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The Wrong Football

~ A UK American Football fan writes about the game he loves

The Wrong Football

Tag Archives: Bill Walsh

Plays, Penalties, and Injuries

26 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by gee4213 in Gee's Thoughts

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Tags

Adam Gase, Arizona Cardinals, Atlanta Falcons, Bill Belichick, Bill O'Brien, Bill Walsh, Blaine Gabbert, Buffalo Bills, Clay Matthews, Detroit Lions, Drew Brees, Green Bay Packers, Houston Texans, Jacksonville Jaguars, Jimmy Garroppolo, Jon Gruden, Josh Allen, Josh Gordon, julian Edleman, Marcus Mariota, Miami Dolphins, Minnesota Vikings, New England Patriots, New Orleans Saints, New York Giants, NFL, Oakland Raiders, San Francisco 49ers, Tennessee Titans, The Score Takes Care of Itslef, William Hayes

18-09-26 Josh Allen TD

Image Credit: wyosports.net

So Wednesday marks the transition from one NFL week to the next as I move from catching up on games and highlights, evaluating the news to preparing to make picks, even if I won’t start the coaching tape for Week three until tomorrow, but more of that later.

I’m currently reading The Score Take Care of Itself by Bill Walsh, and whilst I haven’t got very far yet, the section on the 49ers losing to the Miami Dolphins and coping with adversity rings ever so true. This week we have some coaches who will be facing down despair and problems, whilst others will have taken a moment to savour a win before swiftly moving on to the next week’s game.

The usual king of this, as exemplified by his famous, ‘We’re on to Cincinnati.’ press conference back in 2014, is Bill Belichick who will be trying to turn around the fortunes of his 1-2 team who got thoroughly outplayed by the Detroit Lions. I’m not sure too many people saw that one coming and we had a couple of reminders in week 3 of the old maxim that anything could happen on any given Sunday. The Patriots struggled on offensive as they continue to falter when running the ball and haven’t found the right mix in the passing game. We may see Josh Gordon if they can get him worked into the mix this week and after they take on the Dolphins this weekend they will have Julian Edelman back from suspension but it could take a while for this be sorted. I’m not going to overreact as it is early and I’ve written several times about how the Patriots plan to peak later in the season but for context the Patriots haven’t lost three straight since 2002 when they had a four game losing streak and missed out on the playoffs (they still had a winning 9-7 record).

Perhaps more surprising even than the Lions getting a win over the Patriots was the Buffalo Bills travelling to Minnesota and beating the Vikings 27-6 as Josh Allen managed to rushing touchdowns as well as a passing one. The Vikings will be looking to shake things off quickly as they are on the road in LA for the Thursday night game against the Rams and I’ve heard several people suggest that the Vikings had one eye on this game and that is why they had such a surprisingly poor game against a team they overlooked. I always find such talk a little troubling as I have no way of verifying and the infrastructure for the Vikings is such that my default would be to think it was an aberration that will quickly be righted but given the Packers (who the Vikings drew with last week) lost to Washington this week and the only team the Vikings have beat are the 49ers there is perhaps some concern that there might be deeper problems. Definitely one to keep and eye on, whilst I will have to take a look at Josh Allen on coaching tape this week to find out just how he managed to lead the Bills to a comfortable win.

In fact, there’s quite a lot I wish I could watch in more details including games I didn’t even see the highlights for. Apart from the two upsets I have already mentioned, the New York Giants travelled to the Houston Texans and won, surely placing even more pressure on head coach Bill O’Brien, whilst the Tennessee Titans managed to beat the Jacksonville Jaguars despite starting Blaine Gabbert and then having to play Marcus Mariota despite the limitations he has from a nerve injury when Gabbert was ruled out the game with a concussion. It has to be said that Mike Vrabel has done well to win two games given his quarterback situation and whilst it is far too small a sample size to draw any big conclusions about him as a coach, it is encouraging. Less encouraging is a third loss for  Oakland Raiders under Jon Gruden who along with the Arizona Cardinals join the Texans as the only teams yet to register a win this season.

The Atlanta Falcons lost a barnstormer of a game 42-37 to the New Orleans Saints, with Drew Brees spinning to get the winning score and the Falcons losing a second starting safety for the season to injury so things are getting increasingly tough for them.

Sadly for the San Francisco 49ers, Jimmy Garoppplo was lost for the season with a torn ACL as he tried to gain some extra yards rushing out of bounds. There has been a lot of focus on the steps the NFL are taking to protect the quarterbacks and with the effect losing that one player has on a team I can understand it up to a point. However, with another seemingly form tackle by Clay Matthews resulting in a penalty, not to mention the string of penalties some linemen are picking up in games the new interpretation of the roughing the passer penalty is definitely a huge talking point. In fact the Dolpins (who I’m sure Dan would like me to remind you are 3-0) lost William Hayes to a torn ACL on a sack that head coach Adam Gase is blaming on the new rules. If players are injuring themselves trying to comply with the new rules and some of the bigger name quarterbacks are suggesting that things have gone too far then perhaps the league will look at it. I don’t want to argue that the league has gone soft, and frankly I think this has more to do with keeping the star quarterbacks playing the safety concerns, but a lot of the plays that have been penalised were simply tackles and I have no idea how a two hundred and ninety pound player fighting his way past an offensive linemen to tackle a quarterback, who are often not exactly small themselves, are supposed to lay said quarterback gently to the turf so they don’t risk an injury. You need a certain amount of momentum to tackle a player and explosiveness to get there before the pass is thrown so a lot of these defenders are being put in a very difficult if not an impossible position.

There have been a number of exciting games, and I think we’d all much rather be focussing attention on say the amazing start to the season Patrick Mahomes has had in Andy Reid’s offence or how the LA Rams are ominously rolling through the season, but until the roughing the passer penalties slow down the conversation about the zebras could keep dominating the conversation and frankly I’d much rather be focussed on the surprises and the good play that is happening in the league. After all, the Cleveland Browns and Buffalo Bills won this week, all things are possible.

The Tao of The Wrong Football

06 Sunday Aug 2017

Posted by gee4213 in Uncategorized

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Tags

Bill Walsh, Blogging, Coaching, NFL, Pete Carroll, Philosophy

Training camps have started and with the Hall of Fame game out of the way, preseason football starts in earnest in the coming week.

Dan and I have been podcasting roughly every other week for a while now, and this blog has been bubbling under since April , but if I don’t get it written soon then it won’t happen so embracing Andrew Brandt’s maxim that deadlines spur action, let’s talk a little bit about our plans for the upcoming season.

The idea for this blog post was hatched over a pub table as we started to make plans for the new season, and it is slightly scary that this was already nearly four months ago. I’m now heading into my fourth season of blogging about the NFL and I have always tried to find ways to improve as a writer and make the blog better. Dan was involved from the start through our pick competition and after a season and a half came to me with the idea of us doing a podcast, which I was very happy to do as long as it was his baby and so Dan became a podcast producer.

I like to take time off during the offseason to refresh, and so whilst still following the draft and free agency, I lay off the writing although if I can I’ll read some books about coaching/American Football. One of the books that left a lasting impression on me was Pete Carroll’s Win Forever – as it crystallised one of the things that I had come to believe about successful sports teams. I do not believe there is only one way to run an NFL franchise that can bring you success, but I do think it is important that there is a coherent approach, and it is surprising how often it feels like there isn’t one guiding a team. In his book Carroll lays out how he came to believe it is vitally important for a coach to set down his coaching philosophy so you can explain it and enact it, and he takes you through his and invites you to come up with one of your own.

I could never get mine down below the twenty-five word target, which given some of my posts on here and the fact that I write novels, perhaps should not be a surprise. But it did set me thinking.

So, whilst talking about our plans for the new season, how to balance the work involved with our day jobs and other hobbies, I thought we should try to flesh out the guiding philosophy of the site.

In the about page of the site, that was pretty much written when the site was setup back in 2014, I set out the goals as follows:

“This site shall be a place of reasoned arguments, opinions, and factual writing unless things go very wrong for the Bengals. There will be traditional film study and analytics, as both have things to offer the football fan, and it gives me the opportunity to be wholly wrong in more than one area.”

This has not changed in three seasons and whilst is still a reasonable place to start, the way that I write on this site as I’ve tried to improve what I do and make it more manageable with the rest of my life has definitely evolved.

So I took the notes I had used to try to craft a philosophy having read Carroll’s book and started to adapt them to the blog. I also asked Dan to make a list of his personal characteristics, which turned out to be not too dissimilar to mine:

Gee: competitive, obsessive, patient, engineer, drummer, writer, goal orientated, scientific approach

Dan: driven, competitive, persevering, improvement oriented, fanatical, organised.

It probably makes sense given our shared interests in football and music, our time spent together in bands, and the similarities in the above lists that during our time working together on the podcast there has been hard work, but never been any conflict. There has been plenty of constructive criticism, but nothing coming close to an argument.

Using the above lists I fleshed out the other notes I had been taking and having worked it through with Dan, I will now lay them out for you.

“In an infinite universe, all things are possible, but anything worth doing is too complex to guarantee success so all you can do is commit to the best possible process to optimise your outcome.”

It is not quite Bill Walsh’s book title, The Score Takes Care of Itself, but I love physics and I wanted to stress the universalness of the guiding philosophy.

Dan put in his list of characteristics improvement orientated, and I very much believe in practice and the idea that you improve through multiple incremental steps. This is something you will often hear mentioned by sports teams with a technical focus such as British cycling, but for me it is also born out of being an engineer and trying to take a scientific approach to things.

As an IT engineer, when you have a strange new problem to solve, you don’t just dive in and start randomly changing things. You have to do your research and then work through the problem systematically, changing one thing at a time so you can eliminate possibilities and identify the true source of the problem. I think this approach to diagnostics and problem solving can pretty much be applied to anything.

I also think it is important to focus on what you can control, i.e. the content and how you produce it. So we will focus on continuing to assess and improve what we do so the site does not stand still but keeps moving forward.

So if this is the guiding philosophy, how do we do this and what are we actually aiming for?

The aims are fairly straightforward:

  1. To entertain and inform
  2. We will not be afraid to be wrong or tackle big issues, but we will not lecture
  3. Endeavour to tell the whole story and embrace nuance.

Mostly these speak for themselves, but I will expand a little as these aims are born out of something I wanted to embrace about blogging. I have never set out to chase traffic, this site was setup to help me get better at writing by giving me a structured outlet to practice, but this also meant I was free to write how I wanted. You will probably have heard me talk about the hot take culture on the podcast, but in case you have not I dislike it intensely. There is nothing wrong with taking a position, in fact there is no point in endlessly hedging and saying nothing, but this should be a position you genuinely believe in rather than an a point made to artificially create an argument between two people or generate traffic. Life is infinitely complex, and this can be reflected in sport, and so should in my opinion be reflected in thoughtful commentary, which can still be fun!

It also doesn’t hurt to demonstrate that it is possible to disagree respectfully and to engage in thoughtful discussion rather than dismiss out of hand any point you disagree with. A cursory look round the internet might show how seldom this idea is observed these days.

Given these aims, what are the rules that we put in place to ensure this happens? Well in truth, given the way we work that comes down to two things:

  1. Produce the best content you can
  2. Own your role and trust in each other

Rule one works because we are both trying to improve what we do with a guiding philosophy born out of an existing approach rather than trying to apply an external idea we’ve borrowed and trying to make fit. Stated on its own, rule one is meaningless, but within the context of what I have laid out it is all that is required. Essentially it is a reminder.

Rule two was born out of necessity, but is also grounded in something I’ve come to believe through over twenty years of playing in bands. When Dan came to me about the podcast, I had to be practical as I was already watching games and writing a blog whilst leading a busy life and not wanting to be disowned by my partner. I wanted to try it, but I made sure to let Dan know that it had to be his project. He writes the notes and plans the pod, edits our separate recordings into a coherent conversation and sorts out distribution. We collaborate on news stories in terms of discussing stories, but he basically runs the show and does a great job.

The best bands I have been in have been based around everyone having an equal say, and using the best idea no matter whose it was. This only works if you take care of what you are meant to, and trust the others to do the same.

Circling back to football, it is also how a team has to operate as on every play, elven people are working together to carry out a set sequence of actions, which works best if everybody focuses on their own role and trust the others to do the same i.e. teamwork. The rule should speak for itself, but it is good to have the reminder.

So there you have it, the Tao of The Wrong Football.

Dreams with a Deadline – Process Over Outcome

04 Sunday Sep 2016

Posted by gee4213 in Uncategorized

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Tags

Bill Walsh, Blogging, Hard Knocks, Jonah Keri, Katie Nolan, NFL, Nick Ferguson, Pete Carroll, Shaun Gayle

I want to try something a little different this week before we get into the grind of the NFL regular season, which is why I am cross posting this across both my blogs, so if you’re not a sports fan please bear with me for a little bit as things will come around.

For the last few weeks I have been following the pre-season of three NFL teams and generally getting excited about the start of a new season. However, this is the weekend that as the final cuts are made, for some careers are ending and for others dreams.

As you watch Hard Knocks (for the general reader a series following an NFL team through training camp) the shift in focus goes from a team coming together to the tension that surrounds them as players start to get cut and the business of football really kicks in. Something like two percent of those who play college football make it to the NFL and the average career is a little over three years. The offseason roster goes from ninety to fifty-three this weekend, and whilst the practice squad has expanded over the last couple of years, when you look at those numbers multiplied over thirty-two teams with very few alternative outlets to play American football professionally there are a lot of people left hanging now.

Once the season starts we will start talking about players who are bad or good, but in reality you have to be pretty exceptional to even make it into a training camp, yet alone make a successful career of the sport of American football.

So what happens next? Some will hold on for a call once the injuries start, some will keep themselves fit and hope to try again next year, and some will have to walk away from their dream. Something they have worked very hard to achieve, with fine margins and no way to keep going.

Those who do not like sport will find such sacrifices hard to comprehend, even if they understand that for some this represents their best chance of making something out of their life. Even those of us who love to lift or run as amateurs struggle to truly understand the pressure that a large number of these players will have been going through. This isn’t just winning or losing; this is about putting food on the table for their families, a shot at something bigger than themselves, and chasing a goal with a deadline.

That deadline is the bit that can be truly terrifying. I remember in my twenties feeling a dread every time my birthday rolled around, looking at the things I had and hadn’t achieved and holding myself up against some idealised timetable. I’m a bit more relaxed about things these days, partly through having done things like publishing a book this year, and partly as I have come to understand that I have a restless nature. A couple of days ago a friend halted halfway through a sentence as they realised they were basically calling me crazy.

An NFL blog, writing books, an NFL podcast, a band, a pretty busy job – all the things as I like to say. I found it funny because I didn’t disagree, and they left out the lifting, the runs, the morning stretches and core work, the out of hours support, walks with my partner, the list goes on.

I have come to appreciate the trying of things, but whilst there are things that get sacrificed, I’m not in a position that I have had to sacrifice everything to pursue one goal. There’s some that will talk about how you can achieve anything if you pursue their dream. For some this is true, and I can see that it is offered as a genuine encouragement, but usually by people who have beaten the odds. If I can, then so can you. The problem is that, if you’re focussed on the result, then anything other than achieving that result, and it is all too easy to not get the most out of what you’re doing at the time. And if you sacrifice everything for one goal, then there’s a lot to pick up if that gamble doesn’t pay off.

That’s not to say goal setting isn’t important, or that you shouldn’t try to do what you love, but how you get there is kind of important. If this is sounding dangerously close to one of those life is a journey not a destination inspirational posters, then that’s because it is. So why am I bringing it up now? The answer is podcasts and how I got very lucky this week.

Podcasts feature heavy in this next section because of a discussion between Jonah Keri and Katie Nolan on Keri’s podcast. At the end of every episode Jonah Keri asks his guest for an inspiration thing that has helped his guest. It can be as serious or as silly as they like, and one of the themes that keeps cropping up is that if you love doing something, find a way to do it. Make the thing that you want to do, and you will get better at it and the success may or may not come, but do it for the love anyway.

The reason that these blogs exist are because as I got older, the idea of being a writer wouldn’t go away. I was not one of those children who had a clearly defined idea of what they wanted to do and pursued it through a specific path in education. I kept fiddling with stories and ideas, and then really started working on my writing as I got more serious about it.

The NFL blog started because I loved the NFL and I wanted to work on something that would help me with the mechanics of writing. The NFL would always be something to write about, I was following anyway and it was an extension of my love of the sport.

Along the way, I discovered what I love writing about in relation to football, read more, listened to more podcasts, watched more games. A self-perpetuating interest developed. Not only that, but I learned how to manage my writing time, when I could squeeze out extra words if I needed to, and in the process learnt how to write fiction in more focused bursts without waiting for inspiration.

I read about coaching, and developed my thoughts on this, stealing from Pete Carroll’s book about developing a philosophy, and borrowing the idea from great Bill Walsh that the score takes care of itself. I still haven’t distilled my philosophy down to a handy twenty-five word summary as Carroll asks, but I know the name.

Process Over Outcome.

The idea that you cannot control the outcomes of situation, but if you focus on making the process as good as possible, then you maximise the potential for things to go well.

I’m still working on selling my children’s book, I have a lot to learn. Mostly because I was focussed on making the book as good as I can through the editing and production process.

It is also important to not be afraid of making mistakes, you have to learn from them, but if you’re paralysed by the possibility of failing then you’re not focussing on the process and you might not even try.

The Wrong Football podcast started last season when my friend Dan came to me, and said he’d like to do a podcast with me, and my response was sure, but you have to produce it as I can find time to sit down and record but I’m too tied up with the site to do much more. I approached it like I do being in a band, I have to trust the other people to do their job, go with the best idea, it’s working in a collaborative creative process. Something I’m used to with music and something I have written before about on my writer’s blog.

Thanks to this process, on Friday night I got to shake the hands of a Super Bowl winner. In fact, a pretty significant one for me, because this wasn’t any old Super Bowl winner, but a member of the legendary 1985 Chicago Bears. The team that caused the surge of interest in American football in the UK in the mid 1980s, and pretty much the reason that I am fan of the game. Things come full circle. It was a great experience, certainly for Dan and I, who were very nervous to begin with as this was our first live interview for the pod, but we settled quickly enough because after all, we were talking football.

The interview should be coming in next week’s pod, and will be accompanied by a second interview another ex NFL player Nick Ferguson who was also a great guy, very happy to talk to us and evangelise over the game. It was a pretty incredible evening before we even got to the NFL event itself.

I’m very happy for the pod, and I hope the interviews come across well. I also look back on it, and I think to my own brief stints being interviewed about my book. I don’t see my purpose there as being a hard sell, I just try to be enthusiastic about what I have created. If I wasn’t enthusiastic then I wouldn’t have created it. You hope that your enthusiasm sparks something in others, at the end of the day isn’t that what we’re all hoping for.

The truth is though, that all of these things are interconnected. In a way, the play of Shaun Gayle led to me writing a book, and writing meant that I got to shake his hand. This interconnectedness is part of life, the complexity of the world that surrounds can be baffling, and sometimes it is nice to stare at a sports field and pretend it is as simple as winning and losing. However, once you start to study it the complexity soon picks up again.

I’ll soon be predicting games and writing about the league. I’ll also be working on a sequel to the published book, running, lifting, doing all the things. Following various dreams, trying to ignore the deadlines. Process over outcome. It’s worked for me so far.

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