Football analysis and strategy from Chris B. Brown
New Feature: Football Strategy’s Tech-Fueled Future
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New Feature: Football Strategy’s Tech-Fueled Future
I wrote a feature for Wired on what football strategy will look like in 50 years: Over the last few months I’ve asked a number of coaches at a variety of levels what they thought football strategy would be like in 50 years. Given that, as a profession, coaches tend to be focused on immediate…
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Smart Links — Strategery Round-Up: GPS tracking, bootleg passes, defending 3×1 — 7/15/2014
GPS tracking to measure exertion, speed and to prevent injuries (see also here): Four years ago, Erik Korem and Joe Danos, who were FSU assistants at the time, brought the idea to [Jimbo] Fisher after seeing the devices used by an Australian rules football team. The Australian company that makes them, Catapult Sports, had never…
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Football doesn’t have to be that complicated
Overheard at a coaching clinic: Coach 1: “We just couldn’t stop you guys from hitting the speed out. We used our Tango technique, then switched to the Dragon Claw alignment, and even whipped out the Lombardi Kung Fu grip and we still couldn’t handle it. What are you guys doing to make that that route…
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The future of football and the wave of brain injuries
We’ve been here before, historians remind us, and we have the pictures to prove it: late-nineteenth-century newspaper and magazine illustrations with captions like “The Modern Gladiators” and “Out of the Game.” The latter of those, which appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1891, describes a hauntingly familiar scene, with a player kneeling by his downed—and unconscious—comrade,…
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Strategic trends for the next decade? Start with defense
In their tag-teamed auguries for the next decade of college football, Stewart Mandel and Andy Staples reflect on the decade of the spread and look to the option offenses of the ’70s to predict what big things might come next: 8. The spread and pro-style offenses will learn to coexist College offenses constantly go in…
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Good paragraphs about Madden
And not just this year’s edition. From ESPN: Hawkins wanted “Madden” to play out like the NFL. Equivalent stats. Similar play charts. Real football. By contrast, Lyndon and Knox previously had made a well-received “Monday Night Football” title featuring arcade-style, action-heavy game play. That clicked with Genesis “Madden” producer Rich Hilleman, whose top design priority…
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Player salaries and economic rents
Brian Burke opines on NFL salaries: Personally, I think they’re all overpaid, rookies and veterans. If you ask most football players if they would still play football for $80,000 per year instead of $800,000 or $8 million, they’d say yes. It’s almost certainly a better proposition than whatever else they’d be able to do in…
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Tackling a cyclone: Grantland Rice, the internet, and the death (and rebirth) of sports writing
From the poem “Alumnus Football,” by Grantland Rice: For when the One Great Scorer comes To write against your name, He marks — not that you won or lost — But how you played the Game. This most famous line of famed writer Grantland Rice’s career — “how you played the game” — is frequently…