Game Theory

For your Christmas present this year, allow me to introduce you to a little Game Theory. Let's start with Minimax Theory. Impress your friends! Freak out your relatives! Here's a summary of that theory:

"For every two-person, zero-sum game with finite strategies, there exists a value V and a mixed strategy for each player, such that (a) Given player 2's strategy, the best payoff possible for player 1 is V, and (b) Given player 1's strategy, the best payoff possible for player 2 is −V."

Let me take a crack at it for you, without the algebra... Two opponents in a game where one will win and the other will lose will each try to minimize their bad outcomes, and maximize their good outcomes.

A gentleman named John Forbes Nash created a game solution concept for a zero-sum game (one with a winner and loser) that implies two equally matched players, each knowing the best strategies of their opponent, would adopt opposing strategies such that neither could successfully do what would be optimally best. When you get to that point, you're in what's called a Nash Equilibrium. Two tic-tac-toe players that know what they're doing can easily get to a Nash Equilibrium.

Let's think for just a moment about youth football, and the decisions of offensive and defensive coordinators. Without worrying about passing too much, since passing isn't that easy for fifth graders, then as a defensive coach you might choose to defend the outside run, or the inside run, or 'play it safe' and attempt to defend both types of running plays equally well.

As an offensive coach I can choose to run inside or run outside.  On the table below, I've shown what the defense can do on the top column labels, and what the offense can do on the row labels, and within the matrix, what the yardage gain outcome might be given the circumstances.

	D Defends Outside	D Defends Inside	D Defends Both
O Runs Outside	0	5	4
O Runs Inside	5	0	4

There are four downs available to gain ten yards for an offense. But the risks associated with giving possession back to the opposing team on a fourth down failure make three downs the effective opportunity.

Under two out of three scenarios shown in the matrix above, as an offensive coach I can run a successful play. At first blush, that would seem to be pretty good odds. To optimize my chances for a five yard play, I need to 'keep you guessing' so let us presume that I will try to run as often inside as I do outside.

Also notice that your defense can't just sit in a defense-of-both posture. If you do that then I will gain 12 yards every three plays and march down the field.

Given my criteria, your defense would best be served to guess and defend either inside or outside on every first down. Two outcomes would be possible. If you guess correctly, I gain 0 yards. If you guess incorrectly, I gain 5 yards.

So the down and distance for the next play is either 2nd and 10, or 2nd and 5. If the distance is 10, then for both of the next two downs you should play safely against both types of runs, and force my offense into 4th and 2.

If though, you did not guess correctly on first down, you are now defending a 2nd and 5 situation. You should guess again. If you guess correctly on second down, you will force our offense to face a 3rd and 5, at which point you can safely defend against both and inside and outside run and likely force us into 4th and 1. If you guessed wrong for a second consecutive time then you have just allowed me a first down. But you should guess again, and hope you won't be wrong four times in a row.

Unfortunately for most offenses, if the defense guesses correctly even ONCE in any series of three consecutive downs, which they are statistically likely to do, then the offense will encounter a fourth down situation within four to six plays.

By guessing in this manner, your defense minimized risk over a series of three downs, and maximized the chance of creating a fourth-down during the possession. That's Minimax theory at work.

Because it gets really hard to string three first downs together, offenses reach a Nash Equilibrium in the game, and can't score.

Enter the option. (You knew it was coming, didn't you?)

The coolest thing about the triple option is that it tilts the odds in favor of the offense running the right play. The guesswork has been removed. My offense no longer cares whether your defense is defending the inside or outside, until the play has commenced.

Running the triple effectively is like being able to bet at the roulette wheel for both red and black with the same chip. Once the ball gets rolling, you're pretty sure that one or the other is going to work.

I've not just minimized, but actually eliminated the statistical advantage for the defense of defending either the inside or the outside. If you defend the outside, the triple runs inside. If you defend the inside, the option goes outside.

The test of course, especially in youth football, is that the next best strategy for your defense will then be to force my offense (or our coach) into errors. Your defense will try to get us to make the wrong read, or run the wrong version of the option, or defeat our blocks, or make a big play with some type of high-risk strategy that might leave the defense in an otherwise unsound position, but could create a big loss of yardage.

And that's another whole set of circumstances that we would have to draw out, and won't worry about today.

The triple option isn't the exclusive way to apply these game theories to football. Many modern college spread offenses have options on pass patterns as intrinsic components - so depending on how the defense is aligned, a pattern may break off or take off in different directions and timings. Zone read running plays are option running plays from shotgun, and NFL offenses throw quick slants and wide receiver zip passes off called running plays all the time, depending on what the defenses show. These are all more modern ways of using real-time decision making to maximize good outcomes.

These games within games are all Minimax efforts to tilt the Nash Equilibrium out of balance and into the favor of the offense.

To all our players, parents and friends, here's hoping your holidays are maximized for great outcomes, and  don't let the eggnog effect your equilibrium too much.

Ho, ho, ho, Merry Christmas!

What Don't You Know?

"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know." ~ Donal Rumsfeld

This post is about unknown unknowns. It came to mind because I was thinking about the Black team's three losses in 2010.

(I've noticed that I don't dwell on the losses for the other teams quite as much. I think it is because I'm focused more on the improvements among individual players on the Blue and White teams, and can really leave the games at that. But I seem to linger on the losses for the Black team. We did have improvement among many of our players on the Black team as well, but I just wasn't entirely content with that. If you're blessed with a roster full of talent, you'd better win games. We try not to overly emphasize winning, but as I've mentioned before, they do keep score, and we do try to win.)

Anyway, what kept coming to mind thinking about those losses was Don Rumsfeld's famous line about unknown unknowns. His topic was much more serious than mine, but he actually expressed what we went through to some degree as an offensive football team.

In our 6-0 loss in the semifinals of the Basehor Tournament, we knew that we would have to adapt to playing without a couple of key players. We knew that we would not know what type of defense they would be playing, as there had been no opportunity to scout them. But we did not know that we did not know how to handle an eagled scheme with hard-charging defensive ends. By the time we learned that, the game was in the second half. By the time we found something that might have worked against that thing that we didn't know about, we were down to our last possession.

Before our game against SMNW, we knew that their safety would come up to play run support just before the snap. We knew that we would not know until we had a few cracks at their line whether our veer or option would be more effective (turned out to be veer.) But we did not know that we did not know how to handle an overloaded gap blitz. We learned how to handle that in the weeks following that game. But our offense sputtered in that game because we never knew that we hadn't known how to handle a defense like that.

Against Olathe East we knew that we would be playing the best team in our league, and we would need a great effort against them. We knew that we would not know from snap to snap where their safety would line up, and we prepared for multiple possibilities. But we did not know that we needed to know how to attack a team that stacked six players outside our A backs, instead of the more typical four. It wasn't until the following week at practice, after losing to them, that we developed some better strategies to deal with that type of alignment.

By the time we played our final game we could handle defensive ends crashing with a 5-3 eagle under look. We were much more prepared to pick up the occasional blitz, even through an overloaded gap. And though they didn't stack the outside quite as aggressively as Olathe East, our final opponent did shift somewhat to the outside at the expense of their interior defense - and we were in a far better position to exploit that.

There is a temptation to believe that "now we've seen it all." But I'm sure that we haven't. And I'm happy that we learned and adapted to what defenses did against us throughout last season, and that we got better. But I suppose I will always worry about all the things I don't know that I don't know.

No coach can know what those are beforehand of course - that's the nature of the problem. But this off season, I will be thinking about ways to get faster at understanding unexpected tactics and becoming quicker at inventing adjustments.

RAVENS!

NFL Hits

The National Football League is cracking down on high speed hits to the head.

They've enacted a rule this year that prohibits the practice of 'launching' - whereby a player, typically defensive, leaves his feet to dive head first into a player running at some degree of opposite angle. And it isn't just helmet to helmet contact - also now illegal is forearm to helmet, and shoulder to helmet delivered via the launch.

I know why defensive backs do these things. They are trying to intimidate receivers coming over the middle. This practice has actually been a response to the tightening of pass defense rules in the NFL over the years. It used to be difficult to cross the middle, because DB's could grab you on your cut, and linebackers always took a shot at you as you went past. Now with the 5 yard contact rule in the NFL, fast wide receivers achieve very high velocities on their pass patterns. Safeties in zone defenses launch themselves at those crossing receivers because trying to wrap up Larry Fitzgerald or Randy Moss at full speed is mostly futile.

The way to protect wide receivers is to slow them down. The way to slow them down is to eliminate the immensely irritating 5-yard contact rule. Slow receivers down, and the inevitable collisions in football will be less violent.

Another idea would be for the NFL to fine players proportionally according to the force of any given collision. Force is changed momentum over time. Momentum is mass multiplied by velocity. So the force of any collision in football has a lot to do with how fast two guys are going, how big they are, and at what angle they collide (head-on shortens the time for the change in momentum, creating more force - oblique angles create 'glancing blows' that are less forceful collisions.) 

1. Should the NFL compel wide receivers to run routes at certain angles? Do the angles of the routes have any bearing on the increasing or decreasing incidence of injury?
2. Should the NFL consider whether the wide receiver crossed the field with reckless velocity?
3. What should the NFL do about receivers that 'launch' themselves to catch a pass? Is that a reckless disregard for defenders?
4. Maybe the blame for the angle of a given collision that contributes to an excessive force problem should be placed on the coach that drew the route? Or perhaps blame could be placed on the quarterback that threw the poor pass that caused a last-second adjustment and an unfortunate change in angle?

Obviously, they're not going to adopt ANY of those ideas. The owners like passing. But the truth is, if we don't slow receivers down and simply succeed in lowering the target hitting points for defensive backs - which is I think, the goal of the league - we will soon be discovering a rash of different injuries - neck, ribs, knees, etc. - and then the owners will wonder what they ought to do about that.

Ambidexterity is Good Thing

Our White team's right-footed punter, seeing the heavy rush from his right, calmly booted the ball left-footed.

I've never seen that before.



Lesson for football coaches: If in doubt about who you should choose to be your punter, a soccer player is not a bad idea.

Progress

I've had very little chance to watch our Blue team play in games this year, aside from Coach Lee's highlight clip on YouTube a couple of weeks ago.

Last night I began converting the Blue team's DVD (thanks Dave Brown!) from their second game, and am uploading it to our protected site today. It should finish out sometime this afternoon. Click the 2010 Videos link over on the right side of this page to see what we've shot and uploaded this season. The Blue team's game Saturday was against Paola, and I was able to convert all but Paola's last two plays - a halfback pass incompletion, and another halfback pass for a short completion and tackle by Zach O.

Let me give you my quick impresssion - what a difference one year makes!

We knew that the Blue team had some good talent from last year in players like Eddie and Grant, and we knew that we had some brand new kids like Tommy, Dante, Julian, & Jack M. that looked ready to help right away. We also blended in a couple of kids with two years experience in another program, Shawn and Jacob H, and they've been very consistent performers for a relatively inexperienced team.

But do you recall an e-mail I sent to many of you about how excited I was for the second-year guys, and the progress that I thought they might make? Watching film of Jake, Zach, Colby, and Jarid was a real treat for me. Those guys are absolutely breaking out this season for the Blue team.  Michael B is another second year player - albeit this is his first year in the U.S. - and he has ramped way up from where he was this summer.

By moving to three teams, suddenly those guys that were very new last year now have very important roles, and are making key plays for a rapidly improving Blue team. Mix in the brand new tackle football guys - Dillon, Stewart, Halen, and Hunter - all of whom have big roles themselves and are producing, and the Blue team is really coming together.

I really enjoyed watching your game on film Ravens Blue. You were very impressive. All of us are really excited for you guys!

One Block

Our black team gave up a touchdown to SME on a kick return.

It only took one block to spring him (click the pic for a closer look):

Excellent game anyway. And another good weekend for Blue and White as well - Blue with their first win, and White playing a one touchdown game against the highest scoring team in the league. Great job guys!

Rules In Play

A few football rules have come into play this fall that are interesting to write about.

In week one the opponent for our black team was granted a 5th down (see Coach Lee's post below.)

We talked to the crew about the whole series of plays before the 5th down play was run, but they chose to grant the offense the play anyway.

We didn't make a big deal about it, other than to try to get the situation corrected before the 5th down snap. But the crew chose to leave the down marker as it was, having given Olathe South two 2nd down plays - one at the end of the first quarter, and the other at the beginning of the second quarter.

Turned out that it didn't hurt anything, but we spoke with the officials about it before the snap because we thought it was a correctable error. They told us in the conference pictured above that they knew they'd made a mistake with the down marker. But in our view, they then chose to fix that error by making another mistake. As an official, you hate it when you make a mistake. But you can seldom make things right by pretending that you didn't make a mistake. It probably should have been first down ONW, with referee apologies to Olathe South for having the down marker set incorrectly. Instead, we got the apology, and they got a 5th down.

In our White team's game last Saturday, our referee was giving our opponent's offense a little too much time in the huddle. We complained a bit, and he enforced a delay-of-game penalty for us on the next play when they took too long.

But then he started the clock.

To me, this was an obvious error. If the clock restarted after a delay of game penalty, any coach could virtually kill a game with repeated delays. And in fact of course, the clock procedure after delay IS in the rulebook under Rule 3 Section 4 Article 3-i.  I couldn't have told you that precise location before the game, but you can bet that I can tell anyone where it is today.

What was more interesting to me was the reaction of the various coaches on our sideline to this mistake as it happened. We were all fairly convinced that the ref had it wrong, just because it had to be wrong, based on an intuitive understanding of the game. And yet the ref and line judge both maintained that yes, it probably would be possible to run out much of the clock with repeated delay penalties.

I made a note of this on my evaluation form, as possibly being an exception to the generally pretty good job the officials did in that game. Then just as a follow-up (and to be sure I wasn't crazy) I checked the book, found the specific rule, and sent a quick e-mail to the league supervisor of officials about that and the 5th down situation I mentioned above. To my surprise the league supervisor admitted that he too would have started the clock after a delay penalty, but that in fact we were right about the rule.

I guess this rule must not be as intuitive as I thought, but I'm pretty sure our league knows how it works now.

Finally, I did a bit of research this summer about BBW - that's referee shorthand for 'block below the waist'. In high school football, Rule 9 Article 2 generally prohibits blocking below the waist, except down in the trenches under certain conditions.  However, blocking below the waist is defined within the definition of blocking (Rule 2 Section 3 Article 7) as "Blocking below the waist is making initial contact below the waist..." (my emphasis of the word initial.)

I wondered if this exception by description might allow a down-field punch block in the numbers, followed immediately by a cut technique below the waist. In fact, given the wording, I wondered why wouldn't ANY down-field low contact be OK if the blocker had initially contacted the defender above the waist.  Several other referees had written that contact had to be sustained to meet that exception - but I could not find the word sustained, continuous, or anything like it anywhere in the rulebook.

I had verbal and written conversations with multiple officials pointing out the absence of the language necessary for sustained contact, and was pretty convinced that I'd found a legal way to throw low blocks down the field. But as it turns out, I've since decided that such a technique would be illegal.

By definition blocking is 'obstructing by contact'. Once contact is broken, a blocker is no longer blocking, even if he is standing right beside the defender he just blocked. So the punch and cut technique down the field that I was envisioning would actually be TWO blocks. And the second block would be illegal.

To look at it another way, substitute the definition for the term blocking itself in the blocking below the waist description: "Obstructing by contact below the waist is making initial contact below the waist..." In other words, obstructing by contact can't be blocking below the waist unless it starts as blocking below the waist.

That's why experienced refs had written that the block had to be 'sustained.' If you start high and fall down in the process, sliding down the body of the defender - in fact if any number of different things happen that might seem to make the block illegal, including the guy turning his back on you during the sustained block - you're actually legal if you started legal.

There's a great discussion of NCAA low blocking right here.

Someday when my knees are completely shot (instead of only half shot as they are now) and I can't cope with being a soccer referee any more, I think it would be a great challenge to be a football official.  Until then I'll just work amateur hour on Saturdays from the sidelines.

Here's how you fill the Hole

Fifth down and less than one to go. Yes you read that right. Refs can't count. Terrell does a great job filling the hole! Coach Lee

Great Scrimmage Sunday

Thanks Blue and White teams for making a great scrimmage on Sunday afternoon. We saw so many good things!

I really appreciate your moms and dads sitting in the hot sun watching a little football. Hope they had fun too.

Thank You BVNW

Many thanks to Coach Tom Baird and the BVNW Huskies. What a great opportunity for our Black team to scrimmage one of the top teams in Johnson County.

Special thanks also to Coach Mike Zegunis of BVNW High School, who spoke with both teams after the scrimmage, and had a great message for our players.

I thought we were much improved defensively compared to our effort against them a year ago. Offensively, we've still go a ways to go. But we will get there.

Thanks parents for taking some of your Saturday to help us Get Better.

But What Would Scissors Mean?

I was teaching a little option football yesterday morning. I stopped two-thirds of our guys, an entire scrimmage, just to get a point across about blocking the midline as compared to blocking our regular option.

I won't bore you with all the details of that, for which I'm sure you are quite pleased.

But almost as an aside, I also mentioned that a quarterback could give a hand-signal behind his back to indicate his pre-snap read to the fullback. (Pre-snap read means the look of the alignment of the defense that the quarterback sees, and what his expectations are based on that look.) Basically, if we see the dive key read aligned inside the gap to which we're trying to dive - be it A, B, or C gap, depending on the option we are running - chances are we will not be handing off, and a hand signal prepares the fullback for a quick jump around the hole to help with the blocking.

I thought the hand signals we'd invented for them were pretty clever. If the quarterback sees that the dive gap looks promising, he clenches his fist behind his back, because the fist is equal to the rock, and the fullback is going to get the rock.

If the quarterback holds up an empty hand behind his back, he tells the fullback that he will get the empty hand - in other words, nothing at all, meaning a fake.

Being a wise and sagacious coach, I taught, then tested with a question:

"Now boys, if I use the closed fist behind my back like this, it means THE ROCK, and the rock means the ball, and the ball means the quarterback believes he's going to give the ball to the fullback." I said that and was mildly encouraged that nods of understanding were seen all around. So I continued, "Now boys, if I use the open hand behind my back like this, that means THE EMPTY HAND, and who can tell me what that should mean?" to which Jack B, nearly bursting with newfound understanding, shouted out, 

"Paper?!" 

It was a very entertaining moment for our assistant coaches.

Heat Practices This Week

We will be right on the edge tonight of being unable to practice due to heat. That may be the case all week.

Our plan will be to practice at 6:30 p.m. 6:25 p.m. until 8:25 p.m. Monday through Thursday this week in pads. If upon arrival we are heated out, we will shed the pads and walk through for an hour. Parents, check with us at drop-off to see which sort of practice we will be holding. Or, if you live close enough, you can check the FCCJC web site at 6:25 p.m. or so - if it is way over, you'll know it is a walk-through.

I Lost My Phone...

...but there's a happy ending. This only has to do with football in the very most remote sense, but what the heck. You're reading anyway.

My phone fell out of the pocket of one of our equipment bags. I think it actually happened before practice started. But I didn't notice it missing until after practice, then persuaded myself that it was somewhere else in the bag, or that I'd hadn't brought the thing with me anyway.

(I mean, with Weis and Crennel on board now, I'm just not getting the number calls from Todd that I used to get during practice last year, so I should be fine leaving the phone at home.)

So believing the phone safely at home - a fancy Verizon droid phone mind you, with way more stuff than I really know how to use - I left. It was hot, I was tired, and I figured if it wasn't at home it was in one of the  football bags or my clipboard and I'd find it later.

You do this don't you? If you can't find your phone, you call it? I have a rather, ahem, distinctive ringtone that one of my children established for me. Even if I knew how to change it, I probably wouldn't, because it deeply embarrasses my other children and my wife. And that's what I live for.

So I called my missing phone, listening intently for waka waka waaaaaka waka waka waaaaaka waka waka waaaaaka waaaaaaa. (I told you. Distinctive.)

It didn't ring. It didn't ring in the car, or either football bag, or anyplace else in my home.

Now for ordinary football coaches, this would be a nightmare scenario. You've come home from goofing off all night at football practice, and you've lost your fancy cell phone.

"Why Jim" you say, "You don't goof off at practice. You and all the coaches work very hard with our children to give them a great practice, even in the heat and when things are difficult. You're patient, and kind, and the kids have fun, and it certainly doesn't seem to take all night.. you don't seem to be goofing off at all!" To which I respond, yes, thank you so much for noticing and no, it does not seem like goofing off to me at all, except that I must confess - I think practice is fun. By definition you see, anything that I think is fun is defined as 'goofing off' in our household. You may use your imagination to determine which family member of mine might hold this opinion. 


But no, as I said, I'm no ordinary football coach. I am, in fact, a card-carrying, pocket-protecting, bona-fide, full-on, unabashed Geek - and yes, that's Geek with a capital G.

This deep Geekiness has caused me to install several really useful 'apps' upon my Droid phone. App is short-hand for 'application' and it means a little program that runs on a phone. The app that saved my bacon last night is called, as you might expect, FindMyPhone.

FindMyPhone is, at its heart, a text answering machine. When I installed the FindMyPhone application, I told it to do two things, and it does those two things very happily. First, I told it that whenever it receives a text from any phone that says a very special keyword, it will ring like crazy. It will ring even if the phone is on silent. So no matter where I've lost the blamed thing in my house, the waaka waka etc. will reunite me with my cell phone.

Second, I set up another keyword that texts a reply back the exact GPS coordinates of my phone every five minutes, until I tell it to stop.

This is way cool. Because Google maps will show you, within just a couple of feet, the precise location of a set of GPS coordinates.

Last night I sent my text-me-back keyword to my phone from my son's cell phone, and a couple of minutes later he received a text with the following coordinates: 38.92975778333336,-94.82969685

If you key those GPS coordinates into Google Maps, and then switch to their satellite imagery map, you'll get a picture like this one:

Can you see the green arrow? No, no, not the comic book character. The green arrow right beside the long jump runway.

That's where it said my phone was.

By the time I managed to get FindMyPhone to cough up this information, it was dark. (It isn't dark on the picture Mom, because that's an old image, and they just superimposed the arrow over it. They didn't really task me a satellite, so please don't tell Dad that I have that type of power.) So I went back out there with another cell phone, texted the ring command, and sure enough it bird-dogged me right to it. Buried in a deep patch of grass about a foot away from the green arrow location, there was my expensive black phone, upside down and all but invisible to the naked eye.

Like I said, this doesn't have much to do with football, other than the field. But it is sort of a neat story, if you're into that sort of stuff. Plus, I wanted to write about it. More goofing off I guess.

Down, Set....

GO!

At 6:00 p.m. tonight the FCCJC teams of the ONW Ravens 2018 Football Club will gather for their first non-contact practices of 2010. We'll meet on the JV field, inside the track just east of the school. It might not hurt to be five minutes early to help everyone get their forms turned in.

We're expecting 49 players this evening. That's a great number for the three teams. When you add the 18 expected players for the Blue Valley team that will start the following week, we're up to 67 players in the club.

Remember water, helmet, cleats, shorts, t-shirt, and your player contract and physical form (if the contract has been signed by your health care provider, you don't need the physical form.)

From Deep in the Archives - Men in Motion

Hat tip to the New York Times

Even back in 1921, there were issues to settle.

Heisman and Walter Camp Argue About Men in Motion

We're Popular

We have thirty-two players signed up as of today for FCCJC teams. Tomorrow's registration will indicate whether that number will top out in the mid forties, or perhaps even approach fifty players. Coach Swinford reports that the Blue Valley team has eighteen players already, and may not be done yet.

Whatever happens over these last three registrations, we're well on our way to over sixty 5th grade football players in the ONW area.

When I think back to our start in July of 2008, I remember that we had only fourteen ONW boys, and were fortunate the league sent us two out-of-area players to push us up to sixteen.

We've certainly come a long way. ONW Raven football is popular now because, first and foremost, the boys have had fun. Nearly as importantly, our  parents find the club pretty well organized and receptive, and notice that the coaches seem to care that the players learn and that they play safely.

When you combine all of those things - we boil it down as Have Fun, Get Better, Be Safe - you create an environment that is bound to grow.

Kids want to Have Fun. As parents, we like for our kids to have fun too, and we certainly don't mind that organized athletics seems to be a great way to do that.

Kids also understand that coaches are there to try to help them. Most of them this year will discover (if they hadn't already) that success in the game comes with improving their abilities. At just this age kids really begin to grasp the point of athletics beyond participation. This is the age where they earnestly begin to apply the techniques and strategies that coaches give them to make them better players.

As a teacher, that's a rush. A handful of kids at any given moment last year could use those techniques and strategies for greater success. When I consider that SO MANY of them will be able to take that step this year... well, I can hardly wait to get started helping them Get Better. I think parents really like to see that as their kids participate - that's really one of best parts for us.

And of course, we have to Be Safe. There will be bumps and bruises along the way, but we really watch for the dangerous stuff like improper use of the helmet and heat-related issues. If a player or his parent doesn't feel like we're being safe, we're probably not going to have the player very long anyway.

I think by focusing on those three things we've created a growing program. When organizations are in growth mode, their gravity increases. Parents and kids are pulled in to look because they want to know, "Why are so many of our classmates playing football? What's the big deal?" As they discover us, and find that things are pretty much just the way we said they'd be, they get a great feeling about both the sport and the club.

Notes from Pac 10 Country

I'm here in Estes Park, Colorado, and you're not - more's the pity for you.  While I was driving across I-70 Saturday with my youngest and getting pelted with rain, the FCCJC sign up was interrupted, then canceled due to the same weather.

Only two of our players made it through, so the rest of us will have June 26th, July 10th, and July24th, as the three remaining sign up dates. Plenty of chances yet. Please let us know if none of those remaining dates work for you, and we can see about some alternative arrangement.

If you're not familiar with it, Estes Park is a very pretty little town just at the foot of the Rocky Mountain National Park. It is also just north of Boulder, which officially became Pac 10 country last week.

The locals here seem more interested in the outdoors than what conference their local college team calls home. I think that's one of the criticisms of Colorado college sports, but I also think that makes them fit just nicely with their new Pac 10 brethren.

I'm not sure what to think of the new deal. The Big 10 is taking a breath, and I assume the Pac 10 will too. But will the Big 10 make another play for Notre Dame?  Will they use the threat of asking Missouri, Rutgers, Syracuse and Pittsburgh to force Notre Dame's hand? And then will they go ahead and do it?

Nebraska is in for another year, and Colorado is in for two more, last I heard. Will the Big XII look to replace either or both? Would any school in its right mind join this conference, held together as it is with spitballs and bailing wire?

For our age group, I hear rumors of a top-flight team thinking of leaving the Blue Valley League and joining FCCJC. This is piled on top of rumors I heard throughout the spring of who was leaving FCCJC for Blue Valley.

Really, we're just like the big boys - just less money involved.

Finally, dad and baseball coach Joe Pavlovich made me laugh with this drawing of the Big XII's new logo. Hope all of you are having a great summer, and travel safely!

FCCJC Registration #2 on Saturday

The second FCCJC registration day will be this Saturday, from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. at the Heritage Park Football complex at 162nd and Pflumm. Be sure to bring a checkbook and either an FCCJC registration card from a previous season, or a copy of your son's most recent grade card and birth certificate.

Kansas, K-State, Iowa State, and Missouri will be there checking in for their new division, the Leftover Lightweights. Baylor has not been admitted to this point, though sources say the 8th grade National division has made inquiries.

Warning - Another College Football Conference Re-Alignment Post

Rumors are moving VERY rapidly in college football. We've had confirmation of Texas-Big Ten discussions from leaked E-Mails, deadlines imposed on MU and Nebraska, offers rumored on the way from the PAC 10 for six or more Big XII - all this in the last 48 hours!
 
Are we headed toward four 16-team super conferences?
 
One rumor has the Pac 10 inviting half the Big XII (Texas, Texas A&M,  Colorado, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State) into it's conference. Presumably then Missouri and Nebraska would bolt to the Big 10. If Rutgers from the Big East says yes to the Big 10 as well, that would put them momentarily at fourteen teams.
 
There are two major BCS conferences in the east - the Big East, with eight football playing teams, and the ACC with 12. And the big cheese in all this is the Southeastern conference, with 12 teams and the best football in the country.

Question 1 - will the Southeastern conference sit idly by while the Big XII is pillaged, without making a play for Texas, the Oklahoma schools, or at least A&M?  Question 2, and perhaps the answer to question 1 - will the television contract already in place for the SEC bind them from expansion during this round of expansion free-for-all? Or will they bite the bullet and make a play for four of the Texas/Oklahoma schools?

Back to the east - the ACC is the stronger football league compared to the Big East. Rutgers is already rumored to the Big 10, leaving the Big East with just seven. The football plum remaining in the vulnerable Big East is oddly South Florida - put them down as a target for a sooner-or-later forced-to-expand SEC. The ACC could go after the top four of the remaining six - with it's basketball panache, imagine Syracuse, U-Conn, Louisville, and Cincinnati being in the cross-hairs for the ACC.
 
That would leave Pittsburgh as easy pickings for the Big Ten. Confused? To help clarify (or muddy things further, depending on your point of view) here are the members of what seem to be the target conferences. For the Big East, I've listed the football schools. Remeber, we're talking about four 16-team super conferences - you have to play both football and basketball to be a member.

The 20 Targets

Big 12	Big 12	Big East (fb)	Big East (fb)
Texas	Missouri	South Florida	Rutgers
Texas A&M	Nebraska	Louisville	Pittsburgh
Oklahoma	Colorado	Syracuse	Cincinnati
Oklahoma St	Kansas	U Conn	West Virginia
Texas Tech	Kansas State
Baylor	Iowa State

Let's examine what I call the Pac 10 Grab. In this scenario the Pac 10 successfully swipes the four Big 12 schools they are rumored to desire, and several of the Big East teams move off to greener pastures.

Pac 10 Grab

Pac 10 W	Big 10 W	SEC W	ACC Atlantic
Washington	Missouri	Arkansas	BC
Washington St	Nebraska	Ole Miss	Clemson
Oregon	Iowa	Mississippi St	Florida St
Oregon St	Illinois	LSU	Maryland
Cal	Northwestern	Auburn	NC State
Stanford	Wisconsin	Alabama	Wake Forest
USC	Minnesota	?	Syracuse
UCLA	?	?	UConn
Pac 10 E	Big 10 E	SEC E	ACC Coastal
Arizona	Indiana	Florida	Va Tech
Arizona St	Purdue	Georgia	Ga Tech
Texas	Michigan	Kentucky	Miami
Texas A&M	Michigan St	South Carolina	Virginia
Oklahoma	Ohio St	Tennessee	UNC
Oklahoma St	Penn St	Vanderbuilt	Duke
Texas Tech	Rutgers	South Florida	Louisville
Colorado	?	?	Cincinnati

That scenario leaves two openings in the Big 10 and three openings (someday) in the SEC.
 
Big 10 Commissioner Delaney would give his eye teeth, left gonad, and his mother's wedding ring to get Notre Dame into that open slot in his eastern division. But Notre Dame is already BCS automatic, already has its own TV network, and probably won't budge. They are comfortable as a major independent.
 
Assuming the Irish stand pat, there are six other remaining current automatic BCS teams without a chair as the music winds down. KU and K-State are a nice pair for a basketball conference, but neither the SEC nor the Big 10 think basketball first. KU and Iowa State are members of the American Association of Universities - Baylor and K-State are not. I think those two are both great schools, but somehow the Big Ten seems to think membership in that club is important.  Pittsburgh is an AAU member and OUGHT to be attractive, but they're a private school in a pro-sports, blue-collar type of town. West Virginia has had some football success, and Huggins is an interesting basketball coach - but they're also firmly on the BCS bubble, and not an AAU member.
 
The SEC could invite nearly any of them of course when their television contract expires, and without anywhere else to go, any of them would jump. But perhaps the SEC goes after all four Texas schools to make the Texas legislature happy. That would throw a wrench in the Pac 10's plans, though Colorado and the Oklahoma schools would still be in play for them. But they'd need two more, and KU and K-State would be just sitting there.
 
That scenario I would call the SEC Swallows Texas, and it looks like this:

SEC Swallows Texas

Pac 10 W	Big 10 W	SEC W	ACC Atlantic
Washington	Missouri	Arkansas	BC
Washington St	Nebraska	Ole Miss	Clemson
Oregon	Iowa	Mississippi St	Florida St
Oregon St	Illinois	LSU	Maryland
Cal	Northwestern	Texas	NC State
Stanford	Wisconsin	Texas Tech	Wake Forest
USC	Minnesota	Baylor	Syracuse
UCLA	?	Texas A&M	UConn
Pac 10 E	Big 10 E	SEC E	ACC Coastal
Arizona	Indiana	Florida	Va Tech
Arizona St	Purdue	Georgia	Ga Tech
Colorado	Michigan	Kentucky	Miami
Oklahoma	Michigan St	South Carolina	Virginia
Oklahoma St	Ohio St	Tennessee	UNC
?	Penn St	Vanderbuilt	Duke
?	Rutgers	Alabama	Louisville
?	?	Auburn	Cincinnati

Nothing says the Pac 10 couldn't counter such an SEC play by dumping their bid for Colorado, holding their noses, and offering Baylor - a scenario that should be extremely worrisome to CU.

By the way, no disrespect on my part for Baylor - great school - it's just that Californians aren't clamoring to hang around with Baptists from Waco, TX (and more's the pity - it would be a big cultural improvement for them.)

The flaw in this I think is that the SEC would have trouble breaking OU from Texas - they seem to like playing each other. But since you probably can't break OU and OSU, and you clearly can't break Texas and the Aggies, whether the SEC could get any or all of those, assuming they wanted them, would then probably depend on the Texas legislature.

My latest scenario I call the BigPac.
 
In this alignment, the Big 12 southwest six to the Pac 10 was never really going to happen - it was a rumor designed to flush MU and Nebraska out, as they seemed to be headed that way anyway. The Pac 10 and Big 12 defend themselves against further attrition by jettisoning those two upper Midwestern schools off to colder confines, leaving the remainder free to create a 20 team western super conference. The BigPac would have a Big division and a Pac division. Could this dramatic step have been what Cal-Berkeley Chancellor Rober Birgeneau was alluding to when he predicted a revolution in college athletics?
 
In football each team would play 9 division games games, then a 'tournament' game - 10 plays 10, 9 plays 9, etc. against the other division at the end of the year. The 1 v 1 game is the conference championship, and would move around. Obviously the remaining Big 12 teams all play each other, and the Pac 10 plays all its long-time rivalries, and then there would be the end-of-the-year game. The host for the cross-division game would be determined as each match up was determined, based on whichever team had hosted fewer end-of-the-year games in conference history. In case of tie, the second tie breaker would be evening up the division hosting. You'd do a coin flip after that.


In basketball you'd play your division twice (18) and the other side once (10) creating 28 games. There would be very little non-conference season, absolutely maximizing basketball revenue.

The revolutionary aspect is that it is an entire level beyond what anyone else is thinking. The natural progression of four 16-team super conferences has everybody agog. But does Texas really want to travel further? Do they really want to dump Baylor victories from their schedule? I think this would be an incredibly appealing, have-cake-and-eat-it-too outcome for them. Suddenly they're in a conference that has more competition than the SEC and a full 20 of the 65 auto-bcs teams under it's umbrella. That's quite a sandbox for the Horns to play in.

But for this to happen, the Big 12 and Pac 10 have to know that Nebraska and MU are gone. If those two schools want to stick around and see whether this bigger thing would be a better thing, then fine and we go from there. But Texas really doesn't want to play footsie much more. They have players to buy and championships to win, and all of that is needlessly complicated and delayed while these second-tier programs are fiddling around.

That may be why there is a deadline. Commit - and it's a big financial commitment, you can bet - or go, and don't let the door hit you on the way out.

As a Kansas fan I like this BigPac scenario second best. My first preference is status quo. But you may accuse me of whistling past the graveyard, and you could be right.