Just links and not much else today for reasons I can't take time to explain. Happy Friday and enjoy your weekend, everyone.
Top 2013 Michigan football commit Shane Morris invited to elite ESPN skills camp - Shane Morris continues to headline the 2013 Michigan recruiting class.
The Big Ten's 1,000-yard receivers in 2012 - More love for Roy Roundtree. I, for one, remain somewhat unconvinced.
Choosing The Choosers: Recommending College Football's Playoff Selection Committee - Who should really be the selection committee for a college football playoff, former coaches, or the best college football writers in the game today? You can probably guess my vote.
CONFESSIONS OF AN SEC FAN TO A BIG TEN FAN - EDSBS on the strange relationship between the SEC and the Big Ten when it comes to change within the sport.
Today I want to discuss the theory. The basic concept is the same as option football--rather than having to guess correctly pre-snap, the offense can ideally make the defense wrong every time. Playcalling is often a guessing game, whereby a coordinator is attempting to make an educated guess based upon in-week preparation, but it is only that--a guess. This task used to be easier, as defenses would be known as a cover 3 or cover 2 team. Teams still have tendencies, of course, but defenses tend to now be multi-faceted and put an emphasis on confusing offenses.
An excerpt from 'The Essential Smart Football' about the birth of the 3-3-5 defense
The attacking 3-3 utilizes a kind of intelligent chaos principle: players are told to attack gaps, stunt, blitz, and "fly around and play football," but each call has a reason. Every blitz, after taking account of the players' assignments and movements, should put the defense in a tried-and-true front designed to stop specific offensive concepts. So if a 3-3-5 coach calls an overload blitz to one side or tells the defensive line to slant one way or the other, it's because the staff has crunched the numbers. They know, for example, that out of this specific formation, the offense runs to that direction 87.6 percent of the time. Put another way, this isn't about aggressiveness at all; it's about creating new defensive fronts in a way that sets a trap for the offense.
Defending the Chicken Sandwich
BHGP starts off its playoff rant with an opening salvo against Southern food. Is that really the way you want to play this? A Midwesterner is gonna run smack on food? Southern food is a legitimate cuisine, Midwestern food is something too depressing to contemplate. When I want advice on how much Miracle Whip to put on my bologna on white bread sandwich, I'll call a Big Ten fan, but not until then. See, that's how crappy midwestern food is. Iowa can even screw up a Chick-Fil-A sandwich.
To the average person, being a major college football player isn't a very raw deal. For most, playing a children's game in front of national audiences would be icing on a cake which already included a debt-free education. The problem is, major college football players aren't average people.