![]() ![]() What is important is that the quote is right on the money. It's not clear who originally said that, but it's often attributed to Texas legend Darrell Royal. ![]() As for me, I’ll keep going to Smart Football ( to get my fix of football analysis."It's not the X's and the O's but the Jimmys and the Joes." Sports stories are often the masculine alternatives to soap operas and the Real Housewives of New York. ![]() After all, some fans don’t want their sports-watching to be disrupted by tedious details. There is a place for the puff sportswriting that passes for the majority of football analysis. Better to keep the spotlight on the star quarterback. Ridiculous." He mentions the Saints’ offensive line only in passing, as if keeping 300-pound linemen out of a quarterback’s face required no more effort than growing goofy facial hair. This year, he’s 4 percentage points more accurate, and on pace to throw 35 touchdown passes and five interceptions. Peter King, the doyen of the mainstream football writing establishment, instead marveled at Brees’s numbers: "Brees, in his 5,069-yard passing season last year, was phenomenal. It was Doug Farrar writing for Football Outsiders. But it wasn’t a pundit for a major outlet. A studious football writer might have pointed out that the Saints benefitted from the superior play and use of their offensive line, that something as small as the technique a tackle like the Saints’ Jermon Bushrod uses against an edge-rusher like Usi Omenyiora had a huge impact by giving quarterback Drew Brees an exceptional amount of time to throw the ball. Both teams were good-at least both had won more games than they had lost-and the Giants defense has a reputation for excellence, so the margin of victory was especially eye-opening. Two weeks ago, the New Orleans Saints blew out the New York Giants. Knowledge of X’s and O’s could enrich fans’ enjoyment of the game by laying bare all the moving parts that have to come together to make football plays work. If anything, Easterbrook shrugs in the face of the inscrutability of football playcalling, and is merely calling other commentators poseurs. But from this article it doesn’t seem that Easterbrook has a problem with the importance of playcalling in the game so much as the facile and specious analysis that invokes "playcalling" to support its position. One might take the side of Gregg Easterbrook, who thinks that playcalling-and by extension, coaching- are overrated in football. The implications of play designs are so central to the game that we take them for granted: we know that shotgun plays are conducive to passing or that running plays with many blockers on short-yardage downs are safe bets for small gains with big rewards (ie, first downs). ![]() Because of the way it’s played, however, with discrete plays rather than fluid continuity, success in football depends to an extraordinary degree on the way teams set up before plays start. As with any sport, success in football depends on the innate ability of the athletes playing it. How much football knowledge should readers demand of their favorite football writers? I’m no X’s and O’s guru." What? How does Mandel know Ohio State’s staff is not using Terrelle Pryor properly if he doesn’t know how the X’s and O’s in Ohio State’s plays work? Is it because Pryor is not putting up the gaudy numbers that his athletic ability seems to promise? If that’s the only proof required, couldn’t anyone draw the same conclusion? But Stewart Mandel is not just anybody he professionally writes about football for a major sportswriting venue and his analysis should theoretically be more incisive. While reading one of my favorite weekly football recaps, Stewart Mandel’s College Football Overtime, earlier this season, I was struck by a telling quote in one Mandel’s responses to a letter about the Ohio State-USC game: "As I wrote Monday, Ohio State’s staff is not properly utilizing Terrelle Pryor’s talents. ![]()
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