Excellent PBS Frontline feature on high school football:
– Stopping the run from the 4-2-5. From runcodhit:
Isolation plays create an EXTRA GAP. To remain sound versus this play, the Defense will need to either have a player 2-gap or involve a secondary player in the run fit. This is where the corner playing cutback comes into the picture. When defending the ISO an important thing to consider is how the backers leverage the fullback. Brophy wrote an article about Bo Pelini’s defense, and specifically the lever/spill/lever concept. This is one way to treat run fits. I have become a believer in the linebacker making good contact head up to across, and letting the other backer and cutback player, fill where needed. Carl Pelini mentioned the concept at clinic. He explained that offenses were getting better at scheming run-fits. To combat this his linebackers needed to change up the way they hit and leveraged fullbacks and other pullers.
– NCAA to investigate point-shaving by players. Often fixed games to pay off debts to campus bookies totaling a few hundred dollars.
– In praise of Karl Marx, by Terry Eagleton tells us Marx was a pretty chill bro:
Marx’s goal is leisure, not labor. The best reason for being a socialist, apart from annoying people you happen to dislike, is that you detest having to work. Marx thought that capitalism had developed the forces of production to the point at which, under different social relations, they could be used to emancipate the majority of men and women from the most degrading forms of labor. What did he think we would do then? Whatever we wanted. If, like the great Irish socialist Oscar Wilde, we chose simply to lie around all day in loose crimson garments, sipping absinthe and reading the odd page of Homer to each other, then so be it. The point, however, was that this kind of free activity had to be available to all. We would no longer tolerate a situation in which the minority had leisure because the majority had labor.
Here is Tyler Cowen on Eagleton’s new book on Marx.
– This is important to some of ya’ll: D.C. to legalize online poker. Relatedly, check out the NY Times’s profile of an online poker maven (up to you if it is worth one of your twenty).
– Rakes of Mallow does an impromptu study of DUI arrests and punishments. Draw your own conclusions.
– Quarterback drills with Clemson offensive coordinator Chad Morris at Orange and White.