"What’s the fallout when players start braggin’ on how much money they’re making and the starting running back realizes he’s taking home a dime for every dollar his QB’s getting? "
This, in my opinion, will be the litmus test for every team. Capitalism or Socialism? Didn't some school's team vote for a union at some point? Northwestern maybe? Anyway, good for the kids one way or another. Bad for fans though.
Sidebar, Doc, on not deferring to the second half. Bobby Petrino has been doing this for at least 20 years. The man is not much to most people, but he can coach and has had some ideas ahead of his time. Might even straighten out Jimbo's mess in College Station. .Just sayin...
An offense dominant team kicking off first is PB football. But one reason D dominant teams defer is for slobberknockering them other guys first by forcing a return
They gotta figure out a way to pay quasi-professionals at the college level. The $100. handshakes weren't getting the job done. You're 100% correct the NIL situation is out of hand but it's beyond a S-show. It's a Diarrhea Show. Again spot on for going for it on 4th down. You were a man ahead of his time ( borrowed from the HS coach that never punted). Also kudo on wanting the ball at the beginning of the game. Sets the tone even if you don't score. You think you can score and that screws with the other team. Now, you were on a hot streak until you came up with the fullback idea, Not necessary, put your second or third tight end in the backfield on obvious passing situations. I spent 4 years watching Champ Henson score 2-3 touchdowns a game with a rushing line of 40 yards on 15 carries to never want to see that again. You got back on track with the Hendrix though. Great effort today Doc.
Good article, Doc. Couldnt agree more with you on the NIL debacle. You didnt say if the kid who signed with ASU got a NIL deal from them, but i suspect he did. I recall the Herman Edwards days at ASU short though they were. OUCH!
I think most of us know the NIL "program"..LOL can only go on unchecked for so long until a disaster occurs, and the who knows what will happen. I guess when college football, or sports in general, got away from the value of a full ride and a degree being unimportant, we could have figured the behind the scenes "boosters" would figure a way to abandon the amateur nature of college sports. I think most folks are happy to see college athletes be able to have some basic level of additional compensation, but what is happening is a bad joke at least IMHO. Not sure if i would even plan to play beyond college if i was given a 13 Mil NIL deal while still in high school. Why risk a career ending injury if i already have enough money to help my family and live comfortably for life, especially if i get a degree in something other than basketweaving, and learn how to manage my money...maybe a big if, but just my take. .
The fullback is on the Endangered Species List next to drop-kicker and the Mary River Turtle. If somehow you could get high school kids to play fullback in a pass happy game, your thought might work. Oddly, if one could learn to breathe from his mouth and his ass like the Mary River Turtle can, THAT would certainly be a marketable skill somewhere. In fact, one might suggest, certainly not me, that our dear writer may have achieved southern breathing when he suggested wasting a team position on a Dodo. 🫢
Guys switch positions all the time. You act as if learning to play fullback is a masters-level task. That's a supposition worthy of southern breathing.
I do it often. It’s a byproduct of talking out my ass.
A blocking full back is a specialist like kicker or punter. That position doesn’t exist for good reason. The NFL blitz path is stunted, twisted, half-mooned and delayed…especially delayed in today’s game. And we expect a fullback to monitor every direction either end, either corner, or 3 different linebackers are moving and do that in less than 2 seconds while guessing if his team mates upfront can control their blocking assignment. It can’t be done. What then? TWO FULLBACKS?! One on either side of Burrow? Who do you throw the ball to then? With an empty backfield, the advantage in the secondary goes to the offense. It’s the QB’s responsibility to recognize the defense and put the ball where they aren’t and there is a lot of real estate in that secondary to complete a pass. Joe Burrow is a phenom at reading defenses. On rare occasions, he has a bad day where a defense confuses him. He readily admits that. Other than those days, don’t fix what isn’t broken.
And, yes, an athlete trying to stop the fastest, quickest, meanest players on the field needs Ph D level training to find and stop just one guy in a small sea of confusion…in 2 seconds. Tick. Tick. Tick. Too late.
If he picks up one free runner, that's one more that won't hit Burrow. Joe has been very lucky he hasn't been hurt since 2020. The way things are in the league now, it's only a matter of time.
Doc, I get why you like a fullback. But…fullbacks like John Riggins don’t exist anymore. Coincidently, the Mary River Turtle looks like a hell of a lot like Diesel in his mohawk hair style years. Uncanny, really.
Ummm .. I am being asked to Pledge a payment for the TML. Is that like an NIL for high school teenagers ? At least I know what I'll be getting with TML.
NIL will hurt college sports drastically. At first, I was against the portal, but it seems to have had a positive impact on college basketball. They need to implement a penalty for the coaches who leave and the ones who don’t stick around to coach in the bowl games.
I'm with you on the kick off. Work on the goal line or inside the five. They never seem to get back to the 25.
On fourth down, wasn't it a hoot to see the Eagles line up in a scrum and shove everybody for a yard or so on 4th down? Where are the leather helmets and canvas pants? Where's Bronko Nagurski and Clarke Hinkle?
The push-from-behind rule is kinda humorous that way. Maybe get rid of the hashmarks while you're at it? Talk about yer throwback!
They should just change the name of the sport to rugby. Hard to rank the current most frequent penalties in college and professional sports. Holding has to be up there, followed by pass interference in football and the scrum approach to running the ball on 4th and 1 or ist and goal. in basketball, do they ever call traveling anymore? Or palming the ball? All becoming a big joke.
I see by the top picture today you finally cleaned out your wallet. Did it take a stick of dynamite to blow the lock off? I knew you were hiding money in there for years, but who knew you had most of Ft. Knox tucked away. No more GolfNow deals for you anymore. The bills just came due. The pied piper plays no more tunes. I'm sending my Italian buddy over, Tony Jabroni. He handles collections.
I love to say I told ya so, so I will; I told ya so. Paying college kids ridiculous sums of money has done the obvious. It's opened Pandora's box and creating all sorts of nightmares. That's undeniable. Scandals, cheating, gamblers, and throwing games are next on the agenda, inches away, unless they get this nightmare under control. But remember, conferences basically bullied and disabled the NCAA to change the rules and support their "pay the athletes" agenda, so the big colleges with the deepest pockets and richest boosters ain't gonna try to stop it. Pan to the poor goose that laid the golden eggs. Fast forward to the ending. Thus endeth this story. I suggested that all payments be put in a trust till after graduation, or 4 years, whichever comes last. Makes perfect sense. That's why nobody listened.
Most FBs that block well are too slow to do much else. A blocking fullback that can't run tells the other team you're passing. So what happens? Here comes the blitz, and down goes Joe again. Cue Jim Nantz; "That's the 600th sack of his career, ladies and gentlemen, and he's still just in his 4th season."
I was thinking that making players' pay contingent upon maintaining a GPA of 2.5+ would be a nice (if fairy tale inspired) rule. I like your idea of holding the money in a Trust. Of course, it too has no chance of becoming reality. But I do like it.
Maybe, but they have to consider it with a normal running back in, especially a good one.. The big, slow FB eliminates likelihood of a screen, eliminates crossing the D up with a hand-off. Play action would no longer fool anyone. Once again, the D makes smashed potatoes out of JB. Game has changed. Big FBs are the past. Better to carry extra tail backs.
Yeah this offense would call a fullback an H back. Motion with the guys they have can accomplish the same objectives. I kept thinking Asiasi was the guy they brought here for this role but never could tell if it was working out or not. A strictly FB would be tipping the play. Baltimore is a multi-back run-specfic offensive anomaly and SF features a lot of pre-snap motion too
The 2 teams committed most to using presnap motion are SF and Baltimore. Think there might be a correlation? The '9ers and Ravens also seem to routinely break their QBs every other month or 3
I'm for the fullback. Or an H-Back, or U-Back, or whatever Keith Byers was. I'm also for having a defensive lineman in the backfield during inches and goal, so poor Joe doesn't get crushed. Hand the ball to Refrigerator Jr. and let him have at it.
The NILCAA is a joke. What powers do they possess? When UNC had those fake classes for basketball and football players, what did the NILCAA do? Nothing. Everybody is loving the cash cow right now, but we are one murderous act away from that ending (for a bit at least). Some nut job booster is going to kill some poor kid because that kid decommits from their school, and we will have a Dateline episode to beat them all. Think I'm crazy? Wait and see. The same can be said of sports gambling. Some schmuck is going to lose it all on the over/under between South Dakota State and Missouri A&T and will off some poor kid. Ok, I'm done ranting. I'm all for kids getting paid. I'm all for people having a good time with this gambling thing. I'm just worried there are no safeguards in place.
My all-time favorite guitarist is Jerry Reed. The Claw.
No safeguards? Hoo boy!! It's the Wild West. 18 yr old high school age kids are being dangled 12 mil. Wait till gamblers or the mob get their hooks in a couple kids they lent big money to and force them to fix a basketball game. OR kids decide to form their own little syndicate. It's coming. Watch ESPN's Bad Beats, with SVP. You start to see how easy it is to miss a final run-out hoop and not beat the spread. And before you blame the NCAA, keep in mind the SEC threatened to start their own Ruling Body, just for themselves, if the NCAA didn't kiss their behinds. Remember that? That ruined the NCAA completely. That's when all this stuff started going down, and an emasculated NCAA no longer has any power to stop anything. They're mostly a shell organization for the lesser sports now. You should be thanking them for holding out as long as they did, not blaming them. With insane booster money floating around like snow flakes in a blizzard, things are about to take a turn for the really, really bad. Hold onto your hat.
I'd love to see a triple threat back that can help the QB with an effective Play Action to 1) run it up the middle for five yards consistently 2) stay in the backfield to block effectively 3) swing out wide and catch the ball at full speed heading for daylight! Perine does 1 & 2 well enough for me (so I don't have to perform a lot of data analytics).
I made the mistake of clicking The Athletic’s farm system rankings first thing this morning. I thought the Reds were entrenched in the Top 10, just wanted to see the number. To instead see them dropped to middle of the pack behind the entire division was depressing and baffling, especially since the team has decided not to compete at the major league level this season. Last I saw the farm was ranked 8th & Pittsburgh 7th… suddenly the Bucs are 6th and the Reds 13th, passed in the night by the other 3 Central teams. Did they eat too much over the holidays? I know ranking baseball prospects is hardly an exact science, but someone please explain how this can change so much since fall.
Agreed. I'm not a big believer in "experts'' ranking any players, prospective college or current pro. I just tossed it out there for conversation's sake. I think spending any time wondering about the decisions of 18-year-olds with girlfriend problems is a little strange.
Re NIL, as a longtime season ticket holder with the commensurate large annual donation required, I have zero interest in giving even more money to buy players. Maybe the future playing field tilts to schools with larger and wealthier fanbases. I think the larger NIL pool was a factor in Fickell's move to UW.
I cannot imagine putting up my hard earned money in a pool for recruits. But I do think access to events, coaches, and staff makes some puff up with pride and they find value in it. Big Daddy walking into the donor event, spurs hitting the floor and a pinkie ring. I bought that recruit!
Funny that college football use to be the sanctuary from the “greed” of the NFL. Now the uncontrolled NIL reality reeks and the NFL at least has “controls” that doesn’t allow for shenanigans like this Hurricane/Gator/Sun Devil “recruit.” Becoming harder and harder to come to the sports world to escape the craziness of the other parts of our lives?
I like the FB idea, but what I like even more is the running game NOT always operating from the shotgun - run 5 yards BEFORE you gain an inch. But what do I know?
I largely agree with kicking it short...However...Kicking it out of the endzone results in a 0% of a return for TD. There are instances in games where you absolutely want a 0% chance of TD even if you're giving them an extra 4-8 yards (on avg) by doing so. Same idea with punting it out of bounds. The Bengals probably get to O.T. if Chrisman simply punted it toward the sideline.
There are also times when wear & tear on your special teams guys factors into the total # of times you decide to kick it short. High violence collision by some of your fastest guys tends to slow them down or break them
"What’s the fallout when players start braggin’ on how much money they’re making and the starting running back realizes he’s taking home a dime for every dollar his QB’s getting? "
This, in my opinion, will be the litmus test for every team. Capitalism or Socialism? Didn't some school's team vote for a union at some point? Northwestern maybe? Anyway, good for the kids one way or another. Bad for fans though.
Sidebar, Doc, on not deferring to the second half. Bobby Petrino has been doing this for at least 20 years. The man is not much to most people, but he can coach and has had some ideas ahead of his time. Might even straighten out Jimbo's mess in College Station. .Just sayin...
An offense dominant team kicking off first is PB football. But one reason D dominant teams defer is for slobberknockering them other guys first by forcing a return
They gotta figure out a way to pay quasi-professionals at the college level. The $100. handshakes weren't getting the job done. You're 100% correct the NIL situation is out of hand but it's beyond a S-show. It's a Diarrhea Show. Again spot on for going for it on 4th down. You were a man ahead of his time ( borrowed from the HS coach that never punted). Also kudo on wanting the ball at the beginning of the game. Sets the tone even if you don't score. You think you can score and that screws with the other team. Now, you were on a hot streak until you came up with the fullback idea, Not necessary, put your second or third tight end in the backfield on obvious passing situations. I spent 4 years watching Champ Henson score 2-3 touchdowns a game with a rushing line of 40 yards on 15 carries to never want to see that again. You got back on track with the Hendrix though. Great effort today Doc.
Good article, Doc. Couldnt agree more with you on the NIL debacle. You didnt say if the kid who signed with ASU got a NIL deal from them, but i suspect he did. I recall the Herman Edwards days at ASU short though they were. OUCH!
I think most of us know the NIL "program"..LOL can only go on unchecked for so long until a disaster occurs, and the who knows what will happen. I guess when college football, or sports in general, got away from the value of a full ride and a degree being unimportant, we could have figured the behind the scenes "boosters" would figure a way to abandon the amateur nature of college sports. I think most folks are happy to see college athletes be able to have some basic level of additional compensation, but what is happening is a bad joke at least IMHO. Not sure if i would even plan to play beyond college if i was given a 13 Mil NIL deal while still in high school. Why risk a career ending injury if i already have enough money to help my family and live comfortably for life, especially if i get a degree in something other than basketweaving, and learn how to manage my money...maybe a big if, but just my take. .
Of course he got a deal, probably a nice one. Perhaps we'll never know. That's part of the problem.
The fullback is on the Endangered Species List next to drop-kicker and the Mary River Turtle. If somehow you could get high school kids to play fullback in a pass happy game, your thought might work. Oddly, if one could learn to breathe from his mouth and his ass like the Mary River Turtle can, THAT would certainly be a marketable skill somewhere. In fact, one might suggest, certainly not me, that our dear writer may have achieved southern breathing when he suggested wasting a team position on a Dodo. 🫢
Guys switch positions all the time. You act as if learning to play fullback is a masters-level task. That's a supposition worthy of southern breathing.
I do it often. It’s a byproduct of talking out my ass.
A blocking full back is a specialist like kicker or punter. That position doesn’t exist for good reason. The NFL blitz path is stunted, twisted, half-mooned and delayed…especially delayed in today’s game. And we expect a fullback to monitor every direction either end, either corner, or 3 different linebackers are moving and do that in less than 2 seconds while guessing if his team mates upfront can control their blocking assignment. It can’t be done. What then? TWO FULLBACKS?! One on either side of Burrow? Who do you throw the ball to then? With an empty backfield, the advantage in the secondary goes to the offense. It’s the QB’s responsibility to recognize the defense and put the ball where they aren’t and there is a lot of real estate in that secondary to complete a pass. Joe Burrow is a phenom at reading defenses. On rare occasions, he has a bad day where a defense confuses him. He readily admits that. Other than those days, don’t fix what isn’t broken.
And, yes, an athlete trying to stop the fastest, quickest, meanest players on the field needs Ph D level training to find and stop just one guy in a small sea of confusion…in 2 seconds. Tick. Tick. Tick. Too late.
If he picks up one free runner, that's one more that won't hit Burrow. Joe has been very lucky he hasn't been hurt since 2020. The way things are in the league now, it's only a matter of time.
Doc, I get why you like a fullback. But…fullbacks like John Riggins don’t exist anymore. Coincidently, the Mary River Turtle looks like a hell of a lot like Diesel in his mohawk hair style years. Uncanny, really.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/green-haired-turtle-breathes-through-its-genitals-lands-endangered-reptiles-list-180968788/
That's awesome. You should make that your avatar
Ummm .. I am being asked to Pledge a payment for the TML. Is that like an NIL for high school teenagers ? At least I know what I'll be getting with TML.
Nope, it's a suggested way to compensate a guy who's been working for you for free for six months.
Nick Saban will retire soon...much like Jay Wright at Villanova he won't want to put up with the NIL B.S.
NIL will hurt college sports drastically. At first, I was against the portal, but it seems to have had a positive impact on college basketball. They need to implement a penalty for the coaches who leave and the ones who don’t stick around to coach in the bowl games.
I'm with you on the kick off. Work on the goal line or inside the five. They never seem to get back to the 25.
On fourth down, wasn't it a hoot to see the Eagles line up in a scrum and shove everybody for a yard or so on 4th down? Where are the leather helmets and canvas pants? Where's Bronko Nagurski and Clarke Hinkle?
The push-from-behind rule is kinda humorous that way. Maybe get rid of the hashmarks while you're at it? Talk about yer throwback!
They should just change the name of the sport to rugby. Hard to rank the current most frequent penalties in college and professional sports. Holding has to be up there, followed by pass interference in football and the scrum approach to running the ball on 4th and 1 or ist and goal. in basketball, do they ever call traveling anymore? Or palming the ball? All becoming a big joke.
Totally agree that Band of Gypsy’s is Jimmi’s best. I haven’t listened to it in a while and may have to tonight!
I see by the top picture today you finally cleaned out your wallet. Did it take a stick of dynamite to blow the lock off? I knew you were hiding money in there for years, but who knew you had most of Ft. Knox tucked away. No more GolfNow deals for you anymore. The bills just came due. The pied piper plays no more tunes. I'm sending my Italian buddy over, Tony Jabroni. He handles collections.
I love to say I told ya so, so I will; I told ya so. Paying college kids ridiculous sums of money has done the obvious. It's opened Pandora's box and creating all sorts of nightmares. That's undeniable. Scandals, cheating, gamblers, and throwing games are next on the agenda, inches away, unless they get this nightmare under control. But remember, conferences basically bullied and disabled the NCAA to change the rules and support their "pay the athletes" agenda, so the big colleges with the deepest pockets and richest boosters ain't gonna try to stop it. Pan to the poor goose that laid the golden eggs. Fast forward to the ending. Thus endeth this story. I suggested that all payments be put in a trust till after graduation, or 4 years, whichever comes last. Makes perfect sense. That's why nobody listened.
Most FBs that block well are too slow to do much else. A blocking fullback that can't run tells the other team you're passing. So what happens? Here comes the blitz, and down goes Joe again. Cue Jim Nantz; "That's the 600th sack of his career, ladies and gentlemen, and he's still just in his 4th season."
I was thinking that making players' pay contingent upon maintaining a GPA of 2.5+ would be a nice (if fairy tale inspired) rule. I like your idea of holding the money in a Trust. Of course, it too has no chance of becoming reality. But I do like it.
I doubt many Ds will be guessing Run on 3rd-and-8.
Maybe, but they have to consider it with a normal running back in, especially a good one.. The big, slow FB eliminates likelihood of a screen, eliminates crossing the D up with a hand-off. Play action would no longer fool anyone. Once again, the D makes smashed potatoes out of JB. Game has changed. Big FBs are the past. Better to carry extra tail backs.
Make it an H or U-back. Big ol' Keith Byers could block and catch passes.
Yeah this offense would call a fullback an H back. Motion with the guys they have can accomplish the same objectives. I kept thinking Asiasi was the guy they brought here for this role but never could tell if it was working out or not. A strictly FB would be tipping the play. Baltimore is a multi-back run-specfic offensive anomaly and SF features a lot of pre-snap motion too
I'd prefer an actual extra blocker over pseudo trickery.
The 2 teams committed most to using presnap motion are SF and Baltimore. Think there might be a correlation? The '9ers and Ravens also seem to routinely break their QBs every other month or 3
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-49ers-believe-in-the-magic-of-pre-snap-motion/
I'm for the fullback. Or an H-Back, or U-Back, or whatever Keith Byers was. I'm also for having a defensive lineman in the backfield during inches and goal, so poor Joe doesn't get crushed. Hand the ball to Refrigerator Jr. and let him have at it.
The NILCAA is a joke. What powers do they possess? When UNC had those fake classes for basketball and football players, what did the NILCAA do? Nothing. Everybody is loving the cash cow right now, but we are one murderous act away from that ending (for a bit at least). Some nut job booster is going to kill some poor kid because that kid decommits from their school, and we will have a Dateline episode to beat them all. Think I'm crazy? Wait and see. The same can be said of sports gambling. Some schmuck is going to lose it all on the over/under between South Dakota State and Missouri A&T and will off some poor kid. Ok, I'm done ranting. I'm all for kids getting paid. I'm all for people having a good time with this gambling thing. I'm just worried there are no safeguards in place.
My all-time favorite guitarist is Jerry Reed. The Claw.
No safeguards? Hoo boy!! It's the Wild West. 18 yr old high school age kids are being dangled 12 mil. Wait till gamblers or the mob get their hooks in a couple kids they lent big money to and force them to fix a basketball game. OR kids decide to form their own little syndicate. It's coming. Watch ESPN's Bad Beats, with SVP. You start to see how easy it is to miss a final run-out hoop and not beat the spread. And before you blame the NCAA, keep in mind the SEC threatened to start their own Ruling Body, just for themselves, if the NCAA didn't kiss their behinds. Remember that? That ruined the NCAA completely. That's when all this stuff started going down, and an emasculated NCAA no longer has any power to stop anything. They're mostly a shell organization for the lesser sports now. You should be thanking them for holding out as long as they did, not blaming them. With insane booster money floating around like snow flakes in a blizzard, things are about to take a turn for the really, really bad. Hold onto your hat.
I'd love to see a triple threat back that can help the QB with an effective Play Action to 1) run it up the middle for five yards consistently 2) stay in the backfield to block effectively 3) swing out wide and catch the ball at full speed heading for daylight! Perine does 1 & 2 well enough for me (so I don't have to perform a lot of data analytics).
SF sure gave up a lot of draft coin for McCaffery
Keith Byers!
I made the mistake of clicking The Athletic’s farm system rankings first thing this morning. I thought the Reds were entrenched in the Top 10, just wanted to see the number. To instead see them dropped to middle of the pack behind the entire division was depressing and baffling, especially since the team has decided not to compete at the major league level this season. Last I saw the farm was ranked 8th & Pittsburgh 7th… suddenly the Bucs are 6th and the Reds 13th, passed in the night by the other 3 Central teams. Did they eat too much over the holidays? I know ranking baseball prospects is hardly an exact science, but someone please explain how this can change so much since fall.
Agreed. I'm not a big believer in "experts'' ranking any players, prospective college or current pro. I just tossed it out there for conversation's sake. I think spending any time wondering about the decisions of 18-year-olds with girlfriend problems is a little strange.
Re NIL, as a longtime season ticket holder with the commensurate large annual donation required, I have zero interest in giving even more money to buy players. Maybe the future playing field tilts to schools with larger and wealthier fanbases. I think the larger NIL pool was a factor in Fickell's move to UW.
I cannot imagine putting up my hard earned money in a pool for recruits. But I do think access to events, coaches, and staff makes some puff up with pride and they find value in it. Big Daddy walking into the donor event, spurs hitting the floor and a pinkie ring. I bought that recruit!
Funny that college football use to be the sanctuary from the “greed” of the NFL. Now the uncontrolled NIL reality reeks and the NFL at least has “controls” that doesn’t allow for shenanigans like this Hurricane/Gator/Sun Devil “recruit.” Becoming harder and harder to come to the sports world to escape the craziness of the other parts of our lives?
I like the FB idea, but what I like even more is the running game NOT always operating from the shotgun - run 5 yards BEFORE you gain an inch. But what do I know?
I largely agree with kicking it short...However...Kicking it out of the endzone results in a 0% of a return for TD. There are instances in games where you absolutely want a 0% chance of TD even if you're giving them an extra 4-8 yards (on avg) by doing so. Same idea with punting it out of bounds. The Bengals probably get to O.T. if Chrisman simply punted it toward the sideline.
There are also times when wear & tear on your special teams guys factors into the total # of times you decide to kick it short. High violence collision by some of your fastest guys tends to slow them down or break them
Going to GABP is like watching a train wreck, which is oddly enjoyable (in moderation). If they happen to win, it's a pleasant surprise.
When the current Bengals lose, my heart gets ripped from my soul.
Looking forward to the upcoming train wreck of a baseball season.
It's Always Sunny in GABP ?
Not sure whether you're super sane or sick. I am completely baffled, lol. 👍😊