Draft-eligible players

Forty-eight college football players have requested and been granted permission to enter the 2006 NFL draft prior to finishing their NCAA eligibility and/or their bachelor's degree.

When this topic comes up every winter, people usually focus on the money aspect (players leave to make money), or the "farm system" notion of college football. It rarely focuses on some of the other important measures involved.

1) Human brains are fully developed at around 25 years; prior to that, the brain simply isn't finished becoming. The human body, likewise, isn't fully developed until the early 20s, with metabolic and structural changes continuing to occur.

These kids — and they are still kids — are deciding to enter a physically and mentally demanding profession well before their decision-making capabilities are fully engaged, and even before their physical capabilities are reached.

2) If players are making a jump to professional football for monetary reasons, then rather than focus on individual decisions — in this case, by 48 young men — perhaps a more effective focus would be changing the system, so that these boys — some of whom are barely able to legally drink — don't have to make a decision between dragging themselves out of poverty, or pursuing further development in a more supportive environment.

If our society offered better redistribution of resources, then "buying a house for my mama," might not be such a high priority for some players.

3) The notion that some players are leaving because they simply don't want to be in school.

Rather than compare this to the "farm-system" argument, I would direct this question differently: why? Why wouldn't a student want to be in school? How are universities failing their student-athletes, and how is the education system as a whole failing students such that they don't find education a worthwhile pursuit?

If students leave because they have unaddressed learning difficulties, then schools should put more emphasis on educational support. If students leave because they have insufficient skills to cope with higher education, then schools need to provide supplementary teaching to augment those skills. If students leave because they are bored in their classes, then perhaps schools should reexamine their fields of study and offer topics which more closely approximate what students find intriguing.

Further to all of this, it will be vastly interesting to see how the newest NCAA attempts to encourage scholarship amongst student-athletes develop, especially the prospect of scholarship reduction for lack of progress toward degrees.

USC-Texas: 2005 Rose Bowl

I think USC is going to win.

1) USC has a dominant running game and also a sophisticated passing game. I don't entirely subscribe to Heisman Pundit's notion that sophistication on offense is everything, but when sophistication is added to dominant line play in the running game, things are very different. The primary point here is balance, and USC has it in spades. A well-balanced team will beat a one-dimensional team 4 out of 5 times, and while that means Texas — which has a solid running game and an extremely unsophisticated passing game — will win 1 out of 5, I'll take the odds.

2) Texas has an incredible defense, with a solid secondary and a stellar defensive line. However, their (relative) weakness is at the one spot that I think makes or breaks defenses when confronted with balanced offenses: linebacker. Linebackers are like midfielders: they have to do everything, and they have to do it well, and they have to play on-field-manager. I think Texas might be able to stuff USC's runners on the line. I think Texas may be able to jam the receivers and drape them in coverage. But what about the mid-sized stuff? Little plays hurt just as much as big ones.

3) Vince Young is good. Vince Young is excellent. Vince Young is, regardless of what anyone says, not a very good passer. I know that the conventional wisdom at the moment says that Leinart is overrated as a passer and Young is underrated, but look at the types of passes each is capable of making. Young can throw a spot-on bomb. Young can scramble and hit someone on a broken play (even if he prefers to run, which is, in the long run, eventually going to become a bad idea). Leinart can make every single pass anyone has ever conceived, he can hit every single route in the perfect spot, he is calm enough and mobile enough not to get sacked even when he's feeling pressure.

I'm not sure how USC's defense is going to match up with Texas' offense; the one is very good, and the other is just good enough. But even if we give the benefit of the doubt to USC, Texas just isn't balanced enough in the ways that matter — the sideline routes on 3rd and long, the multiple sets and movement that defenses hate, the progression through receivers (this last is why Young had so many highlights on broken plays: Texas' schemes were such that plays become broken).

And 4) USC has been here before. USC has won 46 of their last 47 (if it weren't for that 3OT game against Cal, they would be on track to break Oklahoma's record tonight). Texas is good, but a few months ago, people were wondering if they could beat a team that had lost three games and was starting a second-string sophomore at quarterback.

So I think USC is going to win. But I wouldn't be surprised if I was wrong. What do I know?

Upsets are fun!

Is baseball really more exciting than football? According to the folks out at Los Alamos (and a few weeks ago, the University of California, as consortium with several companies, was granted further responsibility for the Los Alamos Laboratory, thus ensuring continued scientific excellence and bigger and better bombs), yep, it is because baseball suffers more upsets than (American) football — no word on how Canadian football does in comparison.

The "upset" factor, however, was highest for football — the non-American kind.

However much we might be disinclined to appreciate the "upset" factor as the predicator of excitement, it's true that hope for an upset is the reason they play the game: if you know who's going to win every time, they wouldn't be a reason to take it to the field.

Now, there are perhaps a few reasons for this: three of the sports under consideration — basketball, soccer, and ice hockey — are filled with continuous play, and suggest a leveling affect of talent and execution. Of the others, baseball often can be easily controlled by a single event or player. In football, not only is there no leveling affect of continuous play (rather, momentum plays a huge role in eventual outcome), but also a single player can less affect the game, as there are 24 starters for every team in every contest (if the punter and placekicker are two different people).

Frankly, I adore American football, but it's a lot less exciting than other type of football. Watch some of the matches in this summer's World Cup, and you'll see what I mean: they don't need commercials or somebody's sister's love life to make things interesting.

The Media Is Stupid

The consensus seems to be that Ohio State crushed Notre Dame because of superior speed, and not much else (well, maybe a little good decision-making by Troy Smith, but really, he's just fast). Everyone is raving about Ginn and Holmes and Pittman and Smith, and how rapid-quick-fast-speedy-I've-run-out-of-synonyms they are.

Turns out, yeah, they're fast. But that's not why OSU won.

Let's chart it out:

TD #1, Smith to Ginn for a 56-yard touchdown. Yeah, Ginn outran everybody. But the corner on that play was pulling the "high-school maneuver of looking at the quarterback instead of covering his man," as TMQB regularly laments. Watch the replay: Ginn didn't get separation because he blew by his coverage, he got separation because his coverage was watching the other side of the field.

TD #2, Ginn end-around for a 68-yard touchdown. This one had a lot to do with speed, I admit. But it also had a lot to do with every single other player on the OSU offense -- all 10 of them -- looking for someone to block, and then blocking that person. You think it's just because Ginn is fast that he could run sideline-to-sideline and also up the field for yards and still not have anyone within 25 yards? He's fast; he's not that fast. ABC cut away to Jerry Rice on the sidelines, and Rice mentioned the blocking: he said the best thing about the OSU offense, and about the wide recievers, wasn't that they're fast, it's that they make and hold their blocks.

TD #3, Smith to Holmes for a 85-yard touchdown. This one, like the first one, was more about a breakdown in coverage and less about perfect execution: someone let Holmes get behind him, several someone's, perhaps. You can blame it on the defensive coordinator's call, you can blame it on the safeties, but someone was just out of position, and strangely enough, the same thing happened as with Smith-to-Ginn: OSU exploited the mistake and executed things very well. But defensive mistakes make offence perfection a lot easier. Once Holmes made the catch, he didn't need to have blinding speed to outrun the defence.

TD #4, Pittman around left tackle for a 60-yard touchdown. This is a mirror of the second touchdown: different play, same attention to blocking. The announcers even showed a replay of the run, highlighting Ginn and Holmes making and holding perfect blocks, and letting Pittman slip right in between them and scamper off to the endzone.

So yeah, there are some fast guys on the Ohio State offence. But OSU won through a combination of superior execution — particularly their blocking — and mental mistakes on the part of Notre Dame. [And this is just the OSU offense-Notre Dame defense. The Notre Dame offence made similar mental mistakes, and the OSU defense had similarly excellent execution.]