TUESDAY,  APRIL 24,  2018 -  “You have to recognize that no player is so important that you can't live without him.” Bo Schembechler

Scorsone credited his high school football coach, the legendary “Duke” Weigle, for setting him on the right course.  “I ran into Coach Weigle the summer (1953) before I started at Pitt, and he asked me what I was going to major in at Pitt.  I told him physical education.  ‘I want to be a coach like you,’ I said.  And he wagged his head and said, ‘No, you don’t.  You major in business and you’ll do much better in life.’ In those days, you listened to your high school coach and I went out to Pitt the next day and changed my major.

“That exchange with Coach Weigle probably took all of 20 seconds,” said Scorsone, “but it changed my life.  I have always been grateful to him.”

FRIDAY,  APRIL 20,  2018 -  “A step backward after making a wrong turn is a step in the right direction.” Kurt Vonnegut

*********** Raise your hand if you wouldn’t have been a football coach without the help and support of your wife.  Think about all the ways that our wives put us first, enabling us to do the thing we love to do.

Guys, America just lost one great coach’s wife.

It’s been 20 years since my son-in-law and daughter took my wife and me to visit the President George H. W. Bush Library at Texas A & M.

We all came away deeply impressed by the Bush’s only-in-America story:  George and Barbara Bush, both born to wealth, leave the comfortable life of Greenwich, Connecticut behind and head out to the oil fields of West Texas to start their married life… he becomes a success in business, and goes on to bigger and more responsible positions in government, ultimately to the Presidency of the United States. She raises their children and makes the home and makes it possible for him to achieve his goals, discreetly providing valuable advice at every step of the way.

Barbara Bush was that woman.  She was a coach’s wife - the highest praise I can give any woman.

Mr. Bush had an amazing career in the service of his country, and he helped raise a family that’s worthy of admiration. But without Mrs. Bush, I don't believe George H. W. Bush would ever have become President.

Without her assent, he’d never have been able to move to Texas in the first place.  Imagine the trepidation with which she approached such a move. At least her husband had been around a bit - he’d served in the Navy in World War II. But for Mrs. Bush, a young woman brought up in an eastern culture of wealth and privilege.  Picking up and moving from Greenwich  to Midland, Texas could not have been easy.  But she did it. She was his wife. 

She made it possible for her husband to have it all -  career and home.  Career and family.  And say what you will about the Bush children, they were raised right, without any touch of scandal, any hint of corruption or perversion.

She provided her husband with strength and stability and support.

She defined the word “class.”  Nobility, even.  We will be blessed if we ever see her like again.

And she was a woman of deep faith.  Said her son, President  George W. Bush, “She had faith that she’d be received in the arms of a loving God.”

Barbara Bush was a coach’s wife.

***********  “I heard y’all was racist, so I came to get my free coffee,” the black guy said.  He got his coffee.

“I heard you guys don’t like black people,” he went on, “so I came to get my Starbucks reparations voucher.”

The guy, a comedian named Bryan Sharpe,  “vlogs” (video blogs) as “Hotep Jesus,” and he demonstrated how absurd things have become on the racial front by walking into a New Jersey Starbucks store and filming himself demanding a free coffee as “My Starbucks reparations.”  He wasn’t doing it as some scam to get “free sh-t” - he was doing it to illustrate the near-hysteria with which white America reacts to accusations of racism.

“Racism is a business," he said. "Thanks to the ridiculousness of BLM activists, it’s the new publicity stunt — and I think I just proved it.”

https://www.theblaze.com/news/2018/04/18/viral-video-sees-black-man-enter-starbucks-demand-free-reparations-coffee-theres-a-huge-catch


*********** My grandson, Matt Love, lives in Japan, where he teaches English.  He sent me a photo he took inside Tokyo’s American Football store, and wrote,  “Pretty interesting they had a cardboard cutout of kaep - not sure if they’re aware of how controversial he is. Haha.”

***********  Adidas is said to be interested in signing Colin Kaepernick to an endorsement contract - if he can manage to find an NFL club to sign him.

Let this be a warning to any NFL team considering bringing him in: as sleazy as these shoes companies are, I’m willing to bet that the contract with Adidas will pay him a bonus every time he takes a knee.

Said Adidas North America president Mark King, "We love athletes that have a platform to make the world a better place. If they're an activist in a way that brings attention to something that moves the world forward, even if there's controversy at that moment, we're really interested in those athletes because I think it represents the world today."


*********** At the Northeast Ohio chapter of the National Football Foundation, Mount Union coach Vince Kehres received the Lee Tressel Ohio College  Coach of the Year Award. He is the only person honored by the chapter as a high school student-athlete, a college student-athlete and a coach.  Either  as a player, assistant coach or head  coach, Kehres, who succeeded his father, Larry,  has been a part of 12 of Mount Union’s 13 national titles.



***********In attendance at a Chicago area National Football Foundation event: Left to Right: Dan Hampton, Richard Dent, Steve McMichael, Ted Hendricks and Northwestern Coach Pat Fitzgerald.

*********** I admit that I once  liked pro wrestling  - before it became too soap-operatic to suit me.  Before Vince McMahon, if you will.

Some of the old guys were true athletes.  Many of them, back in the days before million-dollar NFL salaries, were pro football players trying to augment their income.

Some of them I remember because of their amazing physical prowess. One was Antonino “Argentina” Rocca.  Another was Bruno Sammartino, who just died.

An Italian immigrant, Bruno Sammartino came to America as a little kid and made it big here. May he rest in peace.

http://www.pittsburghmagazine.com/Best-of-the-Burgh-Blogs/The-412/April-2018/Bruno-Sammartino-Dies-Wrestlings-Longtime-Champ-Was-82/?vsmaid=7830&vcid=15457#.WtetvsL-jXE.facebook

*********** Once, there were two Gene Washingtons in the NFL. One played at Stanford, and one at Michigan State.  Michigan State Gene Washington’s daughter has produced a documentary about the days when Michigan State and its coach, Duffy Daugherty, broke all sorts of color barriers by going south and recruiting great black athletes that their own segregated state universities couldn’t touch.

It’s entitled “Through the Banks of the Red Cedar,” taking off on the school’s fight song, which begins “On the Banks of the Red Cedar,” the river that flows through the MSU campus.

Based on a trailer I’ve seen, it appears to be a somewhat preachy attempt to teach us, once again, the history of the Civil Rights movement. Not to discourage them,  but it’s already been done very well by documentaries such as “Eyes on the Prize.” I would have hoped that it would been more football-oriented, zeroing in on that particular group of talented southerners, and their experiences playing football at a northern school.

But we’ll see.

https://wdet.org/posts/2018/04/13/86653-group-of-black-msu-players-helped-desegregate-college-football-in-1960s/

*********** In a move believed to be unprecedented in major sports, the Baltimore Orioles will offer free admission to Orioles Park at Camden Yards to any child age nine and younger all season, part of a larger youth outreach program the club is developing.

*********** In DWARFS VS TRANNIES, David Cole asks why trannies, whose difficulties, it could be argued, are self-inflicted, couldn’t learn something from little people…

As I pointed out several years ago, little people have never demanded that folks of normal height adopt a new descriptive term to define themselves as “not a dwarf.”

It’s generally true that the more phony one’s ailment, the more loud and obnoxious one will be about it. The woman with the “gluten allergy” will turn your pleasant lunch into a living hell. The guy with colon cancer will feel ashamed if his malady ruins a meal. Because the gluten harpy enjoys the bitching, enjoys the attention, whereas the colon cancer guy genuinely doesn’t want to be a nuisance. He doesn’t want his condition to define him.

So let’s circle back to the military. The army’s height requirements disqualify dwarfs and midgets. But surely a little person can fire a gun, no? I’ve seen 10-year-old girls who are expert shots; tiny hands can still pull a trigger. So why don’t we hear little people bitching like trannies about not being allowed to serve? I put that question to Cuquis Robledo, director of public relations for Little People of America (LPA), the nation’s largest advocacy organization for those of short stature. I asked her if she knew the general mood among little people regarding the military-service height requirements. “I have not really heard of anyone (in the little person community) who was thinking of joining the military but I’m sure people do talk about it,” she replied. While she believes that “anyone should be given a chance to be involved if they want to serve their country,” she added, “In terms of the height requirement, in my opinion, there are so many different ways to be involved in the military rather than being in direct combat.”
Her position? Little people should have every opportunity to serve their country, but not necessarily in combat.

If little people, facing so many challenges, can learn to live their lives without becoming a massive pain in the ass to the rest of us, if they can realize that their happiness is not dependent on my vocabulary, or my sexual preference, or my beauty standards, or the requirements of our armed forces, then anyone else can too.

We can learn a big lesson from the little people.

“I’ll tell you right now that it has never been easier for a young man/lady to find a reasonably well-paid job in this country and I’d go as far as to say regardless of qualifications, if you’re under the age of 25 and not in work without any good medical or mental health reason then you’re either a lazy little s*** or you’re setting your sights way too high,” he wrote.

“I’m not surprised us millennials are being called entitled. Kids these days measure their worth in the amount of followers they have on Instagram [and] they get upset if they’re not a CEO by 25.

“Everyone seems to want to start from the top, not work their way up. No one seems to want to get their hands dirty anymore.

gave a demonstration of ESPN+ – the over-the-top app that launched April 12. Pulling an iPhone from his pocket, Magnus opened the app and called up video from the 1985 boxing match between Marvin Hagler and Tommy Hearns to demonstrate the scope of the service’s library. Magnus, though, suggested that one of the service’s best selling points may be its ad-free content – not just on the OTT service but throughout ESPN digital. ESPN+ subscribers that are logged in do not have pre-roll ads for videos, like highlights and interviews, on ESPN.com, for example. “That’s been an underreported aspect of ESPN+,” Magnus said.

FYI:   ESPN+ is a subscription service - $4.99 a month.  They’re offering a 30-day free trial, but caveat emptor (Let the buyer beware): “AUTOMATICALLY RENEWS UNTIL CANCELLED”

***********  Hello Coach
My name is —— I’ve been a long time lurker around your site and I purchased vhs tapes from you years ago. I am curious as to this open wing that I keep hearing about.  I have not seen video of it and so I am wondering what it consists of and how you evolved into it?
Thanks

Coach,

Without getting into a lot of explanation, it’s an attempt to try to take advantage of some of the aspects of spread/shotgun offenses while retaining as many of the distinct features of the Double Wing as possible : a TE/Wing set to one side, tight line splits, double-wing blocking.

Its base formation  is “open” to one side and “wing” to the opposite side.

The evolution is fairly involved, but it comes partly from what I saw a California JC coach named Ken Swearengin doing, and partly from my “Wildcat” version of the Double Wing, and partly because I had to give up on an attempt to run my Wildcat from two split ends: one of my splits was slow and didn’t have very good hands -  but he was a very good blocker, and he made a very good tight end.  It’s the sort of improvisation you often have to do at  small high school.

As much as anything, I wanted something for Double Wing coaches who were either getting pressure to “open things up” or, even worse, losing out on jobs because of prejudice against their offense - and I believe I’ve found it.

Not knowing what age group you coach, here’s a screen shot of a middle school team running it, courtesy of Coach Jason Clarke, from Glen Burnie, Maryland.




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

You bring up some great points regarding the shoe companies.  Their marketing people are smart.  They start early.  Get to the kids while they are playing youth sports.  AAU, USA, etc. so that by the time they get to high school it's the kids and their parents that put the pressure on HS athletic departments to get in bed with Nike, Addidas, Under Armour etc.  When that happens the other high schools have to find a way to keep up.  Thus...the apparel wars - sponsorship labeling begins.

I watched a few of those spring "games" on TV.  Especially the schools with new coaches.  Florida will be better with Dan Mullen.  Texas A&M now has a TE in their offense with Jimbo Fisher as their coach.  And Minnesota...watch out for Minnesota.  They have some outstanding young talent, a massive O Line, a fast defense, and a smart, enthusiastic, young head coach who has those kids pumped up.

I don't buy Westbrook's sorry, lame a$$, explanation ONE COTTON PICKIN' MINUTE!!  And that announcer should NEVER have to apologize for it ONE COTTON PICKIN' SECOND!!

For the most part many track coaches ARE football coaches.  Or at least they should be.

I've said from day one that all the "research" done regarding concussions in the NFL has been misleading.

Don't get me started on Robert Mueller.

I thought R. Lee Ermey's characterization of the Marine Drill Sergeant in the movie Full Metal Jacket was priceless.  Also, you and I were probably a few of the "lucky" ones who got to see his GEICO commercial that was pulled.  He'll be missed.  (Ermey...not the other guy).

QUIZ:  Mark "Stink" Schlereth.  Enjoyed watching him cap on Mike Greenberg as a sub-in for Mike Golic on the Mike and Mike show, and take his shots at Golic too. 

Have a great week!

Joe Gutilla
Austin, Texas

TUESDAY,  APRIL 17,  2018 -  “English? Who needs that? I’m never going to England.” Homer Simpson

*********** At just about the same time as the University of Washington’s announcement that it had signed a 10-year deal with Adidas (I forget- are they back to capitalizing the “A”?), more federal charges were filed against an Adidas executive named Jim Gatto for his role in “allegedly” steering top basketball prospects to Kansas and NC State.  Before that, he was accused of doing the same for Louisville.

The “steering” was accomplished with large sums of money, the source of which is, to say the least, suspicious.

The people at Kansas, at NC State and at Louisville know nothing about any of that.  Of course not.   Neither do the people at Adidas. Which leaves Gatto himself - if you can believe he’s so wealthy that as a hobby he pays high school kids $100,000 each to go spend a basketball season at some college.

In the meantime, until things sort themselves out, Gatto remains on “paid leave” from Adidas.

And despite the stench that attaches to Adidas, Washington  nonetheless decided to accept its offer, said to be $20 million MORE than Nike’s.  In terms of total compensation, it vaults Washington into the top ten. 

I can’t wait to see what the designers at Adidas decide the Washington Huskies should look like.

http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2018/04/adidas_offer_for_uw_apparel_de.html

http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2018/04/adidas_jim_gatto_faces_more_ch.html

*********** Portland is ground zero in the Sneaker War.  Nike’s World Headquarters are in suburban Beaverton, and Adidas’ US headquarters are in North Portland.

Naturally, just as any big-city newspaper covers the industries important to its area, the Portland Oregonian keeps a close eye on the two local apparel giants.

In a recent series of articles on the shoe and apparel business, the writers unearthed an extremely unhealthy intrusion by Nike into Oregon high school sports.

Basically, Nike - far more than Adidas (Underarmour isn’t even in the picture) - has made shoe and apparel deals with several  Oregon high schools, providing them with free sh—.  Lots of it.

What’s Nike’s reasoning?  Apart from whatever advertising value there may be in a high school kid wearing the Swoosh, it’s the same sort of thinking behind the free cigarettes that tobacco companies provided our soldiers in World War II - if you can get ‘em when they’re young, the chances are good that they’ll be  your customers for life.

Naturally, in a state that’s so crippled by its pension obligations that it has to lay off teachers and state police and postpone road repairs,  the goods are welcome.

But the goods - the uniforms, the warmups, the shoes, the gym bags -  are contributing to the increasing sense that among the state’s high schools there are chronic haves and have-nots.

Yes, for the sake of PR Nike has donated goods to the Portland Public Schools, which definitely have their share of have-nots, but otherwise the company’s largesse (generosity) has been directed to schools that tend to be state powers. The haves.

Besides the uneven distribution of the goods, however, there’s another, much more interesting problem.

It appears that in many cases, Nike made its deals directly with the coaches of the sports (mostly football), and not their schools  or their school districts.  Besides the fact  that this might raise the suspicion that certain coaches might be on the take, the bigger problem for the schools is that in making those deals, their coaches may have created a Title IX nightmare:  where’s the stuff for the girls’ teams?

http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/page/how_nike_dominated_oregon_high.html

Oregonian editorial

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2018/04/schools_sneaker_deals_needs_ov.html

*********** Tsk, tsk.  Michigan had to call off its spring game because of “weather.”  Did they mean the weather in Rome?  Oh, wait - that was last year.

Or was IMG’s field booked, so they couldn’t play it in Florida, like two years ago?

Pretty bad when you have to play your spring game on your own field and it’s like an away game.

Cynical me - to suspect that the cancellation may have been because QB Shea Patterson wasn't going to be  able to play -  Michigan hasn't been able to get the NCAA waiver allowing him to transfer in from Ole Miss without his having to sit out a year.

Their argument for the waiver is that he shouldn’t be held to the usual standard because  - it's claimed - Ole Miss knew when they signed him that sanctions against it were coming down.

Watch yourself, Harbaugh.  I know you’re desperate, but this Patterson sure sounds like one of "those" kids - he went to three different high schools, transferring for his senior season to IMG Academy, which you know about, of course. 

And, counting a commit-decommit to Arizona, Michigan will make college number three.

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


*********** Johnny Manziel was the featured attraction at the Texas A & M spring game, running all over the field, fielding kicks, doing sideline interviews, playing to the adoring crowd.  I just shook my head at the whole sorry spectacle.  I didn't expect any different from  Johnny Football , but I have to admit my surprise at seeing that he still has the people at A & M bamboozled.

http://www.espn.com/college-football/

*********** As along as we’re on the subject of equality and gender equity and all that good stuff…

Mark Perry, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, writes in the Wall Street Journal that in 2016, 4803 men were killed on the job, compared with 387 women.  To save you the trouble of calculating, men accounted for 92.5 per cent of workplace fatalities. Or, put another way, that’s 12 men killed on the job for every woman killed.

As a sort of jab at those gender-equity types who hector us by telling us how far into the next year the average woman has to work in order to earn the same amount of money that the average man earned in 365 days, Mr. Perry notes that May 30, 2029 will be “EQUAL OCCUPATION FATALITY DAY” - the date on which female fatalities in the workplace will finally equal those for men back in 2016.

*********** EXCERPT FROM THE UPCOMING DOUBLE WING PLAYBOOK...



*********** “Thunder announcer suspended one game after racially insensitive comment about Russell Westbrook” read the headline.

Jeez - what did he say?

Turns out that following the Oklahoma City Thunder's final regular-season game Wednesday night, play-by-play announcer Brian Davis remarked that Brian Westbrook’s performance was excellent.

I lied. Actually, he said Westbrook  was "out of his cotton-picking mind,” which was supposed to convey the same thing.  But no.   Actually, if he had substituted “f—king” for “cotton picking,” he wouldn’t have stirred up as big a fuss.

Turns out “cotton picking” is now “racially insensitive.”  Who knew?  Did you?  I sure didn’t.

Andy Griffith used to say it and no one said squat.  Same with Yosemite Sam. There was the Smothers Brothers routine: “My old man’s a cotton-pickin’, finger-lickin’ chicken plucker - whatddaya thinka that?”  No complaints. And we all laughed  at the idea of Eli Whitney coming up with the name for his invention after hearing someone say “Get your cotton-pickin’ hands off my gin.”

But that was then, and this is now.  This is the Better America I never thought I’d live long enough to see. So Davis, probably surprised to learn that his innocent expression had gravely offended someone - this is, after all twenty-first century America -  did what everybody does nowadays, even when they haven’t done a damn thing wrong.  He apologized. ”It is with great remorse and humility that I accept this suspension,” he said,  “for the insensitive words I used during Wednesday's broadcast. While unintentional, I understand and acknowledge the gravity of the situation."

Wait a minute… racially insensitive???  “Gravity? "

And WTF is the deal with Westbrook?  All he had to do was say, “What’s all the excitement about?” But instead, he said, “What he said wasn’t okay.”

Really, Mr. Westbrook?  Since when, and says who?

In a couple of years it’ll be okay to say “f—king” on the air, and we won’t have any more need for euphemisms like  - trigger alert for insensitive words - “cotton picking.”

Until that wonderful day, though, I say go on saying "cotton picking." I figure that if you were to conduct a survey,  no more than 13 per cent of the respondents would tell you that they consider the term “cotton picking” to be racially insensitive.

I freely admit that I’d be among the 87 per cent who see absolutely no racial connotations - let alone insult - in the phrase, but for those of us who would rather not intentionally offend others, it sure would be awfully nice if we could be handed the list of commonly-used expressions that have been deemed offensive by some secret authority.  If they’re ever finished adding to it.

In the meantime, this probably explains why we don’t see those Andy Griffith reruns any more.

*********** My wife and I stood in a cold, steady rain Saturday and watched a high school track meet.  Well, part of one, actually.  We watched the shot put and a few races - in a cold, steady rain - and finally, after six heats of the boys’ 100, we’d had enough.  I’m sure the meet went on for a couple more hours - in a cold, steady rain. I went away convinced that if that’s the way track coaches spend their spring Saturdays - in a cold, steady rain - they deserve to be paid as much as football coaches.   (If you know me - I don’t think anybody outworks football coaches, or works in tougher conditions -  that’s really saying something.)

*********** When your aims conflict with those of a potential employer, you owe it to the employer to let them know that.

Give Colin Kaepernick credit for doing just that - for (evidently) letting the Seahawks know that he couldn’t assure them that he wouldn’t kneel during the national anthem.

And give the Seahawks credit for avoiding the PR disaster that signing Kaepernick would have led to.
   
*********** The NFL has been getting hustled… This from the Wall Street Journal

The National Football League has asked a federal judge to appoint a special investigator to probe what it describes as a widespread fraud that has resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in false claims to a fund meant to compensate former players for head injuries.

The motion alleges fraudulent schemes by doctors, lawyers and players to illicitly tap the uncapped fund, which is potentially valued around $1 billion. The league established the fund as part of a settlement agreement with players, and the NFL has so far funded more than $227 million in claims.

The motion—filed in the U.S. District Court for Eastern Pennsylvania, where the settlement is overseen—says that an independent administrator in the case has recommended that more than 400 claims be rejected because of fraud. That amounts to 23% of the total claims submitted and has a potential value of hundreds of millions of dollars based on the claims already awarded.

Among the allegations: At least one player was advised to show up to a neuropsychological evaluation hungover and on Valium, to ensure that he failed cognitive tests required to qualify for a settlement. Medical reports submitted by one neurologist included identical vital signs for more than 20 different players. One doctor claimed to have spent 130 hours evaluating players in a single day—on two separate occasions.

Ermey was born in Emporia, Kansas, on March 24, 1944. He grew up with five brothers on a farm outside of Kansas City, Kansas.  In 1958, when Ermey was 14, he and his family left Kansas and moved to Zillah, Washington. As a teenager, Ermey often got in trouble with the local authorities, and he had been arrested twice for criminal mischief by age 17. After his second arrest, a judge gave him a choice between joining the military or being sent to jail; Ermey chose the military.

FRIDAY,  APRIL 13,  2018 -  "I want to stick a knife in your best play." Bo Schembechler

*********** A MODEST PROPOSAL (With apologies to Jonathan Swift)

I’m certainly not the first to notice that to a great extent, football at the high school level is becoming more and more a game for the haves - for the well-off kids who’ve been provided with stable upbringings by ambitious parents who have high aspirations for them.  If you doubt me, check just one indicator - the number of state championships won every year by private (mostly Catholic) schools, with tuitions well north of $20,000 a year.

This year, the big California state title game was between Mater Dei and DeLaSalle, two private Catholic schools.

There’s scarcely a city in the United States that doesn’t have at least one Catholic school that’s a football power.  Some cities have several.  Some, like Chicago and Philadelphia, have entire Catholic leagues.

This is in no way intended to pile on Catholic schools, because overall they do seem to outpace the public schools academically, as well. Besides,  rather recently, there has also sprung up a fair number of high school football powerhouses whose names end in “Christian.”

Nor is it an attack on private schools.  It’s fair to say that they exist largely because of people who have money and care about their kids’ future.

As it is,  people with money who don’t choose to send their kids to private schools still wind up paying in another way - they buy expensive homes in tony suburbs, and they pay in the form of high property taxes.  The public high schools in such places tend to have good football teams.   (Find me a large city that doesn’t have a fair number of powerful high school football teams in its wealthier suburbs.)

Sometimes, of course, these schools go a bit too far in their pursuit of gridiron excellence.

Take Bellevue High, in a well-to-do suburb of Seattle. It has owned a near-monopoly on state Class 3A  titles for most of this century, with out-of-state wins over high-profile programs such as DeLaSalle, Long Beach Poly, St. Louis Prep (Honolulu) and Euless (Texas) Trinity. But uh-oh - A Seattle Times story revealed that Bellevue’s boosters were paying  their head coach in excess of $100,000 a year, and they'd paid the rent for families of out-of-district athletes so they could move to Bellevue.

How many other Bellevues are out there?

I'm definitely opposes to cheaters. But I’m definitely not a socialist. I understand that people will spend what they can to send their kids to  schools with good athletic programs.

I do, however,  believe in fair competition, and I’ve seen what disparity - in facilities and support - can do to kids. I’ve coached at an inner-city school. It had weeds growing in its parking lot, and when I had to take my team to  play at another school - in the same city school district - that had a swimming pool, complete with a water slide, you think our kids didn’t notice? When it was senior night at our school, fewer than half of my seniors had even one parent attend;  the next week, at a wealthy opponent’s stadium (same school district) senior night brought out two parents each for every single senior.

My concern is that if football is as great as we all believe it to be, it would be especially great for poor kids with little family support.  But it’s well-known that kids - city kids, especially - are a lot less likely to play any sport if their team is a chronic loser.

Academically, it’s been proposed in some quarters that certain students’ SAT scores  be adjusted upward to compensate for their relative lack of educational advantages (books in the house, parents who think that an education is important, good teachers, etc.).

While we’re considering that, why not do the same for schools in football? Given that certain schools have built-in advantages that others will never be able to overcome, I propose a handicapping system, based on the relative competitive advantages enjoyed by the opposing teams. The more disadvantaged team would start the game with a certain number of points awarded to it in advance. A reverse handicap, actually, but the purpose is the same as it would be in golf or horse racing - to make the contest more competitive.

Here’s how it would work:

As in golf, every team would have a handicap, although unlike in golf, in which a player’s handicap is subtracted from his score, this handicap would be added to a team’s score. 

The handicap would be determined by  allowing one point for each of the following factors:

It’s the only school in its town/district (3 points)
The superintendent thinks that a winning football program is important (5 points)
The head coach has been at the school more than 3 years
The head coach is a teacher in the school
There is an assistant coach for every 7.5 players
The head coach has the authority to hire and fire assistants as necessary
More than 3/4 of the coaching staff has been together more than 3 years
More than half of the coaching staff are teachers in the school
The staff and at least 3/4 of the players take part in a structured off-season conditioning program
There is a junior varsity team
There is a freshman team
There is a junior high/middle school program
The junior high coaches have solid coaching backgrounds
The junior high is using the same overall offensive and defensive system as the high school
The head coach hires the junior high/middle school coaches
There is an active youth program that feeds the school
At least one of the youth teams in the community uses the high school’s offensive and defensive systems
The principal is a former head coach
The principal is a former assistant football coach
The principal is a former head football coach
The principal, if female, is married to a football coach
The principal, if female, is married to a head football coach
The head coach is the AD
(If not the head coach) The AD has been a head coach of a major sport
(If not the head coach) The AD is a former assistant football coach
(If not the head coach) The AD is a former head football coach
(If not the head coach) The AD is currently not the head coach of another sport
100 per cent attendance is required at pre-season parents’ meetings
There is a clearly defined process for parents to pursue concerns
School athletic policy rules out questions about playing time
The baseball, basketball and wrestling head coaches are on the football staff (1 point for each)
There is sufficient budget for replacement of worn out or unsafe equipment
The playing field is artificial turf
The press box is high enough to film from and large enough for all who need to be there
There is a separate on-campus practice field
There is an indoor practice facility of some sort
There is a team room apart from the regular locker room
There is large, adequate team meeting space with audio-visual equipment
The weight room is adequate in size and well-equipped
Weight training is offered as a class and 90 per cent of the football players are in it
The weight training class is run by someone well-versed in  strength and conditioning training
More than 75 per cent of the  players train with the team during the summer
The program stresses respect, discipline and accountability
The program stresses sound fundamentals
The program  promotes, develops and supports strong senior leadership
A large percentage* of the players lives in a stable home situation
A large percentage* of the players lives with their father
A large percentage* of the players’ fathers were (or are) in the military
A large percentage* of the players’ fathers  played football
A large percentage* of the players’ older brothers played football
A large percentage* of the players’ grandfathers played football
A large percentage* of the players’ fathers  played at this school
A large percentage* of the players’ fathers played on winning teams at this school
No more than three languages are spoken in the school
Fewer than 20 per cent of its students qualify for free- or reduced-price lunch
The school has had at least eight winning seasons over the past ten years

* to be determined

Prior to each game, the difference in points between the two teams’  handicaps  would  be  awarded to the team with the lower handicap.

This is just a rough idea, of course. There’s still a lot of work to do,and I’m hoping I can get someone to pay me to do more research. Maybe I can get a grant from some big foundation (the Clinton Family Foundation maybe?) or some government agency - or even the NFL.  I figure $1 million would be a start - enough to get me up and running.

Obviously, the fact that this is about football at a time when there’s opposition to the sport could affect my success in getting funding, but I won’t let that stand in my way. If need be, I’ll shift my focus to getting more inner-city kids playing baseball.  Soccer, even.

Okay - call me a sellout.  But when I do land that grant, I’ll never forget all you little people I met along the way.  And never forget, guys - you knew me when I was nothing.

*********** “You wouldn’t  let somebody working at McDonald’s, when somebody pulls through, give them a hamburger and say, ‘I don’t know why you’re eating that  beef. Why aren’t you a vegetarian?’” Bob McNair, owner of the Houston Texans, on why NFL owners should should restrain their players from making political statements while they’re on the job.

*********** You may think that college sports is all about who’s best at every sport, but there’s a group of professional nags that calls itself The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES), and it seems to think that the real aim of sports is to promote diversity.

Annually, this diversity whore issues what it pretentiously calls its College Sport Racial and Gender Report Card, including such nuggets as these:

    •    Of the total male student-athletes in Division I athletics, white males decreased to 56.8 percent in 2016-17, while the percentage of African-American males increased to 22.3 percent.

    •    Of the total female student-athletes in Division I athletics, white females decreased to 64.9 percent in 2016-17, while African-American females decreased to 12.5 percent.

    •    White coaches dominated the head-coaching ranks on men's teams, holding 87 percent, 88 percent, and 92 percent of all positions in Divisions I, II and III, respectively. On the women's side, white coaches held 85 percent of Division I, 87 percent of Division II and 91 percent of Division III women's head-coaching positions.

    •    In Division I men's basketball, 22.3 percent of all head coaches were African-American, which was up 1.5 percentage points from the 20.8 percent reported in the 2015-16 season, but is still down 2.9 percentage points from the all-time high of 25.2 percent reported in the 2005-06 season.

    •    Only 7.2 percent of Division I head baseball coaches were people of color.

    •    The number of head football coaches of color at the FBS level increased by one to 17 in 2017. Eighty-seven percent of FBS head coaches were white in the 2017 season.

    •    When you combine the divisions, white coaches filled up 84, 91 and 95 percent of basketball, football and baseball head-coaching positions, respectively.

    •    African-Americans were so unrepresented as head coaches in Division III that the percentage of women coaching men's teams was actually higher than the percentage of African-Americans coaching men's team (6.2 percent versus 5.0 percent).

    •    Perhaps the most damning statistics are that more than 45 years after the passage of Title IX, women hold less than 40 percent of coaching opportunities in women's sports. Women held only 39.8 percent of the head-coaching jobs of women's teams in Division I, 35 percent in Division II and 44 percent in Division III.

    •    Looking at all Division I conferences, excluding Historically Black Conferences, 28 of 30 commissioners were white. Ten were women. This is the same as last year's results.

Ho hum.

http://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/22602600/the-ncaa-continues-struggle-2017-racial-gender-report-card








*********** Not sure where I saw this, but it sure would be a good idea for every football coach’s wife to carry a pack around with her. (Please feel free to copy and print as many as you need.)










*********** "Unlike other sports trophies, replicas of which are given to winning teams, there’s only one Stanley Cup, and in a country as hockey-obsessed as Canada, you can imagine what a big deal it is when the Stanley Cup comes to Moose Jaw for the day..."

Uh, Oh...

Wife Kathy and I follow the Tampa Bay Lightning (Go Bolts!) and have often switched to the NBC Sports Cable What-Not to watch whatever other NHL game is on between Periods in the Lightning run through the Play-Offs.

The other night the main TeeVee Announcer was giving us an anecdotal on a player who lived in the wilds of Moose Jaw.  Things is tough up there, don'cha know.

He turns to his partner and sez, "Do you know where Moose Jaw is?".  His partner knows he is being set up.

"Yes, I do...Ummm..."

"It's about four feet in front of the Moose's rear end..."

Self edited for television.

Charlie Wilson
Crystal River, Florida


*********** If/when Johnny Manziel ever makes it to The Show,  he’s already got himself a shoe, called “The Comeback.” 

Comeback? Don't you have to have been there before you can make a comeback?

https://thebiglead.com/2018/04/09/johnny-manziel-comeback-shoe-line-tony-gonzalez/

*********** While trying unsuccessfully to upload my page on Tueday night, I had some delightful online “chats” with the folks at Verio, whose server I use…

For what it’s worth, after hours and hours of back-and-forth, their "experts"  found that although I couldn’t upload things to my site, they could, which meant that the "issue" (does that make me  sound like a techie?)  was with my local network. I asked if maybe I should try doing what I always do when ever my Internet is down: unplug my modem and my router, and then replug them.

“Sure, you could try that,” was their reply.

Problem solved.  More than 12 hours after it was reported.

I suspect they didn’t tell me what to do right away because over in India they get their laughs listening  to old white American guys who are pissed off.

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

Head coach P.J. Fleck of the Minnesota Golden Gophers says they are going to actually play a full game this Saturday.  Maroon vs Gold.  This should be an interesting watch.

The Air Force AD must be a little crazy himself to take on the AD job at Berserkely.

Loved your joke.

You brought up a very good point about how homogeneous college football has become.  While I still manage to follow my heart and watch Notre Dame, Minnesota, and Fresno State I have become a huge fan of the service academies and Georgia Tech because they bring back a flood of great memories!

That incident at East Tennessee is just the tip of a very large iceberg. 

Have a great week!

Joe 

PS - I was right when I asked at the end of my last email to you, "What's next?"

Apparently it would be having USA teaching all of us how to BLOCK.  Well...why not?  We have ATAVUS teaching us how to TACKLE!  I guess the only things left for us is to have the NBA teach us how to FLOP, and the MSL teach us how to FAKE an injury after the FLOP.  OH...and yes...we will need to be CERTIFIED in all of them!

God help us.

Things are bad when you can go on YouTube and look  at college football games from 30 or 40 years ago and say, “that was better football!”  The players - linemen especially - were trimmer,  and on offense they really came off the ball hard and low.  An they still wore big boys’ shoulder pads -  because they used them.

I know we’re starting to sound like two old farts who can’t believe what these young whippersnappers are up to, but between the Hawk Tackling, the so-called blocking , and the group hug at East Tennessee, it's getting ridiculous.


*********** There are several reasons why Coach Jeff Brohm recruits Kentucky kids to Purdue University.  Perhaps the primary reason is he's from Louisville ("Lou-a-vul" to Kentucky natives), he played and coached at the University of Louisville and also coached at Western Kentucky.  I don't know how he managed to do it, but for a few years Western Kentucky hosted the Kentucky high school championship games. He was able to bring Kentucky's best players onto his own turf.  Because of this he knows most of the top high school coaches in the Commonwealth.  It also helps that the University of Kentucky is a basketball school where the football team is at best an afterthought.  But to those of us from Kentucky, moving North is a tradition. My father was from the Hills of Kentucky. The state thought so much of his "green" valley that they dammed-up the creek and turned it into a reservoir. There is a rather bitter saying in Kentucky: "The Three R's in Kentucky are readin', writin' and Route 31 to Indianapolis."  These kids are simply following the road of their ancestors. And, by the way, doesn't West Point ("THE United States Military Academy") also wear gold and black?

Jim Franklin
Flora, Indiana


I see some real fighting ahead in Kentucky, the Dark and Bloody Ground. Kentucky is not so large a state that it turns out enough D-I prospects to  support four programs: Kentucky, Louisville, Western and… Purdue.  You’re right about Army, although I don’t think of them as a black-and-gold team like the others (Purdue, Vanderbilt, Wake). Army actually has three colors - black, gray and gold. But they never seem to use the gray - and their “gold”  (shield and sword at left) is looking to me more and more like dijon mustard.




*********** QUIZ ANSWER - My wife and I enjoy watching a TV show called “Barnwood Builders,” based on a crew of guys from West Virginia who buy up old, dilapidated barns and log cabins, then - when they can - carefully disassemble them,  and rebuild them elsewhere for people willing to pay well for their work.

Sometimes, when they can’t reconstruct, they’ll build something similar, using the original logs.

Sometimes, they just add the barnwood to their “boneyard,” where they come in handy as “spare parts” for future projects.

That description doesn’t do the show justice, because what this team of guys does reflects a great deal of respect for the craftsmen who initially built the old structures.

I was watching the show Sunday night when the “star,” a Mountaineer named Mark Bowe, took us on a visit to a place in Monongalia County, near the Pennsylvania line, where a guy had restored an old stone house that dated back to 1815.

The place was a near-wreck when the guy found it, but now, it’s absolutely beautiful, inside and out.

The guy who restored it is a former West Virginia University quarterback - Jeff Hosteler.  A Pennsylvania native, he originally enrolled at Penn State, but after Todd Blackledge was named the starter, he transferred to WVU.  After sitting out the mandatory year, he started for two seasons and the Mountaineers went 18-6, including a win over #9-ranked Oklahoma in his first-ever start, and WVU’s first win over Pitt in seven years.  He even inspired a country song, “Ole Hoss.” And he married his college coach, Don Nehlen’s, daughter. In the NFL, he blazed the trail for Nick Foles:  Near the end of the 1990 season, after playing several years in the NFL, mostly as a backup, he was contemplating retiring, when the Giants’ starter, Phil Simms, broke his foot in the 14th game of the season.  Although he had started just two games in his career up to then,  Jeff Hosteler took over the team and led the Giants to five straight wins: two regular-season games, two playoff games, and a 20-19  Super Bowl win over the Buffalo Bills.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igY3pd61WzQ

CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING JEFF HOSTETLER -
JOSH MONTGOMERY - BERWICK, LOUISIANA
JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
GREG KOENIG - CIMARRON, KANSAS
TIM BROWN - FLORENCE, ALABAMA
DAVE DEMPSEY - BRICK, NEW JERSEY
ADAM WESOLOSKI - PULASKI, WISCONSIN
OSSIE OSMUNDSON - WOODLAND, WASHINGTON
JOHN HARRIS - MARTINSVILLE, VIRGINIA
KEN HAMPTON - RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA

*********** QUIZ - Short and stout, he was often referred to as the “Little Round Man.”

He was born in Milledgeville, Georgia, and went to Georgia Military College and then Mercer University. After graduation, he spent 10 years as a high school coach, and at three different schools he coached undefeated championship teams.

He got his first college coaching job in 1938, and after one year as an assistant there he was promoted to head coach and remained on the job  there until 1960.

His overall record was 140-86-9.  His 1942 team won the national title, and his 10-0 1946 team was one of only two undefeated teams in the country.  In an era when bowls were few and a bowl appearance was quite an accomplishment, his teams were 5-2-1 in bowl games.

Two of his best players were Frank Sinkwich, who won the Heisman Trophy, and Charlie Trippi, who won the Maxwell Trophy.

He was an early proponent of the passing game, and two of his quarterbacks - John Rauch and Zeke Bratkowski - went on to play in the NFL.

He was also ahead of his time in going way out of state for talent: Sinkwich (born in Croatia) was from Youngstown, Ohio; Trippi was from Pittston, Pennsylvania; Bratkowski was from Danville, Illinois; and Rauch was from Yeadon, Pennsylvania.

After his retirement as head coach, he remained at the school as AD, and when a major magazine claimed that he and Alabama coach Bear Bryant had conspired to fix their schools’ upcoming game, he and Bryant sued for $10 million each.  Bryant settled for $300,000, but our guy took it to court and was awarded $3 million. It was the largest settlement in history at that time, and is generally considered to have been the major factor in the demise of the magazine.

TUESDAY,  APRIL 10,  2018 -  "I will pound you and pound you until you quit." Woody Hayes

A defensive player intercepted a pass during one drill and began running the ball out of the end zone. Sanders approached the player and told him not to run with the ball and instead just take a knee in the end zone. The player replied that he would take a knee in an actual game situation.

Sanders then slapped the player's helmet. According to the report, the player became "visibly upset," took off his helmet and pads and left the field while some of his teammates attempted to console him. Sanders said he tried to speak with the player but let him walk away after seeing the player's reaction.

Oh, the poor thing. Fortunately, though, other players "attempted to console him."

Wow. Unless they can find some old-fashioned toughness somewhere, there's going to be a lot of taking off of helmets and pads and leaving the field when they play Tennessee on September 8.

http://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/23054956/newly-hired-etsu-coach-randy-sanders-reprimanded-docked-helmet-slap


*********** QUIZ  ANSWER - A native Texan, Robert Reese Neyland (KNEE-land) started out at Texas A & M but transferred after a year to West Point.  He was an all-round athlete. He played football - he was a teammate of a Kansan named Dwight Eisenhower, a Missourian named Omar Bradley, and a Floridian named James Van Fleet  (Eisenhower and Bradley would go on to earn five stars each, and Van Fleet four) - he was a standout pitcher on the baseball team, and he was the Academy’s heavyweight boxing champion.

An outstanding student, he graduated as a civil engineer, and spent a career in the Army, retiring as a general.

After World War I service, he spent six years at West Point, part of the time as aide to the Superintendent, one Douglas MacArthur, as well as assisting the football team, until 1925,  when he was assigned to serve as an ROTC instructor at the University of Tennessee. (He had chosen the assignment because Tennessee's football team was so poor.) There, he assisted with the football team for one year, and the next year he took over as head coach.  With time off for two different tours of active duty, he would hold that position for the next 26 years.

In 21 seasons as head coach, his teams won 173 games and lost only 31 times.

In all, he had 6 undefeated teams, 6 teams with only one loss, and 5 with just two losses.

He ran a balanced-line single wing, and was a proponent of a strong kicking game, but he was most famous for his defense.

In 1938 and 1939, his teams ran off 17 straight shutouts, and 70 consecutive quarters of shutout football.

So stout were his defenses that over his entire career, his teams gave up an average go just 5.6 points per game. One of his most famous players, all-time great lineman Herman Hickman, once said,

“If General Neyland could score a touchdown on you, he had you beat.  If he could score two - he had you in a rout.”

He never had a losing season, but, after retiring from the Army (as a brigadier general) after World War II, he had back-to-back .500 seasons in 1947 and 1948, and some began to question his emphasis on defense and his stubborn insistence on continuing to run the single-wing.

He put an end to any doubts by going 36-6-2 in his final four seasons, including winning the national title in 1951.

After retiring as head coach in 1952, he served as AD until 1962. When he became head coach, the stadium seated 3,200 people.  When he retired as AD, it seated 46,000 people.  Now, it’s named Neyland Stadium in his honor, and it seats in excess of 100,000

CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING GENERAL BOB NEYLAND
JOSH MONTGOMERY - BERWICK, LOUISIANA
JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
GREG KOENIG - CIMARRON, KANSAS
MIKE FRAMKE - GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN
ADAM WESOLOSKI - PULASKI, WISCONSIN
JOHN BOWEN - MT. VERNON, GEORGIA
TIM BROWN - FLORENCE, ALABAMA
DAVID BUCHANAN - BARRE, MASSACHUSETTS
TOM WALLS - WINNIPEG, MANITOBA
MARK KACZMAREK - DAVENPORT, IOWA
KEVIN MCCULLOUGH - LAKEVILLE, INDIANA
MIKE BENTON - COLFAX, ILLINOIS
JOHN BOTHE - OREGON, ILLINOIS
KEN HAMPTON - RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
OSSIE OSMUNDSON - WOODLAND, WASHINGTON


*********** General Robert R. Neyland  had the first no-hitter in Army West Point baseball history.
Tim Brown
Florence, Alabama

*********** Gen. Robert Reese Neyland…Would always visit the stadium when passing through to the Smokies, during Spring Break on our way to Columbia, SC to visit our daughter & catch one of her track meets...I’m sure our coach’s family isn’t the 1st to go a little out of the way to visit a stadium on their travels!

Mark Kaczmarek
Davenport, Iowa

Guilty as charged.  I’ve been known to drive out of my way to see a stadium.  My friend, the late Frank “The Pope” Lovinski, had a  competition with his younger brother, Chuck, to see who could watch games in the most college stadia - Division I, II and III.

I swear The Pope once told me he had seen games in more than 100 stadia.

*********** A video, sent by Greg Koenig

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcfYRqI4-Ek

*********** A Video about the General, narrated by the great Lindsay Nelson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4b1702-i2c

*********** General Neyland’s “Seven Maxims” are known to anyone who played football at Tennessee, many people who have followed Tennessee football over the years, and lots of southern football fans:

* The team that makes the fewest mistakes will win.
* Play for and make the breaks and when one comes your way – SCORE.
* If at first the game – or the breaks – go against you, don't let up... put on more steam.***
* Protect our kickers, our QB, our lead and our ball game.
* Ball, Oskie, cover, block, cut and slice, pursue and gang tackle... for this is the WINNING EDGE.
* Press the kicking game. Here is where the breaks are made.
* Carry the fight to our opponent and keep it there for 60 minutes.

*** When these words were written, the most powerful machines on earth were steam locomotives.

http://library.la84.org/SportsLibrary/CFHSN/CFHSNv16/CFHSNv16n2a.pdf

In the beginning there was Camp, and he was The Law. He said, “Let there be a line of scrimmage,” and there was. He said, “Let there be eleven players,” and there were. He said, “Let there be a system of downs to determine ball possession,” and it was so.

But if Walter Camp, the great 1888-1892 Yale coach, was the father of football, then another Yalie who went  west to Chicago, Amos Alonzo Stagg, was surely the sport’s first artist, weaving laterals and reverses into the game’s design, putting the man in motion, numbering the players, and bestowing varsity letters.  The game would never look the same after this former divinity student had his say.

Of course, that is not to discount the contributions of Glen “Pop” Warner, the wily shape shifter who relished the tricky play and whose genius birthed the single wing offense, which provided sufficient deception for both the running and the passing game.

These were the men who created football on the fly, on practice and game fields of the Ivies and, in the case of Warner, on the fields of the Carlisle Indian School, where his native Americans played , including the great Jim Thorpe.

In the early days Yale dominated the game, but in 1898 the arrival of two players ushered in the “golden age” of Harvard football. One was the aristocratic Percy Haughton; the other a sensational quarterback named Charles Daly, who earned All-American status there and later at West Point. Both men went on to become noted coaches.  Houghton was a brilliant innovator, assimilating the ideas of Camp and Warner into his own original contributions.  When Haughton was made Harvard’s head coach in 1908, he hired Charles Daly as his assistant.  Although the two men were contemporaries, it is generally agreed that Daly absorbed most of Haughton’s philosophies and that he passed them on when he himself became a head coach at West Point.

Thus, when a young Texan named Robert Reese Neyland arrived at the Point in 1912, his football lineage would stretch back to the founders of the game.

FRIDAY,  APRIL 6,  2018 -  “Winners don't win. Losers lose. The team that makes the fewest mistakes will be the winner."   General Robert R. Neyland

*********** Johnny Manziel reminds me of Hillary Clinton. They’ve both blown amazing opportunities, and they both blame their failures on somebody else.

Manziel, the artist once known as Johnny Football, says it’s the Browns’ fault that he didn’t make it with them.  See, despite what he might have told them otherwise, they should have known, for God’s sake, that he wasn’t going to apply himself! That he wasn’t going to work at being a professional quarterback!  They should have known that he wasn’t going to be spending his time in the offices looking at film when he could be out partying.

Those damn, deplorable Browns.

http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2018/04/04/the-problems-with-manziels-comments-about-the-browns/

*********** The city of Vancouver, Washington, which adjoins my town, Camas,  was actually named before its much bigger and better-known counterpart in British Columbia.

The USA version was originally Fort Vancouver,  the first European settlement in the Pacific Northwest.  It was still British territory then, and Fort Vancouver was a trading post owned by the Hudson’s Bay Company.

A replica of the original fort still stands, and it’s quite impressive. Depending on when you visit, it’s possible to see all sorts of craftsmen performing their trades just as they would have nearly 200 years ago, using the tools of the time.

I was just reading an article about the first steamboat in the Pacific Northwest.  It was built in England and brought to Fort Vancouver (under sail power - they didn’t want to risk the steam engines on an ocean voyage) about 1835.

Anyone nostalgic for the days of steam should know that fueling the steamboat kept a team of 12 woodcutters constantly busy: it took them two days to cut enough wood to keep the boat operating for just one day. (Personally, I’d have recommended hiring 12 more woodcutters.)

Ah, the good old days. 

*********** I wouldn’t say that we’ve grown soft.  Oh, no - not the nation whose college-age students insist that they be warned that the literary classic “Huckleberry Finn,” written more than 100 years ago, might contain language considered offensive by today’s standards.

(I find their sensitivity to objectionable language ironic, after hearing Parkland shooting “survivor” David Hogg, supposedly a spokesperson for today’s oh-so-bright young people, generously larding his talks with vulgarities.)

But I didn’t realize how bad things had become until I heard the promo for the movie “Chappaquidick,” and the warning that it showed “historic smoking.”

“Get the kids out of here, Martha! Someone in the movie just lit up a cigarette!”

*********** Back in the 1970s, when Lou Holtz was at Arkansas, I bet I heard him speak a half-dozen times.  He was a lot better then - not like today, when he’s on TV talking to a mass audience.  Back then, it was at coaching clinics.  He was talking to fellow football coaches, and lemme tell you - there was no one better.

He could talk X’s and O’s with the best of them.  He could bring down the house with his self-disparaging humor.  He could perform magic tricks.  And  in his homespun way, he could impart some real wisdom.

One nugget that I’ve remembered through the years was, “you get what you want in life by giving other people what they want.”

Think about that - it’s really simple but it’s really deep. It’s about thinking of others and what motivates them. 

I’ve used it in my own life, and I’ve passed it along to football players in locker rooms and students in my classrooms.

It applies, I tell them, to a girlfriend, or a parent, or a boss, or a teammate, or a teacher.  Or a coach.   You don’t break into the starting lineup, I’d say, by showing up late to practice.  You’re not going to be in the plans if you refuse to come to summer conditioning.  Simple as that.

In economic terms, we’re talking about a form of barter.  Quid pro quo. This for that.

My daughter, Vicky, majored in economics, and she was recently asked to teach a lesson on economics to a group of third graders.  Now what the hell do third graders know about a supply curve?  Or a medium of exchange? Or money, for that matter?

But they know about barter.  Even if they don’t know the word, they know what it means.  They’ve all exchanged something.  They’ve swapped.   They’ve traded. They have an idea of the value of a thing, based on what they might get for it in trade.  They begin to understand that in order to get something that they want that someone else has, they will have to give up something of theirs that the other person wants.

As I talked with Vicky, I heard Lou Holtz once again.  I told her what he said, and I reminded her of the days of, “I’ll trade you a butterscotch krimpet*  for half your peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

Actually, nowadays (if they’re fortunate enough to have someone pack a lunch for them) it’s probably “I’ll trade you a handful of trail mix for your kale salad.”

(Provided the school hasn’t already outlawed the swapping of food.)

* A Philly treat, made by the makers of TastyKake.

*********** I had a friend named Norm Maves, now retired after years of writing for the Portland Oregonian, who came to talk to one of my high school writing classes, and he mentioned that if you were to think of a piece of writing as a building, spelling, punctuation and grammar were  the nails and screws and nuts and bolts that held your structure together.

At roughly the same time, the elementary school principal asked me if I would help judge their annual writing competition.  Somehow, she mentioned that spelling, punctuation and grammar were not to be considered in the judging, because they “didn’t stress that.”

Telling her that from my point of view, that was the only thing they should be stressing, I declined.

It made no difference.  The feel-good teaching continues to this day: “Just get them to put it down on paper.  Don’t discourage their creativity by insisting on all those stupid rules.” Creativity above communication.

Then came email and texting and with it - OMG - the further decline of our language.

But at least we had the news media as the last outpost of correct English.  I mean, you’d think, in the four years of “journalism school” that’s supposedly required to learn what’s needed to get an internship at a TV station, that there would be time to teach the basics of our language. 

But you’d be wrong. Instead, they’re churning out graduates who are well equipped to go to war for social justice, other than the fact that they lack the language skills that your grandparents had before they left eighth grade.

They don’t have the slightest understanding of the meaning of  swim-swam-swum… or drink-drank-drunk… or run-ran-run.

They take nouns and make verbs out of them. (Not that they even know what nouns and verbs are.)  The nounverb “to task” is here to stay. The mountain has been “summitted.” We “gifted” her.  And just yesterday I heard someone on TV say that the police had “efforted” to try to do something.

They seem to think that the past tense (tense? what’s that?) of every verb (oops - there’s that word again) is formed by putting a “-d” or an “-ed” at the end.  Remember what the “journalists” said that protesting NFL players did during the national anthem? Why, they “kneeled,” is what they did. (Is “I feeled sick” next?)  And an Olympian “dived.” (Later, I suppose, he downed a six-pack and then drived drunk.)  The defendant “pleaded” not guilty.  The quarterback “slided” for the first down. And the driver “speeded,” and “weaved” in and out of traffic.

Today, I read in the newspaper that the Ravens had just signed Robert Griffin III, whose career, the article said, had “grinded to a halt.”

I winded the clock.  And I finded some grinded beef and made it into a patty.

God help us all.  It’s evolution in reverse.

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

I have a question about your cadence or lack of cadence.

By going on a single call, in this case “Go” what, if anything, has that taken away from the defense? It seems to me that it would handicap the defense's ability to stem or shift. Have you seen this?

Also, do you have any coaching tips that you used when you made this transition (other than the foot for motion).

While it may actually help the defense somewhat, thinking that they know when we’ll snap the ball,  we can negate that by spending a little practice time - very little - working on a longer count or a “no play” in which we don’t snap it at all.

I see few disadvantages, and a lot of advantages, the chief one being that we NEVER get false start penalties.  What’s that worth?

Going to a simple snap command was never an issue because 95 per cent of the time we went on the same count (go-ready-HUT) anyhow.  It just amounted to saying “the hell with it - let’s just go on 'GO!' every time!”

We decided this one July day at a camp in Kansas - just like that - and when I returned to my team I said that’s the way it’s going to be and that’s the way it’s been for almost 10 years.

It’s given us one less thing to have to deal with in practice, and  as much as possible, along with using the play cards, it's taken memorization - long- or short-term - out of the equation for the kids.

Kids love anything that they don’t have to think about.  And so should coaches, because when kids have to think they can’t be aggressive.

Snapping on GO does give us the ability to snap the ball while the defense is in the process of stemming (shifting).  It is a HUGE help when we’re under center.

*********** I have to admit that I thought that  the name of every player on every NHL team that ever won the Stanley Cup is engraved on the famous trophy.

Oh, I knew that the trophy had grown rather large, from what was once just a rather small silver bowl. I knew that its base had been added to, one layer after another containing the names of more and more players from more and more teams, as the years have passed.

But what I didn’t know was that all that adding to the trophy had finally come to an end - that adding any more layers, and any more names, would make the trophy too large to carry around the ice on the famous “skate-around” by the members of the winning team that follows every Stanley Cup final game.

And, every bit as important, too large to be carried on airlines, when the cup makes its off-season trips, escorted by an NHL executive, to assorted places around the globe where it spends 24 hours with every member of the winning team. (Unlike other sports trophies, replicas of which are given to winning teams, there’s only one Stanley Cup, and in a country as hockey-obsessed as Canada, you can imagine what a big deal it is when the Stanley Cup comes to Moose Jaw for the day.)

So, sorry to say, in order to make room for future players on future Stanley Cup-winning teams, something has to go.  Now, that “something” is a silver band on which was engraved the names of players from 1954 to 1965.  It will be flattened out and sent to the hockey Hall of Fame, but the names on it - names like Bobby Hull, Gordie Howe and Maurice “The Rocket” Richard, and the other players from the great Montreal and Toronto teams of that era - will no longer be on the Stanley Cup.

Right now, if you're an old-timer, they figure your time on the cup to be another 63 years. Eventually, provided we don’t destroy our planet, every name that's now on it will be gone, too.

So much for immortality.

https://apnews.com/3d3ebad3e38a4d028160321cba92c702

*********** EXCERPTED FROM THE UPCOMING DOUBLE WING PLAYBOOK-

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

Hope you and Connie were able to enjoy a peaceful and blessed Easter.

I've always followed the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "What lies behind us, and what lies ahead of us, are small matters compared to what lies within us." 

I can still remember the days.  Practicing getting under our school desks covering our heads during atomic bomb attack drills.  Sitting at grandma's house when I was 10 years old watching the TV with my family wondering if we were about to die from a nuclear war.  Then, after I had turned 18, when my family and I sat in front of the TV and watched with baited breath the "lottery" for the draft (and I'm not talking about the NFL or the NBA), and watched as the basket of numbers spun around to determine the fate of so many young American boys including yours truly.  And voila!  Pretty scary stuff.

Whew!  No chance for a Schwartzylvania.

I'm close to getting rid of my DISH service.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, Hopper and Joeys and all that stuff.  My only question for them when I bought it was, "Will I lose the signal during a storm?"  I had a number of my friends have that experience.  Answer, "OH, gosh, NO!  Our equipment is so much better now!  You won't have that happen."   Yeah, sure. here's my answer now that I have had it for a couple of years, "Well...you better keep trying to improve your equipment because what you have cannot cope with the nasty storms we get here in Texas, because EVERY TIME we get a storm we lose the d***signal!!"

We don't have a "Unity Week" yet here at my school.  Give it time.

Where and when did all this take a knee for injuries thing get started?

QUIZ:  This was an easy one...Weeb Ewbank!

Have a great week!

Joe Gutilla
Austin, Texas

The superintendent has apologized to the community. But Mr. Schwarzman is not going to have to go away empty-handed.  They won’t be naming the high school for him - or, for that matter, the township.  BUT - in addition to the stadium, which was already named for him, they are going to put his name on the school’s new Center for Science and Technology. 

AND, to acknowledge his appreciation of his experience on the track team, two of his track teammates will be  honored by having athletic buildings named for them, and the school’s Athletic Hall of Fame will be named in honor of his former track coach.

I’m left wondering if perhaps there might have been other athletes or coaches over the years  more deserving on the basis of their accomplishments, but what the hell use is all that money if you can’t buy almost anything you want with it?  (Almost.)

Not exactly Schwarzylvania.  But pretty damn close.

http://www.philly.com/philly/education/abington-high-school-apology-steven-schwarzman-25-million-donation-20180403.html?mobi=true

*********** Adam Wesoloski, who now lives in Pulaski, Wisconsin, is a Menominee, Michigan native who not long ago sent me a nice article about fellow Menominee native Billy Wells.  This latest news is about the passing of another Menominee athlete, Bill Rademacher, who played for the New York Jets on the Super Bowl team that beat the Colts.

http://ehextra.com/Content/SPORTS/Sports-Articles/Article/Menominee-s-ultimate-overachiever-/14/37/46267

*********** I'm pleased to see the US Army taking steps to raise the standards. Hopefully, other segments of society will follow their lead and buck the trend of lowering standards to be inclusive.

Coach Greg Koenig
Cimarron, Kansas

*********** QUIZ ANSWER - Weeb Ewbank coached John Unitas and Joe Namath.  He is the only coach to have won an NFL championship and an AFL championship. He won a Super Bowl by beating the team that had fired him six years earlier.

He came out of Richmond, Indiana and attended Miami University, where he played football, baseball and basketball.  One of his football teammates was a transfer from Ohio State named Paul Brown.

After graduation, he coached high school football in Ohio until 1943, when he joined the Navy during World War II.

He wound up on Paul Brown’s staff at Great Lakes Naval Training Center, a service team so good that it once beat Notre Dame.  (Brown, before entering the Navy, had won a national championship coaching at Ohio State.)  After the war he served as an assistant at Brown University and as head coach at Washington University (St. Louis) before rejoining Paul Brown, who by then  was head coach of the Cleveland Browns, as an assistant.

After five years with the Browns, in 1954 he was named head coach of the Baltimore Colts. Although he won two NFL championships with the Colts, he was fired after the 1962 season.  He was quickly scooped up by the New York Jets, and by 1968 he had built  the Jets’ team that would beat his former team, the Colts, in one of the greatest upset in Super Bowl history.

Weed Ewbank retired as Jets’ coach following the 1973 season, and was succeeded by his son-in-law, Charlie Winner.

CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING WEEB EWBANK
RALPH BALDUCCI - PORTLAND, OREGON
KEN HAMPTON - RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
GREG KOENIG - CIMARRON, KANSAS
MARK KACZMAREK - DAVENPORT, IOWA
DAVID BUCHANAN - BARRE, MASSACHUSETTS
ADAM WESOLOSKI - PULASKI, WISCONSIN
JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
JOE GUTILLA - AUSTIN, TEXAS
TIM BROWN - FLORENCE, ALABAMA
PETE PORCELLI - WATERVLIET, NEW YORK
JOSH MONTGOMERY - BERWICK, LOUSIANA
OSSIE OSMUNDSON - WOODLAND, WASHINGTON
MIKE FRAMKE - GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN
DAVE DEMPSEY - BRICK, NEW JERSEY
MIKE BENTON - COLFAX, ILLINOIS
TOM WALLS - WINNIPEG, MANITOBA
DENNIS METZGER - RICHMOND, INDIANA
TOM DAVIS - SAN CARLOS, CALIFORNIA
KEVIN MCCULLOUGH - LAKEVILLE, INDIANA


*********** Weeb Ewbank used to bring his Jets teams to Peekskill, New York for training camp at the Peekskill Military Academy, where my mother got to watch "Broadway Joe" get ready for the NFL season. My grandmother has slides from when the band from Peekskill would go perform at Shea Stadium on "Peekskill Day" where the folks from the town could go watch the games for cheap!

(I mentioned a quarterback I had in my first year of coaching, a kid named Chuck Reilly, from Peekskill. Actually, from a part of Peeksill named Verplanck.)

My Uncle Bobby used to own a home on Verplanck's Point near the old fire house! She used to love to get Meatball Wedges (Hudson Valley version of a submarine sandwich) from Angie's down on the point. I spent a lot of time in Peekskill when I was younger, especially when my father was a professor at West Point. My mother and father met at West Point while my father was a cadet. She was attending Ladycliffe College (now defunct and part of the West Point Museum).

David Buchanan
Barre, Massachusetts

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

The answer is Weeb Ewbank.  My son and I had the opportunity to meet Coach Ewbank, John Unitas, Paul Flatley, Roosevelt Grier, Deacon Jones and Merlin Olson one day in Richmond, IN.  The fourth member of the Fearsome Foursome was a Richmond native named Lamar Lundy and these individuals were in town to support him as he was dealing with illness.  It was a great day.  My son as a 4th or 5th grader said to me on our way home, “That was a special day since we may never see those men together again.”  We have photos and autographs from all of them.  We were both thankful for this opportunity.

Dennis Metzger
Richmond, Indiana

*********** QUIZ - A native Texan, he started out at Texas A & M but transferred after a year to West Point.  He was an all-round athlete. He played football - he was a teammate of a Kansan named Dwight Eisenhower, a Missourian named Omar Bradley, and a Floridian named James Van Fleet  (Eisenhower and Bradley would go on to earn five stars each, and Van Fleet four) - he was a standout pitcher on the baseball team, and he was the Academy’s heavyweight boxing champion.

An outstanding student, he graduated as a civil engineer, and spent a career in the Army, retiring as a general.

After World War I service, he spent six years at West Point, part of the time as aide to the Superintendent, one Douglas MacArthur, as well as assisting the football team, until 1925 when he was assigned to serve as an ROTC instructor at a university in the South. (He had chosen the assignment because their football team was so poor.) There, he assisted with the football team for one year, and the next year he took over as head coach.  With time off for two different tours of active duty, he would hold that position for the next 26 years.

In 21 seasons as head coach, his teams won 173 games and lost only 31 times.

In all, he had 6 undefeated teams, 6 teams with only one loss, and 5 with just two losses.

He ran a balanced-line single wing, and was a proponent of a strong kicking game.  But he was most famous for his defense.

In 1938 and 1939, his teams posted 17 straight shutouts, and played 70 consecutive quarters of shutout football, both records that still stand (and likely always will).

So stout were his defenses that over his entire career, his teams gave up an average of just 5.6 points per game. One of his most famous players, all-time great lineman Herman Hickman, once said, “If (he) could score a touchdown on you, he had you beat.  If he could score two - he had you in a rout.”

He never had a losing season, but, after retiring from the Army (as a brigadier general) after World War II, he had back-to-back .500 seasons in 1947 and 1948, and some began to question his emphasis on defense and his stubborn insistence on continuing to run the single-wing.

He put an end to any doubts by going 36-6-2 in his final four seasons, including winning the national title in 1951.

After retiring as head coach in 1952, he served as AD until 1962. When he first became head coach, the school's stadium seated 3,200 people.  When he retired as AD, it seated 46,000 people.  Now, it seats in excess of 100,000. 

TUESDAY,  APRIL 2,  2018 -  “Football represents and embodies everything that's great about this country, because the United States of America is built on winners, not losers or people who didn't bother to play."   Woody Hayes

*********** AN EXCERPT FROM THE UPCOMING DOUBLE-WING PLAYBOOK UPDATE…




*********** It won’t be “Abington Schwarzman High School” after all.

Last Friday I mentioned the brouhaha generated by the news that my wife’s alma mater, Abington High School, in Pennsylvania, had decided to essentially sell the naming rights to the school.

I remember the first time I saw Abington HS and thinking, "my g*d, this place is like a palace!" Now Schwarzman, who has spent a lifetime stealing money (that's what investment bankers do, folks, and I have some insight as I worked at Blackstone), now wants to give a big chunk of it to one of the most affluent public schools in the state in exchange for naming rights! The whole Wharton School/Wall Street culture is so loathsome!

FRIDAY,  MARCH 30,  2018 - “Courage is knowing what not to fear.”  Plato

*********** I’ve lived a long life.  I’ve lived in five states and I’ve lived roughly half my life on each coast.  I’ve earned a living doing all sorts of things from being a factory foreman to sales to marketing  to sports management to teaching and coaching to doing what I’m doing now (whatever it’s called).  I’ve been to all 57 states (that’s a joke, fellas) and I’ve coached American football in Europe. In that time, and in all those places, I’ve seen a lot of things.  That includes  the things that money can do.

But I made the mistake of thinking I’d  seen it all.

You will recall that not so long ago I mentioned the generosity of one Stephen Schwartzman, an alumnus, as is my wife (although, being female, she’s an “alumna”) of Abington High School, in Abington, Pennsylvania.  Mr. Schwartzman announced that he was donating $25 million - one of the largest private gifts ever to a public high school - to Abington Schools, which announced the funds would be used for all kinds of things mainly related to science and technology education.

Well.   Whatever happened to those little ads in yearbooks that used to say, simply, “compliments of a friend?”  You know - ads bought by people who wanted to donate money, but wished to remain anonymous?

Less than a month has gone by since the donation was announced, but that’s all to took for the Abington School Board to announced its unanimous decision to rename the high school in honor of Mr. Schwartzman.  Hereinafter, it will be “Abington Schwartzman High School.”

Are they serious?  I thought.   It sounds like one of the goofy hyphenated jawbreaker names that today’s parents saddle their kids with.

Hey - we’re not talking about a junk high school in a jerkwater town.  Abington Township, a relatively prosperous Philadelphia suburb,  dates back to 1704, and has a population of about 55,000. The median household income is $94,000. Only 2 per cent of families lie below the poverty line. According to the latest census, it’s 80 per cent white, 12 per cent black, 3 per cent Hispanic and 3 per cent Asian.  (It’s not a “town” as you might think of it, but a “township,” common in Pennsylvania, which contains 15 unincorporated  communities, each with their own post office.)

To a great extent, Abington schools knit the 15 communities together.  Abington High School has a three-year enrollment of about 1700 students and graduates upwards of 500 kids every year. It’s top-notch academically -its  chess team is a perennial state championship contender.   Its sports teams compete in the prestigious Suburban One Conference. (Side note: more than 20 years ago, thanks to its head coach, Doug Moister, Abington was where  I “field-tested” my Double Wing before putting my original video up for sale.)

The school board has assured its patrons that this was NOT Mr. Schwartzman’s idea.  Oh, no. Not Mr. Schwartzman.  This was purely the board’s idea of a way to thank him.   Totally the board’s idea!  And in their thinking, merely putting his name on the wing of a building would never have sufficed. They had to rename the whole school!

To those people who thought that it was Mr. Schwartzman’s idea? The idea of tying his gift to the renaming of a school that’s carried the name of the township for more than 150 years? Not Mr. Schwartzman. He would NEVER do that.  Isn’t his name already on the football stadium?  I mean, it’s not as if, with all his money (he’s worth $22 billion), his ego needs still more stroking.  Is it? 

Hmmm…

Needless to say, community residents are furious.  In the course of one hastily-called school board meeting, Mr. Schwartzman went from benevolent philanthropist to Captain Narcissus.  One angry poster on a forum wondered when the school board members would get their “little Team Schwartzman jerseys.”

I once worked with a wrestling coach whose players’ sweatshirts had a strange sort of acronym on them:  “TANSTAAFL.”  Translated, it stood for, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

The good folks of Abington would understand.

And, okay - NOW I think I’ve seen it all.

*********** There are coaches’ wives, and then there are DOUBLE WING coaches’ wives…

A friend who resigned his position not long ago said that the kids at his school told him that one of the applicants for his former job told them he intends to run the Fly offense.  When my friend’s wife asked what the Fly was, he explained as best he could, and when he mentioned the big line splits, she said, “How do you run Wedge out of that?”

*********** I FOUND THIS INFORMATION: To find out what Facebook thinks your political allegiances are, head over to www.facebook.com/ads/preferences. From there, click on the "Lifestyle and culture" tab under the Interests section. There should be a box in that section titled "US politics" (you may have to click "see more" to find it), which will include, in parentheses, your political designation — for example, liberal, conservative, moderate, etc. (This information might also appear in a drop down menu.) As with the other ad preferences on this page you can remove it by clicking the X in the top right corner.

Well, I did just that, and I’ll be damned! They say I’m “Very Conservative.”  Wow.  Those Facebook people are GOOD!

Okay, okay.  Guilty as charged.

But I do think their little program could use some tweaking, because it also said I like soccer.  Right.

Now, if THAT’S the kind of info they’ve been supplying to advertisers, they’re hoaxters.

Either that, or my account’s been hacked by Russians.


*********** A reader teased me gently about a typo I’d made, and then he and I engaged in a little bit of banter.  I jokingly wrote him, “Every so often I slip a simple error into my writing in hopes that someone is actually reading, and - there - I caught you.  Actually, I welcome you onto my crack team of volunteer proofreaders.”

Yes, my wife does read my page shortly after I upload it, but there’s always something that slips through.

I can actually remember when newspapers actually paid people to proofread.  That was back in the late 60s and early 70s when I’d make a few bucks in the winter covering basketball games for local papers. There, over in the corner of the newsroom,  would sit an older lady whose only job was to peruse the paper, looking for errors that needed correction.  (Newspapers back then still took pride, as they long had, in being exemplars of good, careful writing.)

Now, those old proofreaders are long gone, and it’s obvious that most newspapers depend on their readers to do it.

I once had an assistant coach who managed all the Domino’s stores in the Portland area.  One day I asked him what kind of training program they had for new employees and he said, “We let our customers train them!”



*********** A tsunami   (metaphorically speaking) has hit North Beach High School, in Ocean Shores, Washington.

I coached at North Beach for a total of seven seasons, and it broke my heart when it all came to an end last year.  Todd Bridge, who’d been head coach, finally had enough, and resigned his teaching and coaching job to take a position as athletic director at Elma, Washington.  Before the start of this past school year, the principal also left, so eager to get out that he took a lesser job as assistant principal/athletic director at another school. The AD left, too.  And so did the school secretary. (Anybody who knows how a school operates knows that the loss of the secretary really hurts.)

The football season was a disaster. We’d gone 30-11 the previous four seasons, including two league championships - the first in the school’s history.  But after Todd resigned, they hired a young fellow who’d never before held a paid coaching position.  The results were predictable. Without going into detail, the Hyaks went 1-7. They were outscored, 116-315.  Their last three games ended with running clocks.  Worst of all, in one game, a brawl in front of their bench, precipitated by a late hit out of bounds on the opposing quarterback, resulted in the ejection of three North Beach players.

It all traces to one bad hire.  After years of good, sound operation under the experienced hand(s) of two administrators, retirees from other districts who shared the superintendency, the school board hired a woman from a fairly large Seattle-area district with no prior experience managing people or running a school district.   I never met the woman, but I don’t have to -  I’ve never met anyone who has had a good thing to say about her. 

Discipline at the school, never great,  by all accounts went to hell.  By this January, the faculty was up in arms,  delivering a vote of no confidence to the school board.  Subsequently,  more than 75 per cent of teachers, from kindergarten through high school, announced their intention to leave the district if she remained.  Last week, the board announced that she had “resigned.”  (Maybe she wanted to “spend time with her family.”)

But like a human tsunami, she left a lot of wreckage in her path. 

Well.  The human tsunami may be gone,  but hanging always over the heads of Ocean Shores residents (my wife and I still have a place there) is the possibility of the Real Thing,  a real,  earthquake-triggered tsunami that would - no exaggeration - wipe us off the face of the earth.  Tuesday, the local newspaper, the Aberdeen “Daily World,” carried some really cheery news:

New tsunami inundation maps released by the State Department of Natural Resources Monday show a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast of Grays Harbor and Willapa Bay could create a tsunami that could hit the outer coastline at more than 40 mph with waves ranging from 20 to 60 feet for at least 12 hours before subsiding.



Ocean Shores (circled) is definitely one of those places where a tsunami “could” come in at “up to” 40 miles per hour, and the waves “could” be “up to” 60 feet high. Ocean Shores is a 7-mile long peninsula ( a sand spit, actually) between the Pacific and a large bay known as Grays Harbor (named for ship captain Robert Gray, who in the process of exploring the Pacific Northwest coast entered what turned out to be the mouth of a great river and named it the Columbia, after his ship). There’s just one road from Ocean Shores, a couple of feet above sea level,  to higher ground, and it’s a winding, two-lane highway. In Ocean Shores itself, there’s only only one street that intersects with that highway.   Sixty foot waves?  I have no no idea how far we’d have to go to get to ground that high, but it’s not worth worrying about, because if all we had was 20 minutes’ warning before it started to hit, we’d be lucky if we even made it to the main intersection.  A few years ago, we had a neighbor who said he was all prepared for a tsunami - he had plenty of liquor in his cabinet, and if he ever heard the tsunami siren, he’d pour himself a stiff drink, then sit back and look out the window and watch it come.

We’ll be heading up to our place at Ocean Shores this weekend, and we’ll have a great time.  Of course, we do keep a nice supply of booze on hand (purely for emergency purposes, you understand).

http://www.thedailyworld.com/news/dnr-magnitude-9-quake-on-the-coast-could-hit-outer-coastline-with-waves-to-60-feet/?utm_source=The+Daily+World&utm_campaign=02052468a2-Newsletter_Daily_Update&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e632e0b0b6-02052468a2-229076889

*********** Just when the furor over the NFL’s kneelers had started to subside, along comes Mr. Robert Kraft,  to stir things up once again.  Mr. Kraft, billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, provided the team’s plane to fly some human stage props, aka “Parkland shooting survivors,” to last weekend’s anti-gun march in Washington, DC. 

Hey, Mister Kraft - what about me? I’m a survivor!  Yes, I know - I was 3,000 miles away from the shooting, but where do you draw the line? Anyhow, can I use the plane this weekend?

https://www.si.com/nfl/2018/03/26/marjory-stoneman-douglas-parkland-florida-families-march-our-lives-patriots-plane-robert-kraft

*********** I saw this online and I thought it was worth passing along…

Dear Coach K,

I've never met you, though you've walked past me many times on a stretch of beach called Pine Knoll Shores. I didn't want to bother you, but wish I had known about your gift to Steve Mitchell. His departure from this earth has offered the story of a life well-lived. Steve was the man who sat behind you in Duke University's Cameron Indoor Stadium for the last 37 years and I know you miss him this season.

He did a lot in his sixty plus years. He was born with Down syndrome and his family shrugged off the doctors and took him right home. He was integrated in an era that made his parents ground breakers; school or church, Steve was there. I am a special needs mama too and with parenthood comes advocacy, their forging a path has benefited so many. You called Steve "a good friend who had some challenges." What a gift of inclusive language.

The story goes that in 1980 the only thing Steve Mitchell wanted for Christmas was a Duke basketball ticket, not an easy score, but Steve's brother had a construction company and was hired to renovate the new coach’s, Mike "Coach K" Krzyzewski's, house. He asked you how one might find a ticket to buy and explained his brother’s Christmas wish.

“He can sit behind me,” you said. Did you know how life changing that gift would be?

The following season, Steve wrote you a letter saying, “Coach, I know we’re going to have another great year. I was hoping that I could sit near you again.” You said yes to a family that may have heard no far more often. He wrote you a letter every year for 37 years and this is the first season that a ticket, reserved for one Steve Mitchell, isn’t waiting at will call. Steve would collect his ticket and make his way to his seat behind you (usually with the help of his favorite usher, Fran), a tradition that was life changing for his self-confidence, according to his family. You shook his hand before every game.

Thank you, Coach K.

Mamas of special needs kids know that kindness extends far beyond team affiliation and we know that our team is the best of all. Welcome to the club. And to Steve? Godspeed, my friend and thank you.

Love,

Adrian (Amos's mom)


*********** Maybe one day soon the NFL will start games with face-offs.  Or jump balls.  Or a mad scramble.  Oops. Better scratch that last one - too dangerous.
 
After all, that’s why it’s beginning to sound as if The League is getting ready to do away with kickoffs.  Way too dangerous.  Concussions and all that, don’t you know.

Green Bay Packers president Mark Murphy, a member of the NFL Competition Committee, said that if they  can’t come up with a way to reduce the injuries, the committee will “strongly consider” doing away with kickoffs.

“We’ve reduced the number of returns,” Murphy told reporters, “but we haven’t really done anything to make the play safer. If you don’t make changes to make it safer, we’re going to do away with it. It’s that serious. It’s by far the most dangerous play in the game.”

Murphy said that even when the ball’s kicked through the end zone and there’s no return, there are still injuries on the play:
“The other thing that’s kind of frustrating is there were concussions on touchbacks… One player lets up, the player covering lets up, and one of the blockers comes over and, you know. That creates problems when you’ve got one player going half speed and the other one full speed.”

I have it - why don’t they go back to what they did back before it was American football, and they  played rugby?  Oh.  You say rugby started games with a kickoff? You say it still does?  Never mind.

https://www.yardbarker.com/nfl/articles/nfl_competition_committee_may_consider_eliminating_kickoffs/s1_127_26055104

*********** Finally.  At long last.  The NFL, which claims to care about the health of the game while at the same time tolerating - glorifying, even - the kind of tactics and conduct by its players that endanger it, will now penalize any player who leads with the helmet in hitting an opponent.  I’m all for it.  It’s disgraceful what they’ve been allowing.  But in return for this small step in making an already-rough game less vicious, fans will have to sit through a video review - every f—king time it’s called!  And we’re only talking about a 15-yard penalty, not an ejection, as called for in college football.

*********** It had been a while - way too long - since I’d spoken with my old friend Kevin Latham, of Atlanta, so we had a long talk the other day.

Kevin, veteran readers may remember, had heart transplant surgery back in 2012.  He’s done quite well, returning to the classroom and a normal life, but now he’s decided to retire from teaching.

He’s looking forward to finding a coaching gig - as an assistant.  He’s never been an assistant, and I told him that if you’re as fortunate as I was in finding a good guy to work for, it’s a real joy to be able to just coach and not have the headaches of the head coach.

At the time we spoke, he was excited to tell me about his cousin - actually, his cousin’s son - Devin Ellison, a running back from Bartram Trail High in Jacksonville, Florida who’d just been offered by Georgia Tech.

Devin's had quite a few offers already - Kentucky, Wake Forest, Appalachian State  among them - and the bigger Florida schools are starting to move on him.  Kevin’s excited about Georgia Tech because he’d love to be able to go downtown on fall Saturdays and watch Devin play for the Rambling Wrecks.  (And for a running back with Devin’s moves and speed, I can’t imagine a better offense to play in than Tech’s.)

Devin is one of those rare kids with Power Five talent and Ivy League smarts - he’s also being recruited by Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Cornell.


(VIDEO) https://n.rivals.com/content/prospects/2019/devin-ellison-184379

https://247sports.com/player/devin-ellison-46037455

https://www.bloggersodear.com/2017/5/2/15511920/wake-football-offers-2019-4-star-running-back-devin-ellison-syracuse-rutgers-jacksonville-florida

http://gridironnow.com/jacksonville-area-2019-rb-devin-ellison-drawing-sec-acc-interest/


*********** Some places really know how to present their Black Lion Award.  Aquinas Institute, a private Catholic high school in Rochester, New York, has a long and storied football history.  It was to Aquinas where former Army great (and Heisman Trophy winner) Doc Blanchard came, in 1952, to recruit an Aquinas football player named Don Holleder, persuading him to turn down Notre Dame and instead attend West Point.  The rest is history:  Don Holleder and the men of the Black Lions - the 28th Infantry Regiment - who died in battle with him in Vietnam are the inspiration for the Black Lion Award.  As you can see from the invitation, the presentation of the Black Lion Award is a very big deal at Aquinas Institute! 


TUESDAY,  MARCH 27,  2018 - “It has long been the desire of our enemies to deepen and widen the line of separaton between the white and colored people of this country.” Frederick Douglass

''I remember how all of it started here,'' Dr. Cross continued. ''It was 1945 and the war had ended, and here in Oklahoma we were still feeling very depressed from those tough days that Steinbeck wrote about in 'The Grapes of Wrath.' At a board of regents meeting, it was suggested to me that I try to get a good football team. It would give Oklahomans a reason to have pride in the state. And it did, but I don't think it was very good for the university.''

Dr. Cross hired (Jim) Tatum, and Oklahoma was on its way. But Tatum ran the football team in so crudely professional a manner that the next year Dr. Cross hired (Bud) Wilkinson, a former English major from the University of Minnesota from a well-to-do family.

''Bud was a class act,'' said Dr. Cross. ''Over 90 percent of the football players graduated. Now it's well under 50 percent. One year our starting quarterback flunked out. But he was technically still eligible for the Orange Bowl game. Bud refused to let him play.''

Dr. Cross said that he had always kept in close touch with athletics, ''and broiled a steak at least once a month with the coach.''

He remembered the exact words his successor said about the athletic department when he left the presidency, ''Ah hell, the v.p. of nonacademic affairs can handle that.'' ''You'll be shocked,'' Dr. Cross told him. ''And he was,'' Dr. Cross recalled. ''And so were the four presidents who followed him.''

''Football players became separated from the rest of the student body, and didn't participate in other activities,'' Dr. Cross said. ''In the end, the president must assume responsibility for the entire school. The buck must stop there.''

Michael Bennett is a Super Bowl Champion, a three-time Pro Bowl defensive end, a fearless activist, a feminist, a grassroots philanthropist, an organizer, and a change maker. He's also one of the most scathingly humorous athletes on the planet, and he wants to make you uncomfortable.

Bennett adds his unmistakable voice to discussions of racism and police violence, Black athletes and their relationship to powerful institutions like the NCAA and the NFL, the role of protest in history, and the responsibilities of athletes as role models to speak out against injustice. Following in the footsteps of activist-athletes from Muhammad Ali to Colin Kaepernick, Bennett demonstrates his outspoken leadership both on and off the field.

This is Bill Battle's Wishbone.  I actually remember this Factoid from my wayward youth: The FB was WAY close to the QB.  You should recognize the depth of the FB.  It's Double Wing type stuff.  The whole development of the Wishbone at Texas took off when the FB was dropped back to ~ 3 1/2 yards.  It appears that there was some gaming going on here as well since some plays had the FB a little deeper.

Nonetheless, Bill Battle was a bit star-crossed although he did beat the Bear once but it wasn't enough.  Tennessee wanted Majors, who won a NC at Pitt with the Veer.

How did Majors do?

(The question is rhetorical, but if you don’t know: not well enough for the folks at Tennessee.)

*********** This past weekend, I was working with a young quarterback for the first time and he confessed that he’d always had troubles throwing a tight spiral.  I asked him to throw a few for me, and he mentioned that it felt strange throwing without a glove - said that last season he’d worn a glove.

I asked him why, and he said it was because he had small hands, and he had trouble gripping the ball.

I don’t have big hands, either, but I’ve never had problems gripping a ball - and his hand is slightly bigger than mine.

And then he mentioned the ball that his team used, and when he handed it to me it slipped out of my fingers!  Sucker felt like it was greased!

It was a Spalding ALPHA, a top-of-the-line, high-quality, real leather football, and it was as slick as the screen on my iPhone.

The QB said his receivers didn’t like it, either.  I could see why.

WTF?

Well. This was Washington, and the Spalding ALPHA is the official WIAA (state association) "championship" ball. Note the word “championship.” In WIAA-speak, that means “playoffs.”

During the season, you can use any ball you damn please, so long as it has the NFHS logo on it.

But for the post-season, the “playoff,” the state takes control, and in return for some handed to it by a ball supplier - in this case, Spalding - it then dictates to the participating teams that they must use that supplier’s ball.  Nice of it to sell off what amounts to our playing conditions.

Let’s not kid ourselves - this is a naked attempt by the state to dictate what ball you’ll use during your regular season, too, because otherwise, if you’re having any kind of  season and you have a shot at the playoffs,  at some point you’re going to have to make the switch over to the state-approved tournament ball so you’ll be ready.

That’s exactly the thinking of a lot of coaches, including this QB’s coach last year. Unfortunately, they missed making the playoffs - in their final game of the season -  and who knows? They might have made the playoffs  had they used a different ball during the regular season, one that their QB could throw and their receivers could catch.

I personally would have put making the playoffs first.  I’d have used the manageable ball in the regular season and then, once we were sure we made the playoffs, I’d start to break in the state-approved ball.

And in the meantime, I’d be trying out ways to take  that slickness off that damned Spalding ALPHA.

*********** Like a bad penny, Himself Obama keeps turning up. And now he’s threatening to go nuclear on us. Speaking in Japan, he said that through the efforts of the Obama Foundation,  “I would create a hundred or a thousand or a million young Barack Obamas or Michelle Obamas.”

I'll let you provide the punch line.

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

Stanford has it figured out.  One of a few universities in this country that knows how to strike a balance between its academic reputation and athletics.  There are a ton more opportunities nationally to find the type of young people they want representing their school than just in California and the west coast.  Isn't it interesting how intercollegiate athletics at Stanford has not tarnished the academic integrity of the university overall??

If my wife wasn't so against living in the snow we would be living in Hillsdale, MI.  I would have asked to hand out towels to work in an environment like that. 

I remember reading about "the Fort" and its accomplishments many years ago.  Lomax may think he has all the answers now but within a year he will be asking himself a lot more questions, and have alot less answers.  But one question he will have to answer will be, "Why the h*** did I take this job?"

Lying.  As seldom used word today as the phrases "knock it off"  and "shake it off'.  Been replaced by words like "misled", "inaccurate", "misremembered", etc.

You would think that a fella like Richard Sherman (salutatorian of his HS graduation class, a 4.2 GPA, and a STANFORD grad in Communications) would have been able to figure out he would have been better off without an agent years ago.  But...money (and a big mouth - after all he IS a SoCal kid) tend to have an effect on people.

QUIZ:  Ray Eliot Nusspickel (no relation to Pete Elliott - also an Illini head coach).  I would have used Eliot as my last name too.

Have a great weekend, and stay safe in Camas!  We're able to open up packages again down here.

Joe Gutilla
Austin, Texas

*********** TRUMP AND THE STRUMPET - (Now there’s a word I bet you’d never heard until just now - it’s an outdated word for a prostitute.)

We’re supposed, I guess, to be disturbed by the story, told by a strumpet - a “porn star” who goes by the stage name Stormy Daniels - who claims she did the nasty with Donald Trump, back In 2006.  If you’re keeping score, that’s ten years before he was elected President.  Fast forward to 2016, and as the election neared, Mr. Trump’s lawyer offered the trollop (another outdated but appropriate word) $130,000 for her silence about the event.  Made sense to me. An irrelevant event from long-ago that opponents could turn into a distraction.  She took the lawyer’s money, and in exchange she signed what’s called a non-disclosure agreement (called an “NDA” in inside baseball).

But subsequently, someone else found out about the NDA and offered Ms. Daniels a lot more money than that to break her agreement and tell her story on television.  That she did - on CBS 60 Minutes, this past Sunday night.

What I find interesting here is the depths to which leftists will stoop in order to try to depose the President,  presenting this lowlife as an “adult film star.”  Just a poor working girl trying to make an honest living in a white-male-dominated world that keeps women from being engineers and surgeons and airline pilots. (Full disclosure - I have a grand-daughter who’s a civil engineer.)

Not to try to discredit the “adult film star’s” testimony, but guys, we’re talking about someone whose place on the scale of human life is mere steps above drug dealers and pimps and child molesters.

No man who’s ever had a daughter can even imagine a fate for her  worse than a life of prostitution.

Unless it would be acting in pornographic movies.  A so-called “porn star.” Some star.  Not only selling her body, often subjecting herself to various indignities, running the risk of contracting serious venereal diseases - but doing so for all the world to see.  For generations to come. (Is that really you, Grandma?)

This woman gave her body away to a man and then tattled.  For money.  What a shock.

Once again, TV builds us up then lets us down.  Anyone remember Geraldo Rivera and Al Capone’s vault?

*********** Sent me by Shep Clarke, of Puyallup, Washington




*********** Remember Inflategate and all the uproar over the charges that the Patriots were under-inflating footballs?  Australia’s got its own issue right now, and in this sports-mad country, and the rather pure and upright traditions of its biggest sport - that would be cricket -  it’s far, far bigger than Inflategate ever was.

It concerns tampering with the ball, not unlike the way the baseball old-timers would scuff a ball with an emery board or other abrasive device so that a pitcher could get a better grip, and throw a better breaking ball.

As I understand it from my son, Ed, who works in sports in Australia, this is something that just isn’t done.  Cricketeers are held to a higher standard.  They simply don’t look  at things like offensive holding or corking bats or such the way we do - everybody does it… it’s only holding if you get caught… if you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying… etc., etc.

Yet in a big match between the Australian national team and  South Africa,  an Australian player was seen using a piece of tape to tamper with the ball - seen, by the South African crowd,  ON THE BIG SCREEN!

And then, almost comically, he was caught trying to hide the tape inside his pants.  (“Drop them, Fella.  We want to see what’s inside those drawers.”)

Said the team captain, a position of great prestige, somewhat like a player-coach, "We spoke about it and thought it was a possible way to get an advantage … poor choice and, yeah, we're deeply regrettable."

Interesting choice of words, that.  I’m sure he meant “regretful.”  I would agree, though, that the whole thing is regrettable.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-25/steve-smith-wont-resign-australia-confesses-to-ball-tampering/9584476


*********** Neither the University of Oregon nor Oregon State University has a medical school.  Instead, the state independently runs a highly-regarded medical school known as Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU), located in Portland.

The president of OHSU retired last October and I have no idea what his plans are, maybe because I didn’t read any further after learning what his pension will entail. 

I don’t know what other goodies he’s entitled to, such as use of a chauffeured limousine or a private jet and I assume that health care will never be an issue,  but I do know this:

He will receive $913,000 a year.  That’s $76,000 a month.  Yes, yes, I know - with his new contract, Kirk Cousins will make that much every time he throws a completion.  But otherwise, how many of you will make $76,000 this YEAR?  How many of you have parents who are retired and getting by on HALF that?

Oregon’s Public Employee Retirement System (PERS) is, like most states’,  f—ked up.  In comparison with what private industry does and what its taxpayers can afford, Oregon pays out far more than it can justify, and as a result, in order to make the payments that its politicians committed to many years ago, the state has had to make cuts in all sorts of essential services, such as education.  And things will only get worse as more state workers retire and the state assumes their pensions.

For most Oregonians, the prime example of their out-of-control pension system is former Oregon Ducks’ football coach Mike Bellotti.

Bellotti spent 21 years at Oregon, as offensive coordinator, head coach, and - for one year - athletics director.

When he resigned to take a job with ESPN, he got $2.3 million “severance pay” (tell me how you manage to get “severance pay” when you “resign,” unless it’s a firing that’s called a “resignation” to look better in the newspapers.)

And, thanks to PERS and the generosity of the Oregon taxpayers, he started receiving, and will continue to receive until the day he croaks, $559,000 a year.

According to public records, there are some 2,000 retirees receiving pensions of more than $100,000 a year.

Here’s where I come in. I have no problem with the fact that Mike Belotti, while he was coach at Oregon, was paid maybe 50 times what a typical teacher-coach might be paid. The market determined that. But call me a socialist if you will, because I think that a state’s pension should be designed for people to live a life of dignity in retirement.  With, say, a ceiling of $100,000 a year.

But I don’t think that the fact that a person earned a high income during their working years entitles them to live a life of luxury in retirement.  Not on the taxpayers’ dime. 

When you’re a football coach making $3 million a year, or a school superintendent making $200,000 a year, I think you’re being paid enough that if you want to live well in your golden years, you can well afford to invest in a very nice retirement plan to supplement what you - and everybody else - can expect from the taxpayers.


*********** QUIZ ANSWER - Things seldom work out well when you succeed a legend, but Pete Eliot did just that, and he did so rather successfully.

He succeeded the great Bob Zuppke, whom he had played for and then assisted. Zuppke coached at Illinois for 29 years, and this coach stayed there for 18.

In the more than 70 years since the Big Ten started playing in the Rose Bowl, Illinois has been to the Rose Bowl just five times.  He coached in two of them - and won them both.

HIs 1946 team went 8-2 and won the Big Ten title.  It was the first Big Ten (Actually, then, it was still the Big Nine) team to play in the Rose Bowl, and behind the running of Buddy Young and Julie Rykovitch, it defeated UCLA, 45-13.  Big Nine/Big Ten teams would go on to win the next six Rose Bowls in a row.

His 1951 team finished fourth in the nation. It won the Big Ten (Michigan State having been added the year before) championship and went undefeated, with only a scoreless tie with Ohio State marring its record.  And in the Rose Bowl, it trounced Stanford, 40-7.

In 1953, with two sensational sophomore running backs, J.C. Caroline and Mickey Bates, Illinois tied for the Big Ten championship with Michigan State, but on the basis of who had gone most recently, they lost out to the  Spartans for the Rose Bowl spot.

In 18 years, his overall record was 83–73-11. Things have not been all that good for the school's  football fortunes since he left.

As an example: Combined, Pete Eliot and his processor, Bob Zuppke, spent 47 years at the school.  In the 47 years following his retirement, the school went through NINE different coaches.

Interestingly, his successor was also named Elliott - with two “Ls.”  It was Pete Elliott, one of two brothers (the other was “Bump”) who were standouts at Michigan in the years following the War.

In actuality, though, he was born Ray Eliot Nusspickel.  (I don’t know how and when he changed his name, but I have a pretty good idea why.)


CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING RAY ELIOT:

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

*********** I’m indebted to Todd Hollis, of Elmwood, Illinois, for sending me thIS…

Ray Eliot
by Doug Cartland

3.6.18

It was the summer of 1946, and the war was over. America’s fighting men had come home from all over the world. College men were returning to their universities, including football players.

Ray Eliot was the head football coach at the University of Illinois. He had taken the job in 1942 only to see essentially his entire team leave for the war effort. He had a great class of talent coming in that first year … but off they went too.

Eliot spent his first four years coaching 16- and 17-year-old boys (at 18, they were off to the service). Not all universities had that problem. Purdue, for example, had a marine training program, so they still turned out great teams. As did Notre Dame, as did Great Lakes, and so on.

How Eliot won any games at all during that four-year stretch is a marvel. But he did. Astonishingly, one of those teams actually led the country in total offense.

When his boys finally came home for the 1946 season, the press immediately assumed Illinois would be the favorite to win the Big 9 (now the Big 10) Conference. They saw talent on paper. Eliot, though, saw a puzzle.

First, somewhere between 200 and 500 aspirants came out for football. Try to wade through that swamp.

Second, he had young players, who had won starting jobs the year before, wondering if these veterans just back from the war were going to simply come in and take their jobs away.

Yeah, that was a bit uncomfortable.

Most significantly, these comparatively naïve 18-year-olds now had to mix with men who had been to war. Men who were 23 or 24 years old; some of which had wives and families already.

“We were 24-year-olds trying to mesh with some who were as young as 17,” said one of those returning war veterans … All-American, Alex Agase. “What a job Ray and that coaching staff had—they had the toughest job a coach ever had.”

These men came home with a chip on their shoulders. And who could blame them after what they’d seen?

“The war veterans,” reported the Saturday Evening Post at the time, “were the most unpredictable, unsettling and—sometimes—unmanageable who ever set a coach to strumming his underlip. Outright insubordination was rare enough, but (some were) fed up with jumping every time someone cracked a whip. Many a conscientious kid found weight-reducing agonizing, some showed a fine disdain for the classroom, others simply could not rekindle the urge to play.”

As for Eliot’s situation, the Post said, “Ray Eliot had the same miseries as other college coaches, only more so.”

Talent on paper, yeah.

“This team is the most overrated team in the country,” insisted Eliot before the season. “And if you don’t say so too, you’re crazy.”

After starting the season appealing to his player’s best natures, his team stood at 1-1. Hardly world-beaters.

So, he changed his tune. He got tough and drill-sergeant demanding the next week, and Illinois seemingly responded, ripping Purdue. Well, maybe that was the ticket.

So, he dished out more of the same soup the next week only to see them fall on their faces at Indiana. They were 2-2.

Eliot was perplexed and seemingly without remedy. He didn’t know what to say. He had tried every approach imaginable, but his team had not responded. The papers were calling his team “uninspired,” and he could not disagree with them.

On the Sunday after the Indiana loss, Eliot went to see Doug Mills, the Athletics Director, and offered his resignation. He wanted the best for his boys, and if someone else could get it out of them, then so be it. Mills rejected the offer out of hand. University President George Stoddard came out swinging for him publicly the next day.

Reinvigorated, Eliot resolved to do something about the situation. On Monday, he called an all-player “gripe session.” He listened. Few ideas had merit, but the communication broke the tension. Speaking their minds, especially appealed to the war vets.

After hearing them out, Eliot led them to the film room. He showed them on the Indiana game film how they weren’t playing Illinois’ defense at all. They were hardheaded egos all doing whatever they wanted.

The film session got their attention, but they were still not wholly convinced. So, out to the practice field, they went.

The coach told his starting defensive players to set and run their defense, any way they wanted to—however they thought best.

Then, he called over his freshman offense, told them what to run, and put them against the players’ defense. His freshman offense destroyed this starting, veteran-laden defense.

“One by one,” Eliot told the story many years later, “after the workout was over, they came by my office and said they wanted to go back to my defense, and play it the way I wanted it played. It was then that I knew I had them.”

From that day, Illinois ran off five wins in a row to capture the Big 9 crown. They went on to dismantle UCLA, 45-14, in the Rose Bowl.

It should be said, here, that no other team in the country fared so well with the returning veterans. No one else found the key to unlock their enthusiasm and their collective potential. This is true. I could tell you stories.

Nope, only Ray Eliot.

Ray Eliot is my grandfather. He has just been elected to the University of Illinois Athletics Hall of Fame in its second year of existence. He died in 1980, at the age of 74, after serving his university most of his life.

I could not be more proud. No one could be more deserving.

Oh, and there’s a whole lot of leadership to draw from this story, if you care to draw.

Sincerely,

Doug Cartland, President
Doug Cartland, Inc.
The ONLY Leadership Resource with Guaranteed Results

*********** QUIZ-  He was born and raised in Nashville, where his father had played for Vanderbilt, and he attended Vanderbilt, too.

A quarterback,  he was named MVP of the SEC in 1951, and in the 1952 NFL Draft he was the first person taken, by  the Los Angeles Rams.  Other well-known first-rounders taken after him were  Les Richter, Ollie Matson,  Babe Parilli, Johnny Bright, Hugh McElhenny, Frank Gifford and Harry Agganis.

After spending two years in the service, he spent seven years with the Rams, mostly as a starter, and in 1958 he led the NFL in passing yardage.

In 1961 he was traded to the Bears. In 1962 he led the NFL in completions, and in 1963 he took the Bears to the NFL championship with a 14-10 win over the Giants.   Playing on a frozen field in close to zero-degree weather, he scored both of the Bears’ touchdowns - on quarterback sneaks.

Only once since then - 1985 - have the Bears won it all.

His durability was remarkable.  In his 14 years, he missed only one practice.

He played in 128 games.  He threw for 18,530 yards and 124 TDs, and he rushed for 24 TDs.

When he died in 2016,  Bears’ teammate Ed O’Bradovich recalled,  “He was a very serious person. Religion and family were first and foremost to him.  I never heard him say a cuss word.  You can imagine with all them guys we had on that team - ‘Gosh darn it’ wasn’t in our vocabulary. Very studious.  Wonderful man.”

So popular was he in his hometown that when he played for Chicago, Bears’ games were shown in Nashville on tape delay every Sunday evening, right after the news.

FRIDAY,  MARCH 23,  2018 - “You begin to realize why there are thousands of books about management out there: It is a very difficult thing to do.” Tom Hodgkinson, in “Business for Bohemians,” his book on starting his own  business

Hillsdale College is an independent institution of higher learning founded in 1844 by men and women “grateful to God for the inestimable blessings” resulting from civil and religious liberty and “believing that the diffusion of learning is essential to the perpetuity of these blessings.” It pursues the stated object of the founders: “to furnish all persons who wish, irrespective of nation, color, or sex, a literary, scientific, [and] theological education” outstanding among American colleges “and to combine with this such moral and social instruction as will best develop the minds and improve the hearts of its pupils.” As a nonsectarian Christian institution, Hillsdale College maintains “by precept and example” the immemorial teachings and practices of the Christian faith.

The College also considers itself a trustee of our Western philosophical and theological inheritance tracing to Athens and Jerusalem, a heritage finding its clearest expression in the American experiment of self-government under law.

By training the young in the liberal arts, Hillsdale College prepares students to become leaders worthy of that legacy. By encouraging the scholarship of its faculty, it contributes to the preservation of that legacy for future generations. By publicly defending that legacy, it enlists the aid of other friends of free civilization and thus secures the conditions of its own survival and independence.

The College values the merit of each unique individual, rather than succumbing to the dehumanizing, discriminatory trend of so-called “social justice” and “multicultural diversity,” which judges individuals not as individuals, but as members of a group and which pits one group against other competing groups in divisive power struggles.

The 500 Club. Jeffrey Rohrer is a painter on a mission to release 500 Portraits of icons such as JFK, Ted Williams, Tom Landry and even the amazing Donald Trump. Jeff paints fast...like real fast. He used to actually be fast on his feet when he played for the Dallas Cowboys and Yale Football Teams as a nasty Linebacker but his body is somewhat broken now as he awaits his dark days as a drivelling idiot. Jeff generates 50 paintings a year. Most of the canvasses are devoted to portraits but sometimes Jeff strays into other weird stuff like florals next to candelabras at night or guns but the 500 Club is all about the Portrait world. Speaking of night that is when Jeff paints. Jeff likes to paint while the rest of the world sleeps. Like the Werewolf he is, Jeff transforms when he paints at night and becomes a creature in tune with the other side. When the sun comes up Jeff is covered in oil paint stinking of fine wine only to wake and discover a work of art nailed to the wall of his studio with his name on it. Hopefully you will enjoy this art of a legitimate idiot savant . The 500 Club are only Portraits of people Jeff wants artists and historians to talk about hundreds of years from now...like who is this person and why would someone want to paint them. History past has given us paintings of royalty like kings and queens and of course the religoius work. Jeffrey paints all kinds of people...kind of using one test as to why the subject is being included to the club...would this person be interesting to meet at Coffee Shop for a beverage and of course what kind of beverage would that person order? Stay tuned for further additions to the 500 Club.

(I would love to have one, but shuddet to think of the price. I have a feeling that bottom right - “Man” - is Ernie Stautner, Cowboys’ defensive coordinator when Rohrer played.)

https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/jeffrey-rohrer.html

*********** A great video by movie producers the Erwin Brothers, explains the origin of the B-29 in their logo…

http://erwinbrothers.com/legacy/

*********** Former NBA great Ray Allen was profiled in a recent Wall Street Journal article in which he explains how people get so caught up in identity politics that they fail to understand his interest in the Holocaust: “Some people didn’t like the fact that I was going to Poland to raise awareness for the issues that happened there and not using that time and energy to support people in the black community.   I didn’t go to Poland as a black person, a white person, a Christian person or a Jewish person.  I went as a human being.”

*********** HERE'S ANOTHER CLIP FROM THE UPCOMING NEW EDITION OF MY DOUBLE-WING PLAYBOOK… I APPRECIATE THE INTEREST AND THE PATIENCE OF GUYS WHO ARE WAITING AND ALL I CAN TELL YOU IS THAT AT MY STAGE OF THE GAME THERE ISN’T GOING TO BE A “NEXT” EDITION AFTER THIS ONE, SO BEFORE IT GOES TO PRINT, IT’S GOING TO BE DONE RIGHT. NO MORE DEADLINES FOR ME.  I'M GOING TO APPROACH THIS AS IF I WERE AN 18TH CENTURY GERMAN GUNSMITH OR SWISS WATCHMAKER OR AN ITALIAN BOOTMAKER -   NOT THAT I'M THAT SKILLED, BUT IF IT TAKES ME UNTIL JULY TO BE  SATISFIED THAT IT'S THE BEST I CAN PUT OUT, THEN THAT’S THE WAY IT'LL HAVE TO BE…

TUESDAY,  MARCH 20,  2018 - “All the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.” James Russell Lowell

?  Save your breath.  Some of them have been paid to play basketball since they were in middle school.  Many of their youth team coaches have been paid far better than any high school coaches.  Follow the money back to the shoe companies.

The mere fact that a 6-11 basketball prodigy named  Marvin Bagley III is a “student” at Duke is enough to turn me against college basketball.  Duke’s admissions standards for ordinary, non-basketball-playing  applicants for admission are so high that they routinely screen out hundreds of valedictorians, National Honor Society members  and kids with SAT scores north of the 95th percentile.  But somehow, Mr. Bagley, who attended three different high schools and didn’t actually “graduate” until this past September, just about the time Duke’s school year started, was whisked right up to the front of the line, cutting in ahead of dozens of academically gifted kids on the wait list. (Did I say he was 6-11?)

In the process of moving his talented son around from team to team and  high school to high school, Marvin Bagley, Jr. - the player’s father - has enriched himself handsomely thanks to Nike’s “support” of his youth team, and he now lives in a posh gated community outside Los Angeles. Not too bad for a guy whose “job” has consisted of coaching his kid’s junior team.

(Full disclosure: my daughter and son-in-law are Duke grads.  They love their school, and they support it. But none of their three sons, all good students who wound up going to excellent colleges, was accepted by Duke.)

Mr. Bagley's time at Duke is nearing an end.  He's a one-and done. Once basketball season is over, I rather doubt that he'll continue attending those organic chemistry or physics classes.  No, having spent most of his seven months on a college campus playing basketball, he'll be off to the NBA.

And Duke? They'll crawl back  down in the mud that recruiting has become and resume wrestling with the rest of the pigs.

I still like Duke and I still like Coach K, but I’ll never again be taken in by Duke’s claims that it’s special - that somehow it’s able to play big-time basketball and still maintain its high academic standards.

In reality, it’s a first-rate university that sponsors a semi-pro basketball team.

http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/page/the_loyalty_game.html

***********  I officially resigned today from Hoosic Valley. I let the kids know that I was not coming back and I appreciated everyone's hard work and dedication through the years it was a wonderful experience it really feels good and feels like Vindication when you can stop coaching somewhere on your own terms I would say 90% of My Success as a coach and attaining 100 Varsity wins could not have been accomplished without your system and your guidance Through The Years thank you for being a mentor to me and a great person.

Pete Porcelli
Watervliet, New York

*********** President Trump didn’t give people a lot of time to comment on the Rex Tillerson firing before moving on to the next news-making event, but I can’t let it go without a few more words on the subject of staff loyalty.

I’ve heard a few people saying that Mr. Trump insists on being surrounded by yes men.

While I can’t comment intelligently on that point, I do know that when an underling doesn’t disagree openly with the boss, it doesn’t make him a yes man.  It makes him a loyal subordinate.

What takes place behind closed doors, out of earshot of the public, is where you find out who’s a yes man and who isn’t.

It’s in those closed-door meetings that a good leader encourages - and listens to - opposing arguments.  And it’s where loyal employees make those arguments, while the unctuous yes men provide  fawning support of his every idea.

And then, when the meeting’s over and the decision’s been made, the argument is at an end.  There can’t be any further opposition. 

A football team and the need for the coaching staff to show a united face to the team is a perfect example of this.  The very idea of an assistant coach openly disagreeing with a decision by his head coach is absolutely unthinkable in the profession.  He’s the head coach, and we support him.  So why should things be any different at the level of the national government?

I’m not a veteran, but thanks to my affiliation with the Black Lion Award, I’ve been exposed to a lot of the thinking of the US Army, and one thing I’ve learned - and put to good use as an assistant coach - is that it’s my duty to make the head coach know what my thinking is, even when it means disagreeing with him.

But here’s the point so many ego-driven assistants can’t seem to grasp - once the boss has made his decision and we leave that room, whether I like it or not, it’s MY decision, too.

*********** AN EXCERPT FROM MY UPCOMING DOUBLE WING PLAYBOOK…




*********** Central Florida may have been left out of The Playoff, but the people at UCF say that the unbeaten season and the recognition it brought meant an extra $200 million to the school.

http://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/22797498/university-central-florida-says-unbeaten-season-was-worth-more-200-million

*********** By now the UMBC (University of Maryland Baltimore County) dream is over, but unless you had UVa in your bracket, it was fun while it lasted.

As for that nickname - The Retrievers… The state dog of Maryland is the Chesapeake Bay Retriever, a wonderful dog that derives from a couple of Newfies (Newfoundlands) that survived a shipwreck off the Maryland coast and were bred with local hunting dogs.

We’ve had eight dogs in our married life - two Weimaraners, two Golden Retrievers, two Cairn Terriers, a Carolina Dog and a Chesapeake Bay Retriever.  We haven’t ever had a bad one, and the Chesapeake - which we got when we lived in Maryland - was among the best.   Like Newfies, Chesapeakes love to swim, and there’s no water too cold for them.

*********** "Unlike art or music or architecture, being shocking or “transgressive” in sports is always a sideshow, not the show itself. Yes, Dennis Rodman gussied himself up to look like a cross-dressing assassin in a bad Blade Runner rip-off. But if he didn’t get 20 rebounds a game (or whatever the stat is), people wouldn’t care whether he’s edgy or radical, they’d just think he’s an idiot with a pierced nose and improbable hair color. I remember in the 1980s reading stuff about how Chicago Bears QB Jim McMahon was some radical new kind of rock-and-roll quarterback. Whatever. If he didn’t score touchdowns, no one would care how radical he is.

"There are a lot of similarities between sport and various art forms. They both involve personal excellence, performing for an audience, etc. But one thing sports has that most art forms don’t: defined rules. And with those rules come defined metrics of success.

"This takes a lot of power away from the critics of the sports world, a.k.a. sports writers. They can celebrate this guy’s style over that guy’s. They can say so-and-so hasn’t gotten his fair chance. But they can’t overrule the authority of the scoreboard. There’s an objective authority that completely trumps their subjective authority – or almost completely. Every now and then a sportswriter can make the case that this or that boxer was “robbed” by the judges or that the umps or refs blew it. But that’s small-bore stuff. In the big picture, the critics don’t get to choose the winners, they only get to write about them."

Jonah Goldberg

*********** I was recently hired as HC of the Cruziero Imperadores in Juiz de Fpra/ Belo Horozonte Brazil and yes I am running the DW!
This is the Brazil pro league and looking at their films and vids, they have never seen a WingT based offense should be fun!

Joe Daniels
Sacramento, California

Football really seems to be growing in Brazil.  I’ve seen some video and they look halfway decent.

It’s a big country and they’ve got some good athletes that I’ve seen play soccer and basketball so there’s plenty of room for football to grow


***********

The photo above was sent to me recently by Tom Sunseri, a fellow coach on the 1979 Portland Central Catholic coaching staff.  Great group of guys.  It was my first experience as an assistant coach, and head coach Steve Stanich, at left in the back row, was a really good coach to work with.  Unfortunately for us, the best player in the program was a freshman named Tony Cherico -  and it was doubly unfortunate when his dad’s job transferred him to Kansas City.  Tony wound up going to high school in Olathe, Kansas, then went to Arkansas, where he was an All-American nose guard in 1987.

https://www.arkansasfight.com/2010/8/25/1649955/q-a-tony-cherico-part-1

*********** I came across a series of videos about/by Bobby Dodd, great coach at Georgia Tech.  This first one starts out as a look back by his daughter, a rather personal look at her dad; but it ends up with Coach Dodd, a very good college punter himself at Tennessee, giving some great tips on the kicking game for which he and Georgia Tech were famous.

The film (which is what it was) was way ahead of its time - it was probably shot some time in the 50's or 60's, and Georgia Tech managed to get Coca-Cola (headquartered in Atlanta) to put up some money for it. To he’p pay them back, there’s a shot of the Georgia Tech team taking a Coke break at practice.

“That hot action calls for ice-cold Coca Cola!” Coach Dodd tells us, going on to say that for several years now, they’ve served their players Coke after practices and at half time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foo2_fkksJg&t=3s

The 1952 Georgia Tech team ranks among the greatest teams of all time.  It certainly was one of the best coached, with head coach Bobby Dodd, offensive coach (before the term “coordinator” found its way into football) Frank Broyles and defensive coach Ray Graves. Broyles went on to become a legend as head coach at Arkansas; Graves, who became head coach at Florida, is considered by many to be the inventor of the 5-2 Monster defense.

If you like Belly-T football, you’ll enjoy this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iP3tqpmcQ74

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

Last I checked if I didn't agree with my boss on a seemingly unimportant subject we would agree to disagree.  But I always came out of those meetings knowing he was still my boss.  If I disagreed with him on many more serious issues I wouldn't be attending any more meetings.

Many people don't realize that Tom Benson spent many years building his empire in San Antonio (car dealerships and banking).  A devout Catholic and eventual philanthropist, there are three Catholic schools in SA that bear he and his wife Gayle's names.  The University of the Incarnate Word's football stadium and strength training facility is named after the Bensons; Central Catholic HS has an endowment named after a son who was a CC graduate, and died at 37 of cancer; and he provided St. Anthony Catholic HS a state of the art library/media center.

His philanthropy didn't end there.  He also provided Tulane University the funding to build (re-build?) their own football stadium on their campus.

His popularity in New Orleans faded after Hurricane Katrina when he threatened to move the Saints when the city of New Orleans wouldn't negotiate to build a new stadium to replace the Superdome.

As I mentioned in my previous email regarding Title IX.  It's one thing for Title IX proponents to insist on providing equal opportunity.  However it is completely another thing when the opportunity provided turns out to be a financial albatross.

Just the mere mention of a 3.5 GPA having a wide ranging variance between schools should be enough of a factor to prove that standardized tests would be a better gauge of a student's academic knowledge.  I see that first-hand at my school.  Students transferring in from public schools with 3.5 GPA's struggle to achieve the same GPA in our school.  One student transferring out told me, "why stay here and struggle to get C's when I can go back to my old school and get A's and B's?"  Probably says more about the kid's character (and mom's and dad's) than anything else. That's another story for another time.

Have a great weekend, and Slainte Mhaith!

Joe Gutilla
Austin, Texas

I especially appreciate the information on Mr. Benson. Out of town newspapers didn’t say much more than “Benson, Owner of Saints and Pelicans, Dies.”


*********** QUIZ  ANSWER-  Milt Morin was a native of Fitchburg, Massachusetts and played college ball at UMass, where in addition to football he was New England heavyweight wrestling champion and played on the varsity lacrosse team.  He was a three-time Little All-American, playing both ways and, in his senior year, doing the placekicking.

He was a first-round draft pick of the Cleveland Browns, the first player from UMass ever to be a Number One draft choice,  and in ten seasons with the Browns he played in 129 games and made it to three Pro Bowls.

At 6-4, 240 he was that rare tight end who could block like an offensive lineman, but also catch like a wide receiver.  In his career he caught 271 passes for 4208 yards and 16 touchdowns, and was the Browns’ leading receiver in 1970 and 1973.

He died exactly a week before his induction into the College Football Hall of Fame.

Recalled former teammate Paul Wiggin, who would go on to the head coach of Stanford and of the Kansas City Chiefs, "He was a complete player, a prototype tight end.  Back then, they had 240-pound tight ends who couldn't catch the ball, and 200-pounders who couldn't block. Milt did both."

"He could have played tight end in this era," said Paul Warfield, a teammate with the Browns and later a long-time Browns executive. "He'd be worth his weight in gold because most teams have a tight end who can catch, or a tight end who can block. (He)was such a good blocker, we ran Leroy Kelly's sweeps around his end. He could run precise patterns, and he could blow you off the ball with his blocks."

http://www.cleveland.com/pluto/blog/index.ssf/2010/07/a_wonderful_guy_vintage_clevel.html

CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING MILT  MORIN
JOSH MONTGOMERY - BERWICK, LOUISIANA
GREG KOENIG - CIMARRON, KANSAS
JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
ADAM WESOLOSKI - PULASKI, WISCONSIN
JOE GUTILLA - AUSTIN, TEXAS
KC SMITH - WALPOLE,  MASSACHUSETTS
MIKE FRAMKE - GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN
KEN HAMPTON - RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
TIM BROWN - FLORENCE, ALABAMA
MARK KACZMAREK - DAVENPORT, IOWA
OSSIE OSMONDSON - WOODLAND, WASHINGTON
KEVIN MCCULLOUGH - LAKEVILLE, INDIANA
DAVID BUCHANAN - BARRE, MASSACHUSETTS

*********** I love this from Wikipedia:

"After he made the team, team owner Art Modell called him into his office and asked Morin what salary he would have made if he became a school teacher; Morin's major was education. He told Modell that $6,000 was the salary. Modell told him that he would pay Morin $6,000 a year as tight end."

Greg Koenig
Cimarron, Kansas
 
And on Thursday, Kirk Cousins signed a 3-year contract for $28 million - A YEAR!

*********** QUIZ:  When he finally got an NFL head coaching job, he had coached for 24 years in nine different places.

He was born in Passaic, New Jersey and raised in Clifton, New Jersey.   It’s safe to say his lineage was Italian: without giving you his last name,  the rest of his moniker has to be a pro football record: Raymondo Giuseppe Giovanni Baptiste.

As a lineman, he lettered on Army’s Number 2-ranked 1950 team, but in spring 1951 he was dismissed from the Military Academy, one of 37  Army football players expelled as a result of the so-called “cribbing scandal.” 

He enrolled at Mississippi State, where former Army assistant coach Murray Warmath had just become the head coach, and there he coached the freshman team while earning a degree in civil engineering(!)

After graduation, he served as an Army officer and coached service ball (it was very big at that time). After the Army he coached in college, at Minnesota (where Warmath had moved), Memphis State and Wake Forest, before being hired as defensive line coach of the Denver Broncos of the AFL.

He served as interim head coach of the Broncos for part of one season, then was hired as head coach of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, where he stayed for two seasons.

He coached defense with the Bills and Raiders before being hired by Chuck Knox to be defensive coordinator of the Los Angeles Rams.  After five years as DC, he thought he had a decent shot at the Rams'  head coaching job

FRIDAY,  MARCH 16,  2018  “Youth may outrun the old, but not outwit.”  Geoffrey Chaucer

Playing their archrival the Philadelphia Eagles, the Giants were leading 17–12 and had possession of the ball with only 30 seconds left. They had only to kneel the ball to end the game, as the Eagles had no timeouts. Gibson ordered Giants quarterback Joe Pisarcik to run play "Brown right, near wing, 65 slant", which called for Pisarcik to hand the ball off to fullback Larry Csonka. The handoff was botched and Eagles cornerback Herman Edwards picked up the loose ball and ran in for the game-winning score.

Gibson's reasoning was governed by what happened a play earlier. Pisarcik had taken a knee, only to be knocked over when the Eagles' Bill Bergey charged into Giants' center Jim Clack. This violated an unwritten rule that defensive players do not rush in a situation when the quarterback kneels down. Gibson didn't want to risk getting Pisarcik injured or expose his players to penalties or fines for fighting. However, he didn't explain this to the players, and it came across as a power trip. Head coach John McVay's headphones weren't working, and he later said that he would have overruled Gibson had he known what was happening.

With angry Giant fans demanding someone be held responsible for the debacle, owner Wellington Mara and operations director Andy Robustelli met and decided Gibson had to go. He was fired the next morning. So great was the stigma of having called the play that he never worked in football at any level again. He refused to speak about the incident up until his death in 2015; when ESPN reached him by phone in 2008, he said, "I haven't talked about the game for 30 years, and I'm not about to start now."

Gibson left New York and opened a bait shop and general store on Florida's Sanibel Island, where he raised cattle on his ranch. While he had stayed in contact with McVay and another member of the 1978 staff, Lindy Infante, few other members of the 1978 Giants ever spoke to him again. Gibson died at age 88 on April 10, 2015.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Gibson_(American_football)

"These young men, who are kids, the first time there's a sign that they could be good, they get all of these people trying to latch on and advise, do this and that. But I don't have to worry about a player coming in here and being one-and-done. … I can focus on four years of development, not just in basketball, but developing these players as young women and being successful in whatever it is they want to do."

Notes Ed, “Might also be a reason why there are so many ‘dynasties’ and so much imbalance in the women’s game. Can’t turn it around with a couple of one and done superstars like the men’s game.”

*********** The March 12-18 issue of Sports Business Journal contained some very interesting facts pertaining to women’s college basketball:

(1) Only two teams - South Carolina and UConn - average more than 10,000 per game

(2) Only ten teams - SC, UConn, Iowa State, Tennessee, Notre Dame, Louisville, Mississippi State, Michigan State, Purdue and Baylor - average more than 6,000

(3) There’s not a team in the Big East (a basketball conference) that averages 2,500 per game

(4) There’s not a team in the Pac-12 that averages 5,000 per game; there’s only one (UConn) in the All-American Athletic Conference

(5) The ACC and Big 12 have only two teams each averaging more than 5,000 per game

(6) The Big Ten has five teams averaging more than 5,000 per game; the SEC has four

(7) USC, Washington State and Clemson all average fewer than 1,000 per game

(8) Six teams in the Big East and five in the American Athletic Conference average fewer than 1,000

(9) A survey of more than 2,000 “senior-level sports industry executives” taken in February asked “When will women’s basketball programs as a whole become a viable revenue contributor to Division I athletic departments?  4 per cent answered “They already are.”  26 per cent answered “More than 10 years.”  A full 45 per cent answered, “Never.”

(10) Time for all those people who over the years have pushed and pushed for Title IX and complained about the lack of attention paid to women’s sports to get their asses into the seats at women’s basketball games.

*********** AN EXCERPT FROM THE DOUBLE WING PLAYBOOK I’VE BEEN WORKING ON-
DRILLING FOR THE SCRAMBLE BLOCK…



*********** For years social justice warriors have been working to discredit the SAT, mainly because it didn’t produce the outcomes they wanted, and stood in the way of “diversity.”

But no matter what the do-gooders say, the SAT works - especially in this time when everybody gets trophies - and A’s.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-truth-about-the-sat-and-act-1520521861?emailToken=64c1dfcda7edcedcaf70d1cb7dbdf8d33OhjDPy49X6%2BM8qvVy2g73SnRZuQVPVIrdEMPdoTSnReExrt%2BcKY9rt9L%2BZfD4FlqxwBU0FrGUxdDN59U4m1og%3D%3D


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

Shameful.  It's all I can come up with after reading about the coach who did such a commendable job for 17 years only to be "rewarded" with a pink slip.  Goes the same for the other coach you spoke about.  Someone you and I both know.  His story is even more galling.  In all my years I have never known a more dedicated, hard-working, and giving man.  No matter where he has been his kids and their parents truly believe he made a difference in many of their lives.  After all...isn't that the ultimate goal?  He'll find work again, in a better place, where they will truly appreciate him, and his work.

Funny how those NFL characters always find another team to test the character of the new team.

From the first time I started utilizing your system I've always maintained the integrity of tight splits, aligned off the ball as far as the rules allow, and shuffle pulls through the hole.  Has always worked, and will continue to work when coached correctly.

I call colleges that play football "real" schools.  I call colleges that don't play football "wannabes".  Interesting though how in this age of disparaging the game many smaller liberal arts colleges are either bringing back dormant football programs, or starting football for the first time.  Why?  Improve male enrollment numbers.  Hmmm.  Title IX not working out too well financially??

It's heart wrenching to see and hear about school shootings.  No parent should ever have to suffer the loss of a child, let alone in that manner.  But don't get me started on this orchestrated manipulation of our young people to organize and protest gun laws.  Because that is EXACTLY what it is.  

Have a great week!

Joe Gutilla
Austin, Texas

*********** Since being a “survivor” of the Parkland shooting has evidently conferred on certain teenagers the credentials to pontificate to us on the subject of guns,  is it maybe time to come to a decision on what constitutes a “survivor?” 

Is it someone who was actually shot, and didn’t die?  Is it someone who was shot at but the shooter missed?  Is it someone who was in the same room as the shooter?  The same floor?  Same building?  How about the next building over?  Or the same school campus?  Same neighborhood? A student, but home sick that day?  On the phone to someone at the school?

Either way, how does being on the scene qualify anyone as an expert on the prevention of future school shootings?

We've just had an awful incident in Miami, in which people were killed by the collapse of a bridge. I somehow doubt that any of those who actually survive having a bridge fall on their car will be asked for advice on how to build bridges better.

*********** Adam Wesoloski, of Pulaski, Wisconsin, takes pride in being a Yooper - from Michigan’s U.P. (Upper Peninsula).  And he takes pride in his hometown, Menominee, Michigan, so he sent me a link to a great article about one of Menominee’s favorite sons, a Michigan State player from the 1950s whom I remember well - Billy Wells.

http://ehextra.com/Content/SPORTS/Sports-Articles/Article/Menominee-s-renaissance-man/14/37/45833

TUESDAY,  MARCH 13,  2018  “Trump didn’t get where he is by being house trained.”  Mark Steyn

Coach, After 17 years as a HC, I finally got fired. I knew it would eventually happen. Average of 7.5 wins a year and 9 region championships,  with many first-evers…..I can take it. Two Board members kin folk will be taking my place!!  Thank you for your help, positive influence, love of the game and most of all for being a part of instilling the right mind set in me. I would have never been a HC if were not for your system. I love you man! Think I may hang up the whistle and raise hogs and calves.... their parents don’t bitch.

Hello,

I was wondering since im running the pottstownfirebirds.org and making a book about them if you have any memorabilia items of them or stories as well as contAct information of any former firebirds players?
Thanks and let me know

Wow. So professional. I can only imagine how well done the book will be.

The Pottstown (Pennsylvania) Firebirds were a very, very good minor league pro football team in the late 60s and early 70s. Maybe you’ve seen the two documentaries that NFL Films has done on them.

Which raises a couple of questions about this guy’s project:

NFL Films is possibly the best storyteller our game has ever known.  And they’ve told the story twice.

In addition, a writer named  Jay Acton spent a season with the Firebirds, which he turned into a best-selling book, “The Forgettables."

So how many times can/should you basically tell the same story?  How many untold little facts and stories are you going to come across, 50 years later, that ESPN with all its reporting ability, didn’t unearth?

And then, finally,  there does seem to be a bit of an English language deficiency.  I mean, “making” a book?  To me, that sounds more like what the  barber used to do when the phone would ring.


*********** Big news from Seattle!  Big Mouth - sorry, I meant “opinionated and articulate” - Richard Sherman is gone.  So, too,  is Social Justice Warrior (“they held a gun to my head”) Michael Bennett, author of that sure Pultizer Prize winner ,"Things That Make White People Uncomfortable.”  (Good Luck with that one, Eagles.)

Now, all that’s left is Doug Baldwin, that class act who simulated crapping a football in the end zone during the Super Bowl, and Pepsodent Pete Carroll, who on the one yard line in the Super Bowl  thought that a quick slant pass was a better call than giving the ball to the toughest runner in the NFL.

It would almost be enough to make me like the Seahawks again.

Naaah.   Just kidding.

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2763153-ousting-of-michael-bennett-richard-sherman-brings-an-end-to-woke-era-in-seattle


*********** After I e-mailed you about 30 minutes ago, I was reading "Coach Wyatt's News Archives" dated October 22, 2010 where a coach asked about cheating his playside lineman up so they get contact faster and quicker.  He also asked about widening the splits some.  You replied that defenses will tackle your pulling lineman; defensive lineman will be more likely to beat offensive lineman to the gap; and then you said something that I honestly have never considered..... you said pulling lineman will have to turn their shoulders more to get past the center.  This is such a great coaching point.  Even though this conversation occurred back in 2010, I assume you still stand firm in your comments.  Re: widening splits..  more vulnerable to blitzes and gap stunts.

Coach-

Haven’t changed in the slightest on splits or the depth of our linemen.  

Turning the shoulders has always been a major concern.

My answer, after years of work on it, has been to teach “pulling” linemen to “shuffle.”

This attachment (below)  is from a page in my upcoming Double Wing playbook.


*********** When/why did otherwise articulate people start to answer every question with the word "So?"

*********** Not saying something isn’t awry in college sports right now, but it seems to be divided into "basketball schools” and “football schools,” just as  in high schools.

For example, of the NCAA Tournament's eight number 1 and 2 seeds, not a one had a football team in the Top 25. One of them - Xavier - doesn’t even play football, and another - Villanova - plays FCS football.

Add in the #3 seeds and you pick up Michigan State, which finished last season ranked 15th, and when you add in the #4 seeds, you get Auburn (#10). But you also pick up Gonzaga and Wichita State, neither of whom play football.

In other words, of the top 16 seeds in the NCAA tournament, there are more schools that don’t play football than there are schools ranked in the Top 25.

*********** Don’t know where OJ’s attorneys have been on this, but if I were his attorney I’d take that story he’s peddling about seeing a knife and then not remembering anything after that except for “blood and stuff around.”, and I’d turn it into the damnedest case of CTE you’ve ever seen.  Of course, in order to prove it conclusively they’d have to kill him. Never mind.

***********  Coach -  BU has the Hockey/Basketball Arena named after Agganis (deservingly so)   but the 2 sports Football & Baseball he played at the School are Gone ( mostly because of that Former Asshole President  Dr. John Silber who was ANTI-Football from the get go and the great Title IX )
 
Gaffney Way where Nickerson Field  ( aka Braves Field ) is on was changed to Agganis Way.  I am NO  Engineering or Architecture expert but for baseball guru's 15 % - 20 % of Braves Field is still standing  The Home Side Bleachers  is the former Right Field grand Stands of Braves  Field and the Boston Braves  Ticket & Team  Office Building  is now home to the BU Police
 
Coach There was another Greek from Lynn that was classmates with Agganis, Lou Tsioropoulos  He did 2 years at Lynn Classical than moved cross town and did 2 year at Lynn English  was an All-American for Adolph Rupp at Kentucky and and played on 2 NBA Title teams with the Boston Celtics  , UCLA and other schools wanted him for Both Football & Basketball any other Area of New England His Legend would have been Bigger but he got over shadowed By Agganis
 
than there was an Albanian who was on the St.George Basketball team with Agganis & Louie T.   Vic Pujo  who was  Harry's  End at Lynn Classical and his Favorite receiver  and was later Captain at Cornell when they upset Michigan in  1951  ?
 
John Muckian 
Ipswich,Massachusetts

Believe it or not, I remember them both, Tsioropoulos because I followed Kentucky - Beard, Groza, etc. - when I was a kid.  And Pujo because Cornell was Penn’s traditional Thanksgiving Day rival, and every Philly kid rooted for Penn.

*********** She was executive editor of the New York Times  and the loyalty inspired by  20 years with the paper compelled her to celebrate her 60th birthday by having the Times' "T" tattooed on her back.

She was fired two months later.

*********** Todd Hollis, of Elmwood, Illinois, sent me this great Lombardi quote from Bill Curry’s book, “Ten Men You Meet in the Huddle.”

“Our system is complete, simple, and comprehensive.  We can attack the whole field.  We have very little trickery.  We don’t really need it.

“We win with execution.  Something works, not because it’s a brilliant piece of strategic or tactical thinking, but because our team has practiced the same plays, the same movements, and the same fundamentals over and over and over again.”

Sounds a lot like the Double Wing (or the Open Wing) doesn’t it?

It’s exactly what I’ve been preaching for more than 20 years, and it’s what I’m stressing in the Double Wing playbook I’m working on (yes, I’m still working on it): If you have the ability to run five basic plays - (1) a power off-tackle, (2) a counter, (3) a pass, (4) a Wedge, and (5) a sweep - you are set.  You can run varieties of those plays, and you can run them from different formations - and you can even add a few other plays (trap, G, bootleg pass) but Lombardi’s point - “we win…because our team has practiced the same plays, the same movements, and the same fundamentals over and over and over again” - holds true for us.

Bill Curry’s “Ten Men” - ten men who through football had a great impact on his life…

Bill Badgett - His high school coach in College Park, Georgia.

Bobby Dodd - HIs college coach at Georgia Tech

Vince Lombardi - Who drafted him with the 20th pick in the 1965 draft (the NFL had 20 rounds then. The Oakland Raiders drafted him with their 23rd pick)

Bart Starr - the Packers’ great quarterback

Willie Davis - A black man who helped Curry, a white rookie from the South, adjust to life on an integrated pro football team.

Ray Nitschke - A mean dude - a real prick, actually - who taught Curry about the Law of the Jungle.  Also about the need to forgive.

Don Shula - His coach at Baltimore after he was traded to the Colts. Shula was hard nosed and he worked his players hard, and stressed the importance of ball security, special teams, and eliminating penalties. Shula and his assistants, Don McCafferty and John Sandusky, convinced him he could be a pro center - and taught him how.

John Unitas: (to all real Colts and Colts fans, he was never “Johnny.” That was always something the out-of-towners, the New York media guys, called him. Being in the locker room with Unitas, writes Curry, “was like being in the phone booth with Clark Kent.”  Great line about Unitas by Colts’ lineman Dan Sullivan after drunken owner Bob Irsay had cold-hearted GM Joe Thomas bench the Greatest QB in the History of the Game (this is my Web site and that’s my opinion): “The only player in professional football history to have his jersey retired - with him still in it!”  Curry does a wonderful job of telling what being a Baltimore Colt was like, at a time when few places before or since ever experienced such mutual love between a team and its fans, and he holds back no punches in describing the horrible way the Irsays jilted those fans.

Bubba Smith: The big defensive linemen whose size and toughness was put to use by Curry’s offensive line coach in preparing Curry for the odd-front defenses then coming into vogue.  The big guy who convinced Curry he could become more flexible by being his stretching partner.

George Plimpton: The Harvard-educated writer who as a sideline wrote of his ventures as a pro football player in “Paper Lion.”  Curry writes of the day in 1971 at Colts’ training camp in Westminster, Maryland, where Plimpton, preparing to write another book about life with the Super Bowl champion Colts, lined up to run in a nutcracker (aka Oklahoma) drill. He was going up against all-pro Ray May, and to put it mildly, May skewered him. (True story.  I was there and saw it.)  Curry and Plimpton wound up collaborating on a book, “One More July.”

I’d forgotten what a great book it was until Coach Hollis reminded me.

Curry especially remembered a Unitas quote..  The year before Unitas  died, Curry asked the QB if he really loved football as much as he always said he did. Unitas said something he'd said years earlier,  when he and Curry first met: “You’re a long time dead, Billy.”

He explained, “I mean, if you find something you love, you better do it, and do it right, because we’re only on this planet a little while.”  Then a short pause. “We’re all gonna die, Billy.  And once you’re gone, you’re gone.”


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

As I look forward in our program I don't see that kid that jumps out as the prototypical quarterback (a thrower).  But, we have a load of runningbacks, so I am going to move a couple of those that I really have a lot of faith in (trust, toughness, brains) to quarterback.  I figure I can develop the ability to throw, right?

I need a little advice.  Having never really used a quarterback as a running threat I'm at a bit of a loss.  But with athletes back there who are good at running the ball it seems logical to use their skills (and create another threat for the defense to account for).  If you had to pick three or four "designed runs" for a quarterback, what would they be?  Your "you better have these plays if you plan on using your quarterback as a runner."

Coach,

I’d ask you to be patient with me on this just a little longer because in the upcoming new playbook there isn’t a single base play - power, counter, wedge, reach sweep, trap, G, X - that doesn’t have at least one QB keep off of it.


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

ANC!  America Needs Coaches!  I will be wearing such a pin around my school.  Apparently those who decide on who teaches around here don't believe that coaches make good teachers.  I could go on but I don't want to start my Friday before spring break on a sour note.

"Fatties?"  Brings me back to the times in a land far, far away where terms such as "fatty", "tubby", "slim", "porky", "mumbles", "squints", "buckwheat", "freckle face", and other such colorful nicknames were not only acceptable, but the norm.

Not sure what's worse.  Dads like that guy you described, or dads who don't have the balls to stand up to their wives who don't want their widdo boys pwaying such a wuff game.

Have no intention of watching that particular show.  It is a "Red Line" for me.

I don't think Sheriff Grady Judd will ever be hired here in Travis County TX.  Our sheriff's department would probably all be fired if he were the guy in charge.

Looking forward to the possibility of attending your KC clinic if you can pull it off.

Have a great weekend!

Joe Gutilla
Austin, Texas

*********** In another week or so, in mid-schoolday, our nation's schools will disgorge tens of thousands of brilliant teenagers, allowing them to give us the benefit of their  astounding wisdom, life experience, and knowledge of the Constitution by, uh, "marching." Against guns.

Now, I'm not what you'd call a conspiracy nut, but...

If the purpose of the "march" is - ultimately - to disarm Americans, wouldn't it make sense to stir things up by arranging to have some supposed "right wing gun nut" shoot up some  marchers somewhere?

Fortunately, such an idea would never occur to anyone on the political left.   And certainly not to anyone in "our" FBI.

The scariest moment came when his mother went to watch him play at Clemson. They wouldn't let her in the stadium.

"There were no blacks allowed in the stadium, sweeping the floor, selling popcorn or anything," he said. "When I heard they weren't going to let her in, I told the coaches I wasn't going to play the game. I was going to escort my mother to safety. I actually put my street clothes on."

But the president of Clemson found out about it and invited Hill's mother to sit in his booth. Hill went back down to the field.
Hill also remembers that before the game, Clemson coach Frank Howard came over while Hill was working out and, with a big cigar in his mouth, just stared at him.

"He stared me down," Hill said. "I thought, he's a head coach, what's he doing?"

He said the Maryland assistants asked Howard to move and he cursed at them.

FRIDAY,  MARCH 9,  2018  “For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories.” Plato

*********** ANF - Years ago, when America’s farms were hard-hit by the economy, Iowa’s Hayden Fry put  yelllow stickers on the Hawkeyes’ helmets with three initials on them:  “ANF."  America Needs Farmers.

You'll get no argument from me there.

But with apologies to Coach

Fry and the great state of Iowa and America’s farmers, (plus whoever owns the trademark) I think it’s time that those initials be put to another use: America Needs Football.

If you had any question in your mind about whether American needs football…

(1) The commandant of the US Marine Corps said that “because of physical, mental or moral issues,” only 30 per cent of military-age youngsters are qualified for the military.  A major factor is obesity.  We need to get those fatties out for football,  the only sport in any school where there’s a place for the big, overweight kids.

https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/marine-corps-commandant-less-30-young-men-and-women-are-qualified-join-us

(2) If you find yourself having to listen to someone tell you that other sports will fill the void left when football goes…

Print this out and show it to them

ANF

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/sports/opioids-suicide.html?em_pos=large&emc=edit_sp_20180308&nl=sports&nlid=23696377&ref=img&te=1


*********** Major Lloyd,  military science instructor at West Point , 1977,  defined the difference in strategy and tactics:

Strategy vs Tactics
Strategy is the plans made
Tactics is what you do when those plans go to hell

Tim Brown
Florence, Alabama


*********** It’s not often that I root for Mom in a custody case, but here’s one: In Western Pennsylvania, a father is suing ex-wife to prevent her from allowing their high-school-age son to play football…

PITTSBURGH — In this city with a deep and proud relationship with football, a custody dispute has pushed the debate about the sport’s safety into a new arena: family court.

A father, John Orsini, has gone to court to prevent the youngest of his three sons from playing high school football because, he said, scientific studies have revealed the perils of repeated blows to the head — especially for an athlete, like his son, who has a history of concussions. The boy’s mother, Mr. Orsini’s ex-wife, believes he should be allowed to continue playing because he understands the risks.

“You always heard it sometimes, when one parent would say I don’t want him doing that because he might get hurt,” said Allan E. Mayefsky, a leading divorce lawyer and the former president of the New York chapter of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. “Usually, we thought the parent was just overprotective. Now, it’s more of a real medical issue.”

In the decade since scientists began to link football to long-term brain damage, the debate over the future of the sport has moved from research laboratories to the halls of Congress, to locker rooms and owners’ suites. Families, too, have grappled with the question of how dangerous the game is — and now parents’ concerns are surfacing in legal battles between divorced couples, leading to an increase in fights over whether to amend custody orders to prevent their children from playing the game.

It is impossible to say precisely how many disputes over football are occurring in family courts. Most records are sealed and disputes often settle before they go to trial. But Joe Cordell, the founder of Cordell & Cordell, which specializes in divorce law, said that about a third of the 270 lawyers at his firm, which is spread across 40 states, said that they have seen an increase in custody battles over whether a child should be allowed to play football. In some parts of the country, football has replaced hockey as the sport at the center of custody battles, other lawyers said.
Most of the disputes over football are occurring in states where football remains very popular, like Texas, Oklahoma and Ohio, places Mr. Cordell described as “heavy football states.” In states where football appears to be on the wane, including those in the Northeast, disputes are less common because both parents have already decided that the game is too dangerous for their child to play.

One of those football-heavy states is Pennsylvania, where Mr. Orsini, a musician and former lawyer, went to court last summer to prevent his youngest son from playing tackle football. The case will likely result in a trial.

Like many fathers of his generation, Mr. Orsini, 66, was for years an enthusiastic supporter of football. He played the game in grade school and rooted for the hometown Steelers. He enrolled his sons in youth tackle football leagues when they were as young as 5 years old, including his youngest son. Mr. Orsini said he attended their practices and games, including in the years after he and his ex-wife, Janice, divorced in 2004. Their oldest son, Giuseppe, who is now 21, plays football at Case Western University in Cleveland.

Mr. Orsini’s view of the game changed when his youngest son, 17, sustained three sports-related concussions. The first was in 2013, when he was hit in the head with a metal baseball bat while not wearing a helmet. He took a battery of tests at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and, after several weeks, was allowed to resume playing sports.

The second and third concussions were in 2015 and 2016 during football games. Orsini said that afterward, his son was sensitive to light and noise, experienced headaches and was lethargic. His son, he recalled, sat slumped at the table during meals. Again, within a few weeks, doctors cleared him to return to play. Orsini said that when he asked the doctor whether his son should stop playing football, he was told there was no medical evidence that he should cease playing.

“The moment for me started when he repeatedly got diagnosed with concussions and the doctors kept telling me there was no reason for him to not keep going,” Mr. Orsini said. Having worked as a plaintiff’s attorney, he was alarmed. “His mother didn’t question the doctors, but in my profession it is an impossibility.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/05/sports/football/concussions.html

*********** Don’t  watch “Redline” on CBS.  Consider yourself warned. 

The proposed  drama series, for which they’re shooting the pilot show, is based on a story about a white single father, left widowed after a white cop killed his black husband…

Now, if you go ahead and watch it anyhow, and you turn into a pillar of salt -  don't blame me.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2018/03/06/cbs-pilot-white-dad-widowed-cop-kills-black-husband/


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

I’m reading Bill Curry’s “Ten Men You Meet In the Huddle.”  I’m really enjoying it. At one point “Bobby Dodd on Football” is mentioned. Have you read it? If so, should I find a copy?

Thanks,
Todd Hollis
Elmwood, Illinois

It’s a good read.  I admire Bill Curry.  And I admired Bobby Dodd. Heck of a coach.


*********** MY KIND OF LAWMAN - Sheriff Grady Judd of Polk County, Florida, is the polar opposite of that Israel creep in Broward County.

And he’s not like the weenies in charge of so many of our big-city police departments who are constantly in search of the next “non-lethal” way of dealing with dangerous criminals without giving them what they have coming.

No, sir. Not Sheriff Grady Judd.  To put it bluntly, Grady Judd is a take-no-prisoners lawman.

Asked once why his men had shot a criminal as many times as they did, he replied, “That’s all the bullets they had.”

Recently, when a guy came after a couple of his deputies  with a knife - you guessed it - they drilled him.

At the news conference at which he explained his deputies’ actions,  he had a word or two of advice for those contemplating future dealings with his department:

“Threaten one of my deputies with a gun - or in this case a knife - we’re gonna shoot you.”

http://www.theledger.com/news/20180305/sheriff-judd-deputies-shoot-kill-knife-wielding-man-in-s-lkld





*********** A couple of Oregon skiers died on the same day last week when they fell into tree wells.  Tree wells are found mostly in the mountains of the Northwest, where there’s a lot of snow - and a lot of evergreens.

The snowpack on the mountains can get quite deep, but the low-hanging branches of the trees can act like umbrellas, creating a relatively snowless area  around the base of a tree. 

You see the tree sticking up out of the snow  without realizing  that the snow around it can be a booby trap.

Falling into a tree well - especially head-first, as often happens - is frequently a death sentence.

I’m thinking that a lot of the tree-well accidents happen because people ski out of bounds, but what do I know?

http://www.adventuresnw.com/dangerous-powder-the-deadly-pitfalls-of-tree-wells/





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

Art passed away almost two weeks ago at age 90. Spoke at his service in Newton, Massachusetts. Amazing guy and I am lost without him.

 Art had over 100 guys at service from the 1963 team to 1989 teams in Newton. All very successful and filled up with appreciation. This was my first year out of football in 37. Coached the offensive line for a modified wing-t offense the two previous years. This allowed me to teach Art's flipper. Bottom line...I missed the double wing. When I find a place to run it then I will be back in. Still teaching history full time and enjoying it. You have another clinic in the area and I will be there. My daughter works for the Notre Dame football team so I attended some of their games. Wish they ran the snow plow offense! Thanks for your support and insight over the years...blessings to you and your family.

Gordon Leib
Fairfax, Virginia

I’m so sad to hear the news.  Coach Art Kojoyian and Coach Leib attended my clinics together for years.  You couldn’t see one without the other.  Art was the seasoned right-hand man that every young coach deserves to have in his life.

I loved Art in the short time I knew him and looked forward to seeing him every year -  an old-school guy like me, a guy who loved (and knew) the game, and best of all, a guy who was obviously devoted to Coach Leib.  You can tell a lot about a guy by the people who choose to work with him, and Art’s choosing to work with him was a great compliment.

I can understand what a loss it is.

http://hosting-6673.tributes.com/obituary/show/Aredis-Konji-Art-Coach-Kojoyian-105848153
     

*********** Colorado State is said to be considering a woman as their next head basketball coach.

Becky Hammon, a Colorado State grad, was a WNBA All-Star, and since 2014 she’s been an assistant in some capacity with the San Antonio Spurs.

She would replace Larry Eustachy, who “left the program” amid an investigation into charges that he verbally abused players. (If you didn’t know, the days of Bobby Knight-Style “motivation” are gone.)

Former Colorado State AD Jack Graham, who hired Eustachy and tried to fire him in 2014, told the Denver Post, “The Eustachy era started on my watch. I hired him. I’m sorry he was allowed to take control of another four classes of young men for what they had to endure. I’m thankful there won’t be any more.”

TUESDAY,  MARCH 6,  2018  “Of course I have my opinion about everybody and everything. But I learned a long time ago, keep your damn mouth shut if you want to stay in show business.  I'm not in politics. I’m an entertainer.” Dolly Parton

*********** For fun, I enjoy shooting pool, and I’m constantly reminded of the parallel between planning in pool and planning in football.

In both cases, planning entails thinking “a couple of shots ahead.”

In pool, the idea is to make the first shot and leave the cue ball in a certain spot so you can make the next shot, after which you’ll leave the cue ball in a certain spot, etc.  The great ones can look at a table and determine which ball is going to be the last ball left on the table - the so-called “break ball”  that they’ll use to break the next rack. 

Not me.  I can maybe look ahead a couple of shots, and sometimes, if things go according to plan,  my plan actually works.  But let’s suppose that although I make my first shot,  I don’t leave the cue where I needed it to be for my next shot.  And now that I can’t make my second shot as I’d planned, there goes my whole plan out the window -  after one shot.

In football, you base your plan on what you believe the opponents will do, and then, after they react the way you anticipate, you have just the plan for them.  But there are those times when you go out on the field on Friday night and it’s immediately obvious that the opponents aren’t cooperating - they’re doing something completely different from what you expected.  Bye-bye, plan.

No sense in complaining.  No sense in panicking. You’ve got a game to play.

And there’s no “Plan B.”  How can you possibly have an alternate plan when (1) you spent so much time on your basic plan, and (2)  there were so many possible other contingencies to plan for? 

In pool, you wait until it’s your turn again, looking for another shot that you know you can make,  one that can lead to another shot, and so forth.  You find another way. And if your fundamentals are sound, you have a chance.

In football, similarly,  you find another way.  Once it’s obvious that the original opportunities you’d counted on have been denied you,  you look for other opportunities that your players, with the preparation you’ve given them, can take advantage of.  If your system is flexible and your players are well-versed in it, you have a chance.

General Dwight Eisenhower, whose planning for the D-Day invasion may be as thorough a job of military planning ever, described it: “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

***********  Coach,

The question about mental toughness in your most recent "News You Can Use" struck a chord with me.  This past summer I finished my Education Specialist degree in Coaching Pedagogy from Valdosta State University.  Our last assignment was a thesis and mine happened to be on the topic of developing perseverance in athletes.  I've attached the document for you to read and/or pass along to others if you see fit.  Coaches must play a big role in helping their athletes learn how to properly perceive events if they are to develop mental toughness.  In addition, coaches must help athletes learn how to set themselves up for success while creating opportunities for them to actually experience success.  It's an on-going, multi-faceted process that requires effort on the part of the coach and the player.

Joel Mathews
Fort Osage, Missouri

Hi Coach,

While I wasn’t able to read your thesis in its entirely, the abstract is quite good and addresses “perseverance,” a major component of mental toughness.  (It appears that the masses are beginning to catch on to it as “grit” becomes a fashionable word, although to most Americans I suspect that’s all it is.)

I’ve spent a lot of time in Finland.  The Finns have a word - SISU (“SEE-sue”) - that explains their renowned mental toughness,  and although it’s not easily translatable, if I were to be asked for a one-word definition, I would say “perseverance.”  But then, I’d have to add, “despite all odds, despite obstacles, despite setbacks, despite discouragement.”

SISU is embedded in the Finnish culture, while in America’s trophies-for-everybody society, the coach is often the only person in a young American’s life who values perseverance.


*********** A group hoping to bring the NHL to Seattle asked for season ticket deposits and in less than one day they got 29,000 deposits of from $500 to $1,000.

*********** It’s that time again - NFL Combine time.  Sunday was defensive linemen day, and it took me about two minutes of watching to wonder how devoid of anything interesting a person’s life must be if he’ll actually  sit in front of a TV and watch as large men in shorts, one after another, run 40-yard dashes.

*********** But then there’s Shaquem Griffin, the kid from Central Florida with one hand who wasn’t initially invited to the combine.  After some pressure, the NFL gave in, and the kid responded: with a special prosthetic arm brace that enabled him to balance the barbell, he bench pressed 225 pounds 20 times, and he ran a 4.38 40, the fastest for a linebacker since 2003.

https://www.newsday.com/sports/columnists/bob-glauber/shaquem-griffin-nfl-combine-bench-press-1.17070661

*********** An excerpt from my upcoming ALL-NEW Double Wing playbook …



*********** My wife was born and raised in Abington, Pennsylvania.  Abington is an old town, dating back to the 1700s., and over the years it’s been engulfed by the spread of nearby Philadelphia, but it has maintained its own pride of community. One of the major reasons is its schools.

As one example of the pride Abingtonians take in their schools, twelve years ago a wealthy alumnus named Stephen Schwarzman stepped up and lent his support to efforts to build a football stadium on the high school campus.   A grateful community named the stadium in his honor.

More recently, Mr. Schwarzman, the billionaire chairman and CEO of The Blackstone Group, a major investment firm, announced that he would donate $25 million to Abington schools to build a Science and Technology center on the campus.

The gift is one of the largest ever made to any public high school anywhere.

http://www.phillyvoice.com/abington-high-school-receives-record-25-million-gift-stem-facility/

*********** Duke beat North Carolina Saturday, which means the two arch rivals split their two meetings this season. 

How arch is the rivalry? There was a Wall Street Journal article this past week about the run on one very special license plate in every state where it’s available: “GTHCGTH”

It stands for a cheer that’s dear to the hearts of all Duke fans: “GO TO HELL CAROLINA, GO TO HELL!”

Former Duke player Kenny Dennard lives in Houston now, and he’s got the GTHCGTH plate for Texas.

*********** I love West Point and I love Army football, but I’m a donor (a small one, but a donor nonetheless), so that permits me to criticize an athletic department that schedules its spring football game for a Friday afternoon (Friday the 13th, yet), because there’s a lacrosse doubleheader - men’s and women’s - scheduled for their stadium the next day.

*********** Shortly before his death, Carroll Rosenbloom, the man who brought the NFL to Baltimore, told what it was that drove him to work out the deal (basically swapping the  Baltimore Colts for the Los Angeles Rams) that enabled him to leave Baltimore:

I promised Baltimore a world championship in five years. We got one in six.  More followed.  We went to the Super Bowl. Suddenly the media turned on us. I invited the press to a lunch.  I said, “Gentlemen, nobody seems to appreciate the Colts anymore. I wish you would tell me what we’ve done wrong.

No one said a word.

I said, “Doesn’t anyone have something to say?  You all write for the papers or talk on radio or television. We’re friends here. Nothing will be repeated.  Say what you please.  The Colts are looking for help.”

A sports editor said, “You have gotten us used to wins.”

I could not believe it.

I said, “Would you be happier if we lost?”

No one said no.  No one said yes.

I said, “Gentlemen, thank you for coming. I wish you well.”

I went home, taking my son.  I said, “Steve, we can’t stay here any longer. This town is satiated. They feel if you don’t win the Super Bowl every year, you’re due for trouble. I’m going to find a way to get out of Baltimore.”

*********** I'm not against children, but I am 100% against "think of the children." I like to think of what's best for the grown-ups. Whatever works best for free, honest, informed, self-reliant, and armed adults works best for their dependents, and if children are anything, they are dependent.  If they grow up into anything, it is more parents. If you love a child, remember that the purpose of cuteness is to make sure kids turn into adults – who in turn are in charge of making us more children.

Jeremy Egerer, in “American Thinker”

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

I have had many criticisms of many of our Presidents from JFK on up.  Doesn't matter whether they're Democrat or Republican.  I have a few criticisms of our current President as well.  Especially the tweeting.  I can understand at times why he chooses to use that form of communication, being what the mainstream media is today.  However, like you, my experience as a coach balks when he chooses to call out his own cabinet selections.  It is when he chooses to use twitter for those reasons he appears to be less of a leader than what many of us want him to be.

The only lips these lips kiss belong to my wife. 

I agree with your assessment on how we try to get kids mentally tough.  I also agree that it may be a thing of the past considering the education climate, and parental environment we live in today.

Gonna be interesting to see how this NCAA basketball issue turns out.  Either ESPN is going to look like a bunch of idiots not following through with their leads, and have the masses see them as an extension of our current justice issues,  or Sean Miller will be seen as a major liar and never get a big-time basketball gig again.


QUIZ:  I found out about Harry Agganis "the Golden Greek" from one of my former players who received a football scholarship out of JC to Boston University, and played for two years in the mid 90's before BU dropped football a couple of years after he graduated.  The weekend I was there they played UNH in one of the most thrilling college football games Nickerson Field ever saw.

Have a great weekend.

Joe Gutilla
Austin, Texas


*********** QUIZ ANSWER:  Harry Agganis has been dead for more than 60 years, but the Golden Greek, as he was known, is still generally considered the greatest all-around athlete ever to come out of New England.

He was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, the youngest of seven children of Greek immigrant parents.  He was baptized “Aristotle,” but that was shortened to “Ari,” which in time became anglicized to “Harry.”

He may still be New England’s best-ever football prospect.  When he played in high school, crowds of more than 20,000 packed Lynn’s Manning Bowl to watch him play.  He was heavily recruited.  Notre Dame’s Frank Leahy called him the best played he’d ever seen.  But he chose to stay home, close to his widowed mother, and elected to play at Boston University. Almost by himself he made the Terriers into a national power.  He was the first - and only - All-American ever to play at BU, which no longer even plays football. 

Selected in the first round of the 1952 draft by the Cleveland Browns, who saw in him the eventual successor to All-Pro Otto Graham, he turned down their $25,000 bonus offer to sign instead to play baseball with his hometown Red Sox.

Bostonians saw in him the successor to Ted Williams.  He played one year of AAA ball, and had a so-so rookie season, but hopes were high for him in his second year, 1955.  But in early June he was diagnosed with pneumonia.  After returning to the lineup for two games, he suffered a relapse, and on June 27, 1955, he died of a pulmonary embolism - a blood clot that makes its way to the lungs.

Harry Agganis, the Golden Greek,  was 26 years old.

More than 10,000 people attended his wake.

CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING HARRY AGGANIS
JOSH MONTGOMERY - BERWICK, LOUISIANA
JOHN VERMILLION - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
KEN HAMPTON - RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
MARK KACZMAREK - DAVENPORT, IOWA
ADAM WESOLOSKI - PULASKI, WISCONSIN
JOE GUTILLA - AUSTIN, TEXAS
TIM BROWN - FLORENCE, ALABAMA
OSSIE OSMUNDSON - WOODLAND, WASHINGTON


***********  I think of Harry Agganis and other athletes who left us too soon - Tyler Hilinski. Howie Morenz.  George Gipp.  Nile Kinnick - and I think of A. E. Housman’s poem, ("To an Athlete Dying Young”)

To an Athlete Dying Young
By A. E. Housman
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.

FRIDAY,  MARCH 2,  2018  “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” Charles Darwin

, or do you let it go on, hoping things will magically get better?

Thought so.

And when you do deal with it, do you meet with him face-to-face and let him know what you expect, or do you tweet it, so everybody knows your program’s innermost workings?

Thought so.

Can you even imagine any head coach sending out a tweet disparaging his offensive coordinator and questioning the things he’s been doing? 

If you’ve been reading my page for any length of time, you know me well enough to know that if I saw that tweet I’d say, “What’s with the whining?  Aren’t you the head coach?  You’re his boss. Tell him WTF you want, and if he won’t do it, fire his ass.”

*********** This one’s been festering for some time.  Back before the Super Bowl,  a video circulated showing Tom Brady and his 11-year-old son kissing affectionately - on the lips.

Some misguided sorts made a very big deal of it - some called it creepy.  Imagine - a father and son kissing!  The idea!

It took me back some 60 years, to the Glascott’s living room.

The Glascotts were Bob and his dad, Jack.

Jack was nicknamed Black Jack (I have no idea why) but he was a tough Philadelphia Irishman (a definite redundancy) who had been a football player himself and had been an NFL referee for some time.  Say what you will about referees, but you can’t be a pansy and be a referee in the NFL.

Bob was about four years older than me, and at that time he played football at Tennessee.

He’d been All-everything at Philly’s Roman Catholic High, and had originally gone to  Penn.  But things didn’t work out for him there, and he transferred to Tennessee.

Bob’s been dead a few years now, but when I first met him, we were both working at a camp in New Hampshire.  I was a high school junior, so Bob would  probably have been a sophomore at UT.

He was a stud.  He was 6-1, 225, which was very big then for a running back.  His arms were as big as my legs.  (He first introduced me to weight lifting, which Tennessee was just getting into.) Oh - and he could beat me in the 100.  (And not being very big, I was fairly fast.)  Looking at him cured me of any visions I had of playing big-time football.

At Tennessee,  Bob was a fullback in the Vols’ famous single wing, coached by Bowden Wyatt. He carried the ball a little, but mostly he blocked.  As a sophomore, he blocked for the great Johnny Majors.   Bob suffered a serious knee injury - playing touch football at camp -  but he earned two letters at UT and  played in the Gator Bowl and in the 1957 Sugar Bowl.  For the sake of this story - how tough do you suppose you’d have had to be to play fullback at Tennessee in those days? 

Now, back to the Glascotts'  living room, in their summer place in Ocean City, New Jersey.

My father and I had dropped over for a visit, and as we sat there, Bob, who’d arrived a few minutes later than we did, entered the room, bent down,  and kissed his dad - on the lips.

http://www.philly.com/philly/obituaries/20151213_Robert_A__Glascott__81__college_recreation_director.html

http://cstv.collegesports.com/mt5.2/mt-search.cgi?search=vols&__mode=tag&IncludeBlogs=31&limit=20&page=8

*********** KEEP PORTLAND WEIRD DEPARTMENT… The Portland Oregonian described a property that had fallen into disrepair:  “It had once been the Woodshed Restaurant and then a vegan strip club known as the Black Cauldron.”

*********** Q. Is there any way to “teach”, or to “improve”, mental toughness in athletes?  Is there any way, besides putting them in adverse and challenging practice situations, to make kids more mentally resilient?  I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit.  Truthfully, I suspect mental toughness in people is tied to whatever the people in positions of authority in their lives allow them to do or not do, but in terms of high school kids, is there any means by which a coach can develop mental toughness in kids whose home lives are largely privileged and permissive?

I think that you start from the beginning to sell kids on how tough it’s going to be, and how proud they’ll be when they make it through each stage of your program, from out-of-season, to pre-season, to in-season.  You can start out fairly easy, and increase the toughness as you go, all the time telling them how tough they are to be doing what they’re doing.  They don’t know whether what they’re doing is any tougher than what every other team in the country is doing, but that doesn’t matter - you convince them that it is.  And you make sure to put them in competitive situations, whether it’s tackling drills or relay races or whatever. But you can’t do this unless you’re in a situation where your superiors will let you run a tough program.  By that I mean that when the kids come home complaining about how tough the practice was (which is natural) and then the parents call the AD or the principal (which is the new natural), accusing you of abuse, they’ll back you up.  And that means you have to let them know - up front -  exactly what you intend to do, and get their sign-off on it.

Hard to say if there  are any of those administrators left.

*********** My friend John Torres is not yet old enough to be what I’d consider an Old Coach, but I am, and I really enjoyed an article he sent me.

It was a great article in the New York Times about Ron Adams, 70 years old and still going strong as an assistant to the Golden State Warriors’ Steve Kerr. 

He’s not just a team grandfather; for three years in a row, NBA GMs have voted him the league’s best assistant.

He’s smart and he’s wise, and best of all, from Steve Kerr’s point of view, he tells it like it is:   “I wanted a truth-teller, somebody to tell me, ‘You gotta do this, and you gotta do that,’ completely unfiltered,” Kerr told the Times. “Somebody whose experience and wisdom made everyone stand up and listen. I knew right then that we were talking to the right guy, and I’m just thankful we have him because he’s been instrumental in all that we’ve done.”

He even tells the truth when the team’s winning and everyone else thinks things are going great:  “Ron will tell me, ‘We stunk last night,’” Kerr says. “He will say it to my face. He does not get fooled by our record. He’ll walk into practice and tell me we have to do a certain defensive drill, we can’t forget the fundamentals, because we’ve been awful.’”

Wrote Coach JT, “Honestly, I see a little of Coach Adams in both of us.”

Every young coach could use an older, wiser coach on his staff.  Unfortunately, two problems get in the way - most young coaches are too insecure to have a guy on their staff who knows more than they do, and - just as bad - too often the older coach can’t seem to understand that he’s an adviser, and no longer the head guy.

What makes it work for Golden State, besides Ron Adams’ being a great coach, is that he knows his place - he isn’t after Steve Kerr’s job;  but what really makes it work is that Kerr is so secure in himself that he sees the benefit of tapping into an old coach’s wisdom and experience without feeling threatened.

(I’m still pissed at JT and myself because he was in Portland recently and we couldn’t find a way to get together.  Fortunately, he said he liked it enough that he'll be back!)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/sports/basketball/warriors-ron-adams-age-70.html

*********** There was an article in our local paper about a girl who plays soccer for the local junior college.  Sorry- “community college.”  Oops - almost forgot - like all Washington JCs it pretentiously calls itself a “College.”  But you understand.

The kid is a freshman (13th grade).  According to the article she’s already had four operations on her knees.  But she insists on playing with pain because, she told the paper,  “it’s important to be seen.”

Uh, kid - hate to take our dreams from you, but - nobody’s looking.

*********** With all the blather about gun control and assault weapons and background checks and blah, blah, blah…

Nobody seems to want to talk about  Broward Schools' implementation of the “PROMISE” program, the Obama administration’s “solution” to the disproportionate number of offenses that resulted in the arrests  of males “of color”:  why, we’ll just let the schools handle it themselves, in house.  Poof. Problem solved. Arrests? Way down. Good enough to earn the school superintendent a trip to the White House!  Everybody’s happy, especially the young criminals.  Er, ex-criminals.

https://www.browardschools1.com/cms/lib/FL01803656/Centricity/Domain/6947/promiseflyer.pdf

*********** Former Army All-American guard/linebacker (two-way football!) Bob Novogratz is on the Board of the Black Lion Award.  He and his wife, Barbara have raised an amazing family, all of whom have distinguished themselves in one area of endeavor or another.

One of their children is Michael Novogratz, a former wrestler at Princeton who made a fortune running a hedge fund and now spends a great deal of his time, talent and treasure on behalf of the sport of amateur wrestling.

For example, he has helped fund Beat the Streets Wrestling, to return wrestling to New York City’s schools… helped stage a college wrestling exhibition in New York’s Times Square… fought successfully to keep wrestling in the Olympics…

A wealthy patron can make or break a sport’s relevance at the Olympic level. Five years ago, the International Olympic Committee voted to drop wrestling from the games by 2020. Billionaire investor Mike Novogratz, a Division 1 wrestler at Princeton, swept in to rally fellow financiers and hordes of other fans in backing a successful campaign to reverse the IOC’s vote. He also has personally seen to it that winners are rewarded by seeding a fund that pays out cash prizes of up to $250,000 to Olympic and World Championship medalists. Other backers of the fund include hedge funders Jamie Dinan and David McCormick.

“It’s really to say, ‘Thank you,’” says Novogratz of the prizes. “Everyone who wrestles leaves their sweat, blood, and soul on the mat. When an Olympic wrestler walks out there, they’re carrying the hopes and dreams of those millions of wrestling fans who’ve toiled for not a lot of reward and glory.”

he won the Heisman Trophy in 1957.

When a sports reporter had the temerity to suggest to A & M’s coach that Crow’s 562 yards rushing (all season) was hardly what you’d call a Heisman performance, the A & M coach, a fellow named Paul “Bear” Bryant, replied,  “That don’t count all the people he knocked down.”

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

My dad and I would always watch the College All-Star game.  It not only signaled the start of the football season, but the start of the passion I developed for the game of football.

I didn't realize that Keith Babb was connected to NCSA.  My first experience with them was as an assistant coach at Southwestern University here in TX.  A number of recruited players we looked at had NCSA profiles. 

This year's edition of the Winter Olympics had the lowest TV ratings ever.  Frankly...I only watched a couple of hockey games, and some bobsled races. 

Can't wait to get my hands on your updated playbook material.

Well...I can tell that your coaching friend isn't interviewing for the head coaching job at my school. But you do provide him with sound advice.  One addition...surround himself with good people.  Too bad the job isn't in Texas.  I know one good people who might be available.

Joe Gutilla
Austin, Texas


*********** Hmmm.  Just last weekend the “news” was that Arizona basketball coach Sean Miller had been caught by an FBI wiretap discussing a $100,000 payment to get a player, Deandre Ayton, to come to Arizona.  That was all pretty much based on an ESPN scoop.

Oops.

si.com reports that there appear to be some, uh, “inconsistencies” in the ESPN story.  For one thing, the FBI wiretap didn’t begin until after Ayton, the player in question, had committed to ‘Zona.

Cool.

For those of us who hate today’s ESPN, this could be a fun ride.

https://www.si.com/college-basketball/2018/03/01/arizona-sean-miller-deandre-ayton-espn-report

*********** John Vermillion’s newest novel, “Evil in Disguise” - #4 in the Simon Pack series - is now available on Amazon.

John Vermillion is a West Point grad and his hero, Simon Pack, is the guy we’d all love to be. Or know. Or have as a boss.  Or as a President.

Author Vermillion is also a topnotch football buff.

https://www.amazon.com/Evil-Disguise-Simon-Pack-Novel/dp/1980359725?pd_rd_wg=WXuJj&pd_rd_r=348df326-431c-47f9-aa60-3204163eed73&pd_rd_w=TbNzE&ref_=pd_gw_qpp&pf_rd_r=1HC4YQ0H9TWWQVYZN3ZB&pf_rd_p=7f2ebd8b-ccd6-573d-805e-74c795fd912d

QUIZ ANSWER:   You seldom heard his name without a reference to one of his body parts - his toe.

A native of Martins Ferry, Ohio,  Lou “The Toe” Groza was born over top of the family tavern. His father was an immigrant form HungAary and his mother came from Romania.   He came from an athletic family and although he grew to be a 6-3, 250 pound NFL lineman, he was the smallest of four brothers. One brother, Alex, was a basketball All-American at Kentucky.

He played some college ball - but very little - at Ohio State before World War II service called. The legendary Paul Brown, then coach at Ohio State recalled "recruiting" him to come to Columbus: “Lou Groza was an all-state tackle in football, an all-state center in basketball, and a member of the National Honor Society, and as a senior he stood well over six feet tall and weighed 220 pounds. He had also begun to excel as a place-kicker, thanks to the tutelage of his brother, Frank. Even then the kicking game was important to me, and I saw that Groza’s talent could give us a tremendous advantage. I asked Gomer Jones, his coach and an Ohio State alumnus, to bring him to Columbus later in the year for an interview. At the time, Notre Dame was also interested in him, and (he) said he was thinking of going to South Bend. 'What has Notre Dame offered you?' I asked him. 'I'll get a full scholarship, plus room and board,' he said. ‘Lou, we can find you a job, and that is all,' I replied. Lou said he really wanted to play at Ohio State, but there were other problems. 'My brother was just drafted into the army, and I know I'll be next,' he said. 'So I can't guarantee that I'll be able to play for you until the war is over.' 'That's all right,' I replied. 'We are building a team that will have the best possible boys, and we want you to be a part of it.' He finally agreed, and we arranged a job that paid him $60 per month, and Lou played for our freshman team in 1942 before going into the army. Even as an eighteen year-old, he was something special as a kicker. His kickoffs sailed 70 yards, and his field goals, under pressure, went 40 or 50 yards. Unlike college football kickers today (Brown was writing in 1979) who use a platter (tee), he kicked off the grass."

He took part in the invasion of Okinawa and was preparing to take part in the invasion of Japan when the war ended. When he returned from overseas, Brown, now hired to start a pro football team in Cleveland approached him and other former Buckeyes about signing with his team. As Brown recalled, "Life was completely different for them now, and college football no longer had the same allure it had had a few years before, when they were eighteen years old."

He played 21 years for the Browns, and during that time he played on four AAFC champions and four NFL champions.  In 1950, the Browns’ first year in the NFL, his last-second field goal won the NFL championship game over the Los Angeles Rams.

Although conceded to be the first of the great pro football field goal kickers, Lou Groza was named first team all-Pro offensive lineman four straight years (1952-1955) and second-team twice (1956-1957). As either a kicker or an offensive lineman, he played in nine Pro Bowls.

“I always thought of myself more as a tackle than a kicker,” Groza would later recall. “At least until I couldn’t play tackle any more.”

Lou Groza is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame and his number has been retired by the Browns.

CORRECTLY  IDENTIFYING LOU “THE TOE” GROZA

Josh Montgomery - Berwick,  Louisiana
Gary Pavis - St. Leonard,  Maryland (One of several kickers in the 40s-60s that were linemen (Lou Michaels, Steve Myhra and sometimes Jerry Kramer)
Ken Hampton - Raleigh, North Carolina
Mark Kaczmarek - Davenport, Iowa
Jerry Lovell - Bellevue, Nebraska
John Vermillion - St. Petersburg, Florida
Adam Wesoloski - Pulaski, Wisconsin
Kevin McCullough - Lakeville, Indiana
Joe Gutilla - Austin, Texas
Ossie Osmundson - Woodland, Washington
Tom Davis - San Carlos, California

*********** Before the Bengals formed in 1968 Cincinnati was Cleveland Browns territory. In some ways nearby Dayton, Ohio still is. I remember asking my father, "Why does Lou Groza have a lineman's number (76)? "Because for years he played line." I thought it odd that a lineman was also the kicker. Well, it was. To my childish mind Lou "The Toe" Groza was as much the Cleveland Browns as was Jim Brown. Now they're "The Factory of Sadness" (if you haven't seen this video, it is now legendary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRBDMMVctu8 .

Jim Franklin
Flora, Indiana


*********** Pictured is the shoe I wore as a HS player, though my hero was Jerry Kramer who sometimes kicked when Hornung was suspended...I was the long-snapper for punts & the QB snapped for FG & XP.

Mark Kaczmarek
Davenport, Iowa

I once had a player named Henry Brown who had led the nation in kick scoring when he played at Missouri.  He used a square-toe shoe but he couldn’t run with it (he was also a receiver) so we had to call a time out whenever we wanted to kick a field goal so he could change shoes.  In our WFL game against you guys (New York Stars)  in Phila (1974) we lost when we missed a last-minute field goal.  And we missed because with all the gangs of kids crowding the sidelines, someone made off with our kicker’s square-toe shoe.   I don’t know if Lou The Toe wore a special kicking shoe, but I do know that he used to keep a strip of tape in his helmet which he’d lay down on the field as a guide when he had to place kick.  They outlawed  it - called it the Lou Groza Rule.

*********** It would make the game more entertaining if only players on the OL and DL could kick or punt during the games.

Jerry Lovell
Bellevue, Nebraska

Agreed - maybe that would be a way to compensate those guys for the fact that otherwise they never touch the ball.


*********** QUIZ:  He’s been dead for more than 60 years, but the Golden Greek, as he was known, is still generally considered the greatest all-around athlete ever to come out of New England.

He was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, the youngest of seven children of Greek immigrant parents.  He was baptized “Aristotle,” but that was shortened to “Ari,” which in time became anglicized to “Harry.”

He may still be New England’s best-ever football prospect.  When he played in high school, crowds of more than 20,000 packed Lynn’s Manning Bowl to watch him play.  He was heavily recruited.  Notre Dame’s Frank Leahy called him the best player he’d ever seen.  But he chose to stay home, close to his widowed mother, and elected to play at Boston University. Almost by himself he made the Terriers into a national power.  He was the first - and only - All-American ever to play at BU, which no longer even plays football. 

Selected in the first round of the 1952 draft by the Cleveland Browns, who saw in him the eventual successor to All-Pro Otto Graham, he turned down their $25,000 bonus offer to sign instead to play baseball with his hometown Red Sox.

Bostonians saw in him the successor to Ted Williams.  He played one year of AAA ball, and had a so-so rookie season, but hopes were high for him in his second year, 1955.  But in early June he was diagnosed with pneumonia.  After returning to the lineup for two games, he suffered a relapse, and on June 27, 1955, he died of a pulmonary embolism - a blood clot that makes its way to the lungs.

He was 26 years old.

More than 10,000 people attended his wake.

TUESDAY,  FEBRUARY 27,  2018  “While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.” Samuel Adams

*********** Wouldn’t you like to put together a team with players like these?

Norm Snead… Bill Kilmer… Tommy Mason… Keith Lincoln… Herb Adderley… Bobby Crespino… Pervis Atkins… Claude Gibson… Ed Sharockman… Art Baker…Bill Brown… Tom Matte… Carl Kammerer… Greg Larson… Mike Pyle… Houston Antwine… E. J. Holub… Roland Lakes… Stew Barber… Ernie Ladd… Jim Tyrer… Fred Hageman… Bob Lilly… Billy Shaw… Myron Pottios… Ken Rice… Ben Davidson… Joe Rutgens… John Brewer… Marlin McKeever… Aaron Thomas… Fred Arbanas…  Earl Faison… Elbert Kimbrough… Dan LaRose… Bernie Casey… Mike Ditka

There’s an awful lot of All-Pros on that list, and a number of Pro Football Hall of Famers.

That was the College All-Stars of 1961. From 1934 until 1976, the official start of every football season was the so-called College All-Star Game, played in midsummer in Chicago’s Soldier Field, between the defending NFL champions and a select team of graduating (more or less) senior all-stars. 

This particular group of all stars played the Philadelphia Eagles.

The Eagles won, 28-14.

It’s quaint to think that there was a time when NFL  teams would allow their top draft picks to miss the first couple of weeks of their training camp while running the risk of injury.  But nowadays, even if the NFL were still to think that it was a great promotion for The League, no agent would allow a client to risk his career in one exhibition game.

Don Shipley, who goes back with me to the 1960s, when I played semi-pro ball for his dad, Dick, in Frederick, Maryland, is a constant source of great football history material.  He sent me this copy of a page from TV Guide, which back in the days before there were dozens of football games on TV would print the teams’ rosters.  (Notice that it was also from a time when it was still important to the NFL to let us know where a guy played his college football.)




*********** Don Shipley knows how much I love the old NFL and especially the Baltimore Colts.  And right at the top is Lenny Moore, The Reading Rocket, one of the most exciting players I’ve ever seen.  So Don was thoughtful enough to send me this great highlight video of Lenny Moore.

I had no idea that he holds the NFL record for most TD runs of more than 50 yards - 26!

With today’s pass-happy offenses, that record’s safe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr61qJyTHA0&feature=youtu.be

*********** My old friend Armando Castro has lived in Roanoke, Virginia for at least 20 years, and it took him that long to finally get around to visiting what may be Roanoke’s best-known place - Black Dog Salvage, home base for the DIY Network “Salvage Dawgs.”

https://www.blackdogsalvage.com/

*********** I guess we’re supposed to be excited about an Olympic gold medal in Cornhole on Ice, aka curling.

*********** Isn’t it cool when athletes love their country - and show it?

Russian hockey players weren’t allowed to represent their country in the winter Olympics, but that didn’t keep them from winning the gold medal.   And as they stood for the medal ceremony and the band played some innocuous music, they broke into song - they sang their national anthem.

Just sayin’.

***********  I don’t know if I made it clear what Keith Babb was offering to do, so I’ll repeat it.

in 2004 Keith, an old friend,  wound up leaving a good job with a bank to go to work for NCSA, a then-new recruiting service based in Chicago.

Now, years later, that recruiting service has more than 700 people working for it,  and Keith is its “Senior National Recruiting Specialist.”

I know that there are shady operators in this recruiting business,  but I also know Keith Babb.  While he was coaching, we were in pretty constant touch. We had dinner at West Point when Melissa was on her recruiting visit there, and Keith stayed at our place when visiting  his son who was going to college in Portland.  On one of my last clinics in Chicago, not long after Keith had joined NCSA, he showed me around their offices and introduced me around.  Keith has now been with NCSA for 14 years, and I know that he wouldn’t be associated with an organization that did not operate ethically.

He recently wrote me and included some info about NCSA’s services:

 One of our innovations is what we call Team Edition.  It provides recruiting tools for high school and club coaches.  It's cutting edge technology that brings coaches the resources they need to help all student-athletes find the right fit situation so their student-athletes can get a large portion of their school funded.  Here's the link:  http://www.ncsasports.org/team/features-coach  

 We also provide a lot of recruiting advice here:  http://usatodayhss.com/tag/ncsa.

    What I'm most proud of, though, is the help we provide for those student-athletes who have financial need and can't access our network any other way than being given a grant.  When Chris Kraus started NCSA in Feb, 2000, his drive, motivation, and overall goal was to be in a position to help every student athlete who qualifies academically and athletically without worrying about finances.  So we have refined that mission over the years and jumped through the NCAA & NAIA compliance hoops, so that mission can be accomplished.  Here's more on that effort here:  http://allinaward.com/

    Coach Wyatt, NCSA is committed to helping at least 2,000 deserving student-athletes using this grant this calendar year.  If you or any of your coaches' network has someone who should receive this help, feel free to let them know.  Also, you can feel free to include my contact information if anyone has questions.

In other words -  If you have a football player who may not be highly-recruited by the Big Guys but is a pretty good players and could benefit from college if he could come to the attention of the right people - this could be the best thing that ever happened to him.  NCSA can get him exposed to more people than you could if you worked at it around the clock for the next three months - and they can do a much better job than you or I could in finding the right fit for him.  For a service like that, people pay quite a bit - but as Keith wrote, NCSA is committed to helping deserving kids.

Keith's email:  kbabb@ncsasports.org

Keith Babb
Sr National Recruiting Specialist
NCSA | Next College Student Athlete
1333 N. Kingsbury St. Chicago, IL 60642
312-205-7474|
ncsasports.org

About Keith -   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LoiWxsXo1s

*********** New evidence suggests George Washington sexually harassed  his secretary (Satire, guys - satire.)

http://www.theonion.com/new-evidence-suggests-president-george-washington-sent-1823275416

*********** Charlie Wilson, from Crystal River, Florida, knows as much about the evolution of the belly, the wishbone and the flexbone as anyone I know, and he has been a great source of information.

He’s been busy lately uploading some old Mississippi State footage from the early 80s, when Emory Bellard (inventor of the Wishbone) was tearing people up with his “wingbone,” a hybrid wishbone-Wing T mix.  As with so many football innovations, it’s hard to tell how much of the success was  due to Coach Bellard, how much to the concept itself, and how much  to Mississippi State’s quarterback, John Bond - a 6-4, 220-pound wishbone quarterback. Bond could run and pass, but mostly he operated the offense as though he’d designed it.   He’s one of the most unsung great quarterbacks I’ve ever seen.

This is 1982, Mississippi State vs Florida…  Amazing how much more physical those offensive linemen were than the  Pushme-Pullyous created by today’s spread offenses.

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

And this is Mississippi State vs LSU, same year.  LSU came in with the nation's  #1 defense.

LSU had two great young running backs named Dalton Hilliard and Garry James and a future NFL receiver named Eric Martin.

Besides Bond, Mississippi State had a great running back named Michael Haddix.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSywtn-hM_8

*********** Suppose I were to tell you that there’s a high school “designed for, though not limited to, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender young people, as well as those questioning their sexuality.”

It’s true - it’s Harvey Milk High School, named for an openly-gay San Francisco official who was murdered.

Imagine how many different rest rooms that school must have!

Suppose I were also to tell you that their football team is consistently a city power?

I’d be lying.

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

*********** Since October I’ve been working on the first update to my Double Wing playbook since 2000, and it’s been a slow go. I finally feel that I’m heading into the home stretch, and I hope I’m not being overly optimistic in thinking that I’m just a couple of weeks away from sending it to the printer.

One of the things that’s complicated matters has been my plan to use photos where possible.  Most of the “photos” are actually screenshots of the wealth of video from camps and practices that I’ve accumulated over the years, but scrolling through all sorts of video, looking for just the right “still,” is tremendously time-consuming. 

Here’s one example, illustrating the A Back’s assignment on Super Power.



*********** My plan to make our schools safer is to make qualifying for concealed carry a requirement  for certification to teach in a public school.

Teachers would not be required to carry, but they would be permitted to do so, and the knowledge that even one teacher in a school might be armed and qualified would be enough to give most potential shooters pause.

Those already certified and teaching would be given five years to qualify and recertify.  By then, most of them who didn’t wish to meet the requirement would either have retired or found another line of work.

Not only should this make our schools safer,  but it would have another effect every bit as important -  not only would it clear the schools of a lot of the big talk-no act leftist types who wouldn’t lift a finger to protect students, but it would also discourage younger ones from coming on board.

Just the thing we need to get our schools back to teaching kids how to think, instead of what to think.

And the best part of it is, my program won't cost a dime.  Just take all the money that schools waste every year on "teacher in-service" days and useless guest speakers and you'll have more than enough  funds to pay for guns, ammo, instruction and range time.

*********** A coaching friend told me about a recent interview he had at a small Catholic high school:

 I thought the interview went well. They said they will bring back the top 2 candidates next week for a second interview with the AD and Principal. The first one was with a selection committee of about 8 people. In the event that I make the final cut I have a question for you. the major question most of the committee members had was how The HC would handle recruiting.

I would like to bring some sort of recruiting plan with me if I am invited back for a second interview. I believe they need to do a better job within the school as well as outside of it to bring student athletes in to the school. I have some ideas on how to reach out to the youth football community, as I still have many ties there, but I would like to hear any ideas you may have or draw on any experience you have on the subject.

Hi Coach-

I think that now more than ever, with football under attack, you have to recruit the parents.

Too many people, I think, think you recruit kids, but football’s tough and it’s too easy for them to turn you down.    Kids would rather drink pop and play video games and hang out.  

Even when there are parents involved in a kid’s life, kids don’t always tell their parents that the coach asked them to play football.

Parents, if they’re involved in a kid’s life, want more for them.

This is especially true in the case of a private school, where the parents have already made a significant investment in their kids’ future.

And from the time their kids were small,  they’ve been a part of their kids’ activities, and many of them resist the idea of “losing” them to a coach once they hit high school. 

I think that’s where you get them.  You invite them in.

You go directly to the parents of every potential player in the school, meeting with them in their homes - one family at a time.

I would prepare a booklet showing them the things that being part of a football team would do for their son, along with the things that I would commit to them that I would do for their son.  I would deal with the team culture that I will create - Respect, Responsibility, Resilience, I call mine - and I would deal with the standards I would expect from all the boys.

I would talk to them about my commitment to player safety - conditioning, equipment, techniques, practice plans, and behavior standards.  And I’d make sure I had a copy of a study showing that at our level, football less dangerous than lots of other sports - not to mention that fact that if they’re left to their own devices, teenage boys have a tendency to find far more dangerous things to do than football - without any of the benefits of football.

I would invite them to attend any practice (on the sidelines, obviously) and to join us in our post-game de-briefing session out on the field - Frosty Westering called it the “afterglow.”

You could probably meet with two or three sets of parents a night. If you were talking about 60 kids, then at a rate of two of them a night for five days a week, it would take you six weeks.  It might not take that long.  Several years ago a friend of mine did this when he took over at a new school and he got 100 kids out.

Of course you talk to the kids in the school, too - but that’s another issue.

But I guarantee you selling the parents would set you apart from everybody else, especially with your background in sales.

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

Mark Cuban is a lot like many of today's "young" millionaires.  A lot of talk...no action.  A lot of fluff...no substance.  A lot of flash...no shine.  A lot of words...all BS.  Some advice to Mr. Cuban...D-UP!!

Turner Gill called it.  He described my wife to a T.  I could not have done it without her PERIOD.

Those sure were different times my friend.  And times we are most certainly never going to see again.  The Reverend Graham was a rock for many during those times.

My nephew was a Marine.  A sniper at that.  He's livid.  And he and his Marine buddies all say the Corps is definitely "lowering their standards."

I've considered flip-flopping for a long time.  But...I've flip-flopped on whether I should or shouldn't.  What happens if you have kids up front who are better on one side of center than they are on the other?  I've seen it a number of times, and because of it I've stayed with right-handed/left-handed ability.  Yet...with O Line numbers being what they are nowadays I wonder if flip-flopping should be the way to go!

Have a great weekend!

Joe Gutilla
Austin, Texas


*********** QUIZ ANSWER - With all the great players the Steelers have in the Hall of Fame, they've retired just two jerseys - and Ernie Stautner's is one of them.

Ernie Stautner was born in Germany - in Bavaria - and brought to the United States when he was three.  He went to high school in Albany, New York, and after service in the Marine Corps, he played at Boston College. 

In 1950 he was a second-round draft pick of the Steelers.  In 14 years with the Steelers as a defensive end, he missed only six games. He was named to nine Pro Bowls and was quite often rated the best defensive end in the business.

He made it into the Pro Football Hall of Fame the first time he was eligible.

Those old Steelers were known for their toughness - win or lose, they’d work you over -  and he was the toughest Steeler of them all.

Wrote longtime Steelers’ president Dan Rooney, in his memoirs,

“We had great defensive players in those early days. Guys like Ernie Stautner a bruising defensive tackle and nine-time Pro Bowler, could drink alongside Bobby Layne and play like the Pro Bowler he was the next day. He flattened running backs like a steamroller.  Ernie wound up in the Hall of Fame, and was considered by teammates and opponents alike to be the toughest guy in the league. He’s the only Steeler player, ever, to have his jersey, number 70, officially retired.” (Since the publication of Dan Rooney’s book in 2007, Joe Greene’s number 75 has been retired.)

Maybe it will help if I mention that after his playing career was over, Ernie Stautner built a reputation as a great coach with the Dallas Cowboys, spending 23 years on Tom Landry’s staff. For 16 of those years he was the Cowboys’ defensive coordinator, and as a defensive line coach he developed such greats as Bob Lilly, Randy White, Jethro Pugh, Harvey Banks Martin, Jim Jeffcoat and Ed “Too Tall” Jones.

(Some guys may remember him as one of the very first of the retired athletes in the Miller Light “Tastes Great! Less Filling!” commercials.