Cogblog

Every couple of months I veer wildly off-topic to indulge my personal interests (nee the “Basketball category” on this blog.

I want to break down a few of my personal theories on football and how they relate to some more commonly held football beliefs.

Let’s start with this tenet: The goal of the defense is to put mental pressure on the offense.  If the defense puts the offense, and particularly the quarterback, out of sorts, they probably win.  The quarterback that is hating life the most is probably going to lose.

For the purpose of this discussion, I want to focus on the passing game.  If the defense is too weak to stop the run, the quarterback never throws, is never out of sorts, and they win.  Stopping the run is assumed.  People that can’t stop the run lose every time.

So anyway, mental pressure usually comes from pressure rushing the quarterback.  Pressure arrives in one of two ways:

• A great defensive line
• Blitzing

A great example of “great defensive line” was the NY Giants the year they defeated the previously unbeaten Patriots in the Superbowl.  Justin Tuck, Osi Umenyiora, and Michael Strahan were all absolute superstars that could not be blocked one-on-one, they would rush 4 guys, and to double team all three of those guys and block effectively would have taken 7 blockers ((3*2)+1), more than the Patriots kept in with their spread offense, and the result was that Tom Brady was discombobulated the entire game as he constantly felt the heat.

This is why Right End is the highest paid player on most defensive teams.  If the defensive line can generate this kind of pressure without a blitz, it makes everyone’s life easier.  That guy, creating that pressure, is worth his weight in gold.  Conversely, this is why everyone talks about the Left Tackle and how much Left Tackle’s make.  If a Left Tackle keeps a QB from being scared that someone he can’t see is about to hit him, then a QB doesn’t feel pressure.  A great LT is the single biggest thing a team can do to help a QB feel secure.

Finally, relative to other things that I will discuss in a moment, great defensive linemen help stop the run.  Which, as we discussed, is a preliminary criteria to play the game.

Most people don’t have enough talent on the defensive line to be able to harass the quarterback with just a few men rushing.  The result is that many people blitz to create pressure.  Defenses that blitz to create pressure rely on another key player (and this is my area of unique contribution to football schools of thought finally make their appearance): The Cornerback.

Cornerbacks are the defensive backs whose primary area of responsibility is covering wide receivers.  In a defense predicated on the blitz, the ability to single cover wide receivers, even the best wide receivers, gives a defense unparalleled flexibility in where they bring the heat and how much heat they bring.  If you look at the most successful blitzing defenses, you will find teams that value good cover corners:  The Philadelphia hey-day under Jimmy Johnson features a slew of Pro Bowl corners: Troy Vincent, Bobby Taylor, Lito Sheppard, Sheldon Brown, Asante Samuel.  They were never without two superstar corners.  With those corners, they could blitz from all over the field, including bringing Brian Dawkins, the free safety, down into the box for blitzing and run support.

The Jets defense last year keyed off of Revis Island.  Rex Ryan simply never had to game plan for changing coverage to account for great receivers.  He put them on the island and then felt free to go back to blitzing the QB with all the other players.

Without great cornerbacks, a defense needs to drop safeties back to protect over the top.  Once you drop safeties back, you are more vulnerable to the run.  Furthermore, now the flats and middle of the field are less defended, so you need your linebackers to keep an eye out for the tight end and running backs.  You have fewer players to man up with the safeties supporting the corners.  Now you can only blitz one or two guys or risk leaving people wide open in the middle of the field.

Pressure comes from great corners!  Take that to the bank.

Once again, my wife has gotten me going on a topic that I must blog about, despite the fact that it is completely unrelated to everything else. Hopefully it will be half as popular as my basketball post, which was the last random rant I did and was linked to by ESPN. Yay.

Anyway, the topic is Sweet Tea! Huge props to Slate for doing a great article covering the phenomenon of sweet tea. No props for not having trackbacks. Lame.

Here are the facts of the matter as I see them:

1. No restaurant in the northeast makes a good cup of iced tea. Too bitter or too sweet. They do not know how to make it happen.
2. I remember my first day “up North”. I arrived at college, having never visited before applying/accepting/going, and I go out to eat. Appalled by a variety of terrible events: First, it’s not very good, which I kind of expected. Second, no free refills. No free refills defies the whole southern hospitality of sweet tea. I was glad to see that it got called out at the end.
3. There is something I think was missed in the article and also missed in the 150+ comments on the article: True homemade tea needs to be SUN TEA. That is how I was raised. It heats and brews naturally for several hours in the hot sun and you are rewarded with the king of refreshment.
4. I don’t feel the need to heat it hot enough to absorb all the sugar, because it must be sun tea! I am a believer in preparing simple syrup to accompany and sweeten.

Here is my recipe: Add one bag of “Lipton Cold Brew”, the large bags, and three bags of your favorite flavored tea, I like a nice peach ginger tea, to a one quart glass pitcher of water. Cover with Saran Wrap and put it out in the sun for a few hours. Remove tea bags, add some syrup (1 part water, 1 part sugar, boil and cool) and enjoy!

Good sun tea is one of the few undeniable pleasures in life.

“Who’s Now“, ESPN’s event to figure out who is the most “now”, has been pretty thoroughly ripped in the media.  Do I think it is dumb?  Yeah, probably.  Figuring out what “now” means is pretty dumb, and I assume it means something like “Who is the most popular person at this instant”, which is definitely not a contest I think about a lot.

Having said all of that, I want to break down the contest for you and predict my winner based on rigorous anti-science:

1. First, let me start by saying that the beginning was also the end.  LeBron and Tiger had the highest votes of anyone in the first round, crushing their competitors, and now they are in the finals.  In fact, Tom Brady was the only person who #1 seed to not make it to the semi-finals and was also the only person who had the most votes in his bracket to make it through.  You expect #1 to cream #8, but the degree of creaming told the tale of the tape.  Peyton, LeBron and Tiger slaughter their #8 and cruise to the finals.  Tom barely beats David Ortiz and gets tripped up by Shaq in the semi-finals.
2. Only two upsets would really have mattered.  If you look at places where people came close to winning without winning, only two of them makes a big impact.  Tony Parker upset Federer, but if Federer had won, Shaq would have gotten him next round.  Jeter beat Reggie Bush, but if Bush had pulled it out, LeBron would have crushed him.  Here are some ideas though: If TO had beaten A-Rod, then he would have faced off with Kobe.  Bad boys that bring it on game day.  The closest defeat was LT over Beckham in the first round.  If Beckham wins, he faces Nash and the winner then faces Tiger.  If LT had lost, its a different contest but Tiger still wins out.  The next closest defeat was Shaq over Phelps.  If Phelps wins, then it is Phelps vs Parker to see which underdog gets his clock cleaned by Brady.  Shaq actually defeated Brady, so that is a big swing.
3. Parker’s upset and Shaq defeating Tom Brady are the only events in the contest where a lower seed advanced.  Federer being seeded #2 was clearly a bad decision by the committee that failed to recognize how “now” Shaq is (#3 seed).

I am sure that is more than you ever wanted to know about “Who’s Now”.

I spent the entire day raving about the Cleveland Cavaliers game, so my wife thought I should blog about it here.  Normally she tells me to stay focused on business-related topics, so if she thought it was blog-worthy then I must have a really unique message for everyone.  Go find a friend that TIVO’d Game 5 and watch it.  One for the history books.

I have been telling all of my friends the same story since this series started and I wanted to share it.  Watching these games reminds me of my middle school rec league (My rec league was probably representative of a typical little kid basketball league experience).  There were a bunch of teams (my team was one) that had a bunch of OK players.  We fielded five or six guys that did not suck.  We won some games – a few more than we lost – but were never amazingly good.  There were three kinds of teams we played:

1. Many of the teams we played were similar to our team.  They had some players better and some worse, but never that different.  We all matched up well and had a good game.
2. There were a few teams we beat that had nobody.  Our players were better across the board.  Every matchup was in our favor.  These were easy wins and there were always a couple.
3. Finally, there was always some team that had a lot of bad players – every matchup was in our favor – EXCEPT FOR THIS ONE GUY.  He had hit puberty faster or the genetic lottery or something and was bigger, stronger, faster, and better in every way then every single one of our players.  By a lot.

Rec league approaches in this situation are funny.  We played a lot of Box-and-1 defenses, Triangle-and-2 defenses, things like that.  Usually it didn’t matter much what we did.

Anyway, I had flashbacks to middle school watching Game 1 and I think the entire world felt that way watching Game 5.  I think the Cleveland players felt that way during Game 5. At every matchup position, they lose: Wallace, Prince, Hamilton and Billups are all better than any player on the Cleveland team – EXCEPT FOR THIS ONE GUY.  And this one guy is so much better than any Detroit player that suddenly Detroit as a team looks overmatched.