the prestigious Southwest Conference, but won the conference championship - and beat Texas, 30-0 - in Houston’s first year of membership.

In his 33-year career, he assisted at just one school, Michigan State, and served as head coach at just one school, Houston.  In his 25 years as head coach, he built a relatively  unknown program, snubbed by the bigger, better-known programs in Texas, into a national power.  He produced 46 All-Americans and sent 69 players to the NFL. He retired following the 1986 season with an overall record of 160-108-8.

What kind of a team captain was he?  Coach Blaik in his memoirs, “You Have to Pay the Price,” recalled a game against Stanford:  “when one of our ends missed a tackle, to permit a Stanford back a 4-yard gain, our Captain Bill Yeoman advised that miscreant, ‘Let that happen again and you’re through!’”

An interview with Bill Yeoman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyFHmpIuQfo

A great example of Bill Yeoman as a man of honor…
http://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/8053505/houston-cougars-bill-yeoman-written-late-adviser-policy

*********** Mrs. Yeoman’s obituary
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/houstonchronicle/obituary.aspx?pid=173728185


*********** Several years ago, at the suggestion of my friend  Mike Lude, I spoke on the phone with a longtime coach named Clarence “Dan” Daniel,  who’d assisted Mike years before at Colorado State.  Dan proved to be a very interesting guy.  He’d coached in a lot of places and knew a lot of people and he told me that he was on hand the day the Houston Veer was “invented” in 1964.  He was on Bill Yeoman’s staff, and he said that they were getting ready to play Mississippi State (he was pretty sure that’s who it was).   The scout team was running the Mississippi State offense when a “State” halfback ran a simple dive and broke it straight up the field, untouched, for a touchdown.  Coach Yeoman happened to see this and immediately dashed over to see what had happened - where his defense had broken down.  What had happened, it turned out, was that the “Mississippi State” tackle on the playside had blown his assignment, releasing onto a linebacker while leaving unblocked the defensive lineman he should have blocked.  The dive had hit so fast that the unblocked Houston lineman had charged upfield, right past the running back, and with every Houston defender to the inside walled off by blockers, there was no one left to make the tackle.

Great story. 

In fairness, though, my training as a historian requires me to  note that in an interview years later, Coach Yeoman remembered the incident a bit differently.  They were playing Penn State, he recalled,  and they were having trouble blocking Penn State’s front when in frustration he told his tackle “as long as you’re not blocking anybody anyhow, you might just as well get out of the way” - and the rest is history.

Not to dispute either account - I’m sure both men told their versions numerous times over the years with complete confidence in their veracity - I think it’s fair to say that they’re in total agreement on one fact: the origin of the veer was pure serendipity - accidental discovery of something good.

Dan Daniel, incidentally, died with his boots on.  He passed away in June of 2015 at the age of 82,  looking forward to his fourth season as an assistant at Iowa Western Junior College.

TUESDAY,  MAY 2,  2017  - “Hire paranoids. Even though they have a high false alarm rate, they discover all plots.”  Herman Kahn, noted intellectual

************  The Kansas City clinic was a great  event, with coaches from seven different states in attendance.  There were a couple of staffs there with - how do I say this? - “non-Wyatt” Double Wing backgrounds, and we did our best to translate, but there were also a number of guys who go back with me to the late 90’s or so: coaches such as Mike Benton, of Colfax, Illinois;  Mike Foristiere of Wahluke, Washington (formerly of Boise, Idaho); Brad Knight of Clarinda (formerly Galva-Holstein), Iowa; and Greg Koenig of Cimarron (formerly Beloit), Kansas.  Those guys have been running my stuff long enough and well enough that if I should ever lose my place at a clinic they could easily bail me out. 

Very close to them in experience and right up there in success with the Double Wing was Coach Todd Hollis, from Elmwood, Illinois, who brought along his right-hand man, Mike Walker. At Rio, Wisconsin, the Double Wing was introduced back in the late 1990s by a coach named Nick Crawford, but then he left, and in recent years hard times have hit.  Current coach Brian Brewer was sold on the Double Wing by Coach Crawford, and he was on hand with two young, eager assistants - his son, Brady Brewer, and Rodger Williams.  Coach Kyle Ross, from Polo, Missouri, has been running my system since 2010, and in seven years his worst season has been 6-5.  It’s been nearly 12 years since I met with Coach Greg Hale from Bradford, Ohio to install the Double Wing, and at some point he moved on. Now, he’s back, assisting.  He’s recovering from a medical setback at the moment, but new head coach Dave McFeely and assistant John Cruse, were back for a refresher course.  There was a lot of very interesting and informative give-and-take among the guys in attendance, and I think we all learned a bunch, myself included.  Sam Knopik, head coach at Kansas City’s Pembroke Hill School hosted a couple of my clinics a few years ago, and he was there with Mike Rutherford and Dean Brendel.  Sam started corresponding with me when I first went on the Internet and he was coaching football in Ukraine!

Dinner Friday night was at Tanner’s, in Platte City, Missouri.  For me the highlight was watching poor Brad Knight, the only Iowa Hawkeye in the room, having to deal with the crossfire from a trio of Badgers on one side and a Cornhusker on the other.

On Saturday night, several of us who hadn’t yet left for home met for dinner at Chappell’s, in North Kansas City.  Sam Knopik introduced me to it  few years ago.  I guess Chappell’s is considered a sports bar.  But it’s not a sports bar in the sense of a Buffalo Wild Wings - there are only three TVs in the place.   It’s actually a sports museum, but only if your idea of a museum includes good food and drink along with the exhibits.  As a museum, its collection of sports memorabilia, and pictures, pennants and football helmets (several hundred hang from the ceilings of its several rooms) makes it worthy of comparison to the Baseball or Pro Football Halls of Fame.

The owner/host, Jim Chappell (it’s pronounced “Chapel,” he told us, not the fancier “shah-PELL”) seemed quite pleased to have a collection of football coaches on hand, and gave us the grand tour of the place.  He’s a native midwesterner, originally from Keokuk, Iowa, and he’s a wealth of sports information, especially as it pertains to Kansas City and the states surrounding it.

He let us behind the bar to take the picture above.  (Left to Right: Greg Koenig, Brad Knight, Hugh Wyatt, Todd Hollis, Mike Walker, Dave McFeely, Mike Foristiere, John Cruse and Jim Chappell.  Does it look like I'm covertly drawing a glass of Blue Moon?)

Jim invited us to add to his collection of helmets, informing us that 50 per cent of the coaches who told him they’d bring him a helmet actually did so, and said he wouldn’t want to have to classify us among the “other fifty per cent.”

There's so much to see and do around Kansas City - the World War I Museum and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum for sure - and so many good BBQ places - Arthur Bryant’s and Oklahoma Joe’s, that I know of - but I would put a visit to Chappell’s, at lunch or dinner time, near the top of my list.

*********** Having to kill an hour or so Sunday afternoon before turning in my rental car and heading for the airport, I drove around north of the KC airport.  Seeing a sign on I-29 advertising a “Weston Brewing Company,” I turned off at the Weston exit, figuring that if there was actually a brewery in town, it couldn’t be all bad.

Well.

The first things I noticed as I got a couple of miles off the freeway were large, grassy  estates, horse farms like the kind you’d see in the Northern Virginia hunt country.  One place must have had enough money invested in its white rail fencing alone to buy nice houses for a half a dozen or so of us poor football coaches.

And then, coming over the crest of a hill where, I was forewarned, trucks might be entering the highway, I drove past a sign at the entrance to the McCormick Distillery.  One of those new distilleries that have spring up all over the place, I figured, but oh, no - below the name on the sign, it read “Superb Spirits Since 1856.”  WTF? That was before the Civil War began.  (Officially, anyhow, because the fighting over slavery had already broken out just across the river in "Bleeding Kansas.")

I drove on, and after passing the Entering  Weston sign I found myself driving through a neighborhood of nice houses on tree-shaded streets.  I came to the top of a hill where I was given no choice but to turn left, and when I did I found myself looking down a Main Street that took me back in time.  Yes, there were new cars and pickup trucks parked on both sides of the street, but the architecture on both sides was from a time long gone - even before the McCormick Distilling Company started making booze..

I had to pull off and do a little online research.  The distillery, I found, was established by a guy named Holladay, who started the Pony Express, whose easternmost terminus was just to the north, in St. Joseph, Missouri.  The distillery has changed names a few times, but it is the longest continuously operating distillery in the United States and it’s on the National Register of Historic Places.

The town itself (originally “West Town,” according to one account) was settled in the 1830s, and until the admission of Texas in 1845 it was  the westernmost settlement in the United States.  It was a busy steamboat port until 1881, when the fickle Missouri River flooded and shifted its channel a couple of miles away, leaving Weston suddenly landlocked and without its lifeblood.  (I can just see the whores and card sharps leaving town.)

Weston isn’t that far from Kansas City, and it’s obviously a popular day-trip destination.   It’s got quaint restaurants and taverns and plenty of antique stores, and a drive down its Main Street is an invitation to park the car and get out and walk around.

As for the Weston Brewing Company, I found myself pressed for time and never did find it.  I’m told that it dates back to the 1840s when a German immigrant, found the area ideal for the production of lager beer (what most of us now simply call beer), which requires long storage under cool conditions.  In those days long before artificial  refrigeration, the answer was to store the beer undergound, and the limestone in that area enabled him to dig caves large enough for those purposes.  The brewery was closed in 1919 by Prohibition, and it was only in 2005 that it came back into being.  It definitely does not sound like some back-of-of-a-tavern operation, with a couple of stainless steel tanks. Next time, I’ll visit it, especially the bar located underground in one of the old caverns.

There’s a lesson, here, of course - we all need to get our asses off the Interstate and do a little exploring.

*********** Some of the coaches at the clinic said that “alumni football” is catching fire in their areas, and one of them mentioned a school near him that reputedly had raised more than $40,000 promoting one such game.  The company that promoted the deal charges $150 per player and provides the uniforms and - presumably - the insurance, and  rents the  facilities. The two schools get all proceeds from presales, while the promoter keeps all gate sales.

Mock you may, but they’re playing football.

*********** One of the coaches at the Kansas City clinic, Mike Walker, said he’s been officiating spring semi-pro football in Central Illinois.  Eight-man semi-pro football.

A couple of the coaches there have had experience coaching nine-man football (basically, you drop two of the linemen - or, to put it another way, you line up like Georgia Tech and then tell the split ends to go sit down).  We all agreed that, since there’s only a one-man difference between eight- and nine-man anyhow, we’d all prefer to coach the nine-man game because for a coach it’s much, much closer to the 11-man game.

*********** The big donors at Duke are referred to as Iron Dukes.  The name pays tribute to the amazing 1938 Duke football team, which first earned that nickname.  Coached by the great Wallace Wade, who in 1931 had been lured away from Alabama by Duke (can you imagine Nick Saban leaving Alabama to coach at Duke?) Duke was undefeated  during the regular season. And not only undefeated, get this - unscored-on.  Chosen to play USC in the Rose Bowl, the Iron Dukes led, 3-0, until the final 40 seconds of the game, when USC broke through with a touchdown pass and defeated the Blue Devils.  It had to be devastating to those kids. It’s way too late now to find out, but I would love to know what that several-days-long train ride back to North Carolina was like.

DUKE 18  VPI (Virginia Tech) 0
DUKE 27 Davidson 0
DUKE 7 Colgate 0
DUKE 6 Georgia Tech 0
DUKE 7 Wake Forest 0
DUKE 14 North Carolina 0
DUKE 21 Syracuse 0
DUKE 7 NC State 0
DUKE 7 Pitt 0
USC 7 DUKE 3

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

I enjoyed the Single Wing article and the link to the Single Wing web site. One of the authors on the site coaches at Staunton River High School in Bedford, VA, about 20 miles from where I grew up in Lynchburg. They were an offensive machine this past season. The Single Wing has become popular in the central Virginia area. I know of at least three teams there that run the offense. Last fall I was able to watch a Single Wing team just north of Lynchburg, Amherst, play Jefferson Forest High School. I was intrigued by some of the formations they ran and struck by the similarity in blocking schemes with the DW/Open Wing. I'm sure there are many flavors of Single Wing, but this one had many similarities to what we do.

Jim Crawley
China Grove, North Carolina


*********** At Chino Hills (California) High, the basketball team is looking for a new coach.

The former coach, who couldn’t do any better than 30-3 this past season, was informed last week that he wouldn’t be coming back.

This means that the kids at Chino Hills will be getting their third coach in as many seasons.

None of this makes any sense until you learn that Chino Hills is the school of the Ball brothers - and Super Parent LaVar Ball.

Ball Senior originally supported  the most recent coach, but then, toward the end of the season openly criticized him in the sports media.

Note to anyone applying for the Chino Hills job.  There is some talent there.  The youngest Ball brother, LaMelo, has two years left. 

So, alas, does LaVar.   After LaMelo graduates, LaVar can move on to building the family brand or criticizing his sons' college coaches. Or both.

http://www.latimes.com/sports/highschool/varsity-times/la-sp-high-schools-sondheimer-20170430-story.html


*********** CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING RIP ENGLE-

JOSH MONTGOMERY - BERWICK, LOUISIANA
ADAM WESOLOSKI - PULASKI, WISCONSIN
KC SMITH, WALPOLE, MASSACHUSETTS
MARK KACZMAREK - DAVENPORT, IOWA
JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
KEVIN MCCULLOUGH - LAKEVILLE, INDIANA
TOM DAVIS - SAN MARCOS, CALIFORNIA
MIKE CAHILL - GUILDERLAND, NEW YORK
KEN HAMPTON - RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
WILL STOUT - WASILLA, ALASKA

*********** Rip Engle was born and raised in Elk Lick Township, a small town in Western Pennsylvania near the Maryland line.  He got his first job at the age of 14, driving mules in  coal mine.  He didn’t play high school football (he had been promoted to mine foreman) and when he entered college he played in the first football game he ever saw.

His first coaching job was in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, where he spent 11 years as the high school head coach.

His first college head coaching job was at  Brown, an Ivy League school, and after going 7-2 and 8-1 in his final two years there, he was hired by Penn State in 1950.  He brought along his former quarterback, a kid from Brooklyn named Joe Paterno, to help teach his system, and Paterno decided he liked coaching so much that he passed up a chance to go to law school and instead remained as an assistant coach.

When Rip Engle retired after 16 years,  he’d compiled a 104-48-4 record.  He never had a losing season at Penn State.  His only non-winning season was his last, when the Lions finished 5-5.

On his recommendation, his successor was Joe Paterno, the Ivy League quarterback who’d come with him 16 years earlier to help out on a temporary basis.

Paterno would take the Penn State program to the very heights of college football, winning 409 games in his 46 years there.

FRIDAY,  APRIL 28,  2017  - “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” Michelangelo