The boards have been a trifle slow, of late, so I spent a few hours over the last couple of days indulging myself in what may seem a strange pursuit to those of you that know me - reading poetry. Of course, I had also decided that a break from my normal non-football routines - surfing internet porn sites and leafing through dog-eared copies of Soldier Of Fortune - was probably in order, as well. While (due to the inspiration of several on this board) I'm feeling in an unusually self-revelatory mood, I do intend - as god intended - to turn this topic towards football, and specifically the defense, at some undetermined point in time.First, however, a digression as to my attachment to poetry - one in which I completely lack any of the necessary academic or cultural appreciation skills. I came by my appreciation of poetry honestly, in a desperate attempt at personal cultural enrichment, unaided by two degrees in business admin. One of my numerous wives, god help her, held a MA from the University of Chicago, with honors, in English Lit (interestingly enough, her grad advisor was none other than Norman McLean of "A River Runs Through It" fame, so I read that little epistle in 1979, or so). Anyway, aside from considering me (correctly) as a cultural philistine, Cat was also some 30 IQ points north of my location in her intellectual sub-basement. Add to that her apparent awareness of every fact committed to writing in the Christian epoch, and dinner conversations tended to be not unlike oral exams. In a crazed effort to achieve at least a token of conversational leverage, I resorted to reading poetry - to no avail, as you might guess. I've always thought that Cat divorced me since (a) she considered people who liked football to be in the same league as Louis L'Amour readers, and I was guilty of both sins, and (b) I could never get past page ten of "Ulysses" without my eyes glazing over and beginning to snore. Well, Cat, I hope you're OK wherever you are, but I do occasionally fantasize that you've remarried, to someone with a semi-colon fetish who also confuses the usage of "lose" and "loose".At any rate, somewhere in this painful attempt at poetic self-education, I ran across one WB Yeats - couldn't understand a ******* thing he wrote, but the guy had a kinghell command of words. Of course, given my dour Welsh ancestry, it could also have been an envy of drunken Gaelics with total mastery of the English language - who knows, or really gives a ****? Now, poetry has a way of describing events (such as football) far removed from the original intent - of course, the same statement could apply to country and western music, so don't run too far with that particular rock. However, consider these lines from Billy Y:
Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,Is that a description of our defenses during the Mackovic era, or not - an era when shoulder pads were optional equipment and many of our defenders considered post-collegiate careers on the pro rodeo circuit? Now, consider the final two lines in the same poem:And, what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem, waiting to be born.Ominous words for ominous times, and filled with foreboding and a sense of dread - exactly the type of emotions we want the Reese Rage to inflict (defensively speaking, of course) on our soon to be hapless opposition. As most of you know, I am not big on the naming of defenses, but "Rough Beasts" has a certain visceral appeal to the darker side of my nature. Consider some huge creature (" a shape with lion body, and the head of a man", to quote WBY), crawling across the turf, its coat marred by oozing combat wounds, its one good eye filled with a feral light and unwaveringly focused on the jugular of its foe - or the ACL, take your pick. That, campers, is a defensive image with which to be reckoned.OK, you scream insensitively, but what does this **** have to do with next year's defense? And, will you ever get to the ******* point? Well, getting to the point may be OK if you're evaluating pencil sharpeners, but patience remains a virtue where many of us could benefit from improvement. Certainly, the minions of evil that represent the American travel industry wish that I would manifest improvements in that area. In the space of two short years, we have gone from a defensively inept group ranked 85th to a total defense ranking of 6th - heady gain, that. More important to some of us old timers, we no longer resemble aspiring toreadors against the run, improving from 86th to 17th ranking-wise and allowing 56% fewer yards per game on the ground than the ill-fated 1997 crew. In the same timeframe, yards per carry dropped to 2.7 from an embarrassing 4.7 Very gratifyingly, TFLs ballooned from 3.5 per game in 1997, to 4.2 in 1998, and to a very robust 11.2 per game last season.Pass defense had its own set of glowing improvements. Most will remember opposing QBs dropping back to pass and leisurely whipping out their cell phones to arrange evening action (assuming it was the normal 2:30 September day game - do you hear me, DeLoss?) while our pass rush struggled to get pass the LOS, and their receivers ran three and four different routes to get open. Well, no more - combined QB pressures and sacks tripled from 1997 to 1997 - from 5.5 per game to 15. In fact, we improved in every single pass defense measurement over the two years.Of course, past performance - even when the trend is clearly upwards - is of interest only to the extent it can serve as an accurate predictor of future performance. If the three primary components of defensive performance - personnel, scheme, and schedule - are examined, there's clearly plenty of reasons to think we should be expecting a dominating defensive effort in 2000. The schemes won't change appreciably, the schedule is less stringent (although there will be more passing teams to be faced), and personnel will be upgraded.As to personnel, consider that nine starters return and ten of the guys who started in the Cotton Bowl are back. The PhxHorn Iron Law Of Improvement, which states that performance gains are realized, over time, in a negatively exponential fashion clearly comes into play. Basically, that says (and there are exceptions, as I'm positive several people will point out), that maximum incremental improvements occur between the first and second years, with the improvement delta being less in each of the following years. If you consider the youth of last year's defense, then to expect major performance gains from the returners is by no means hallucinatory. Consider the impact of guys such as Rawls, T Jones, Brooks, Hill, and Jackson - to name a few - last year, when they were, for the most part, limited to special teams action in 1998. Those guys are nowhere near the peak of their respective learning curves. Jones, to single out one guy, is an absolutely fascinating subject - I think the kid is still only nineteen, yet he's 6-4/6-5, 230ish, and runs a sub-4.5 - what may he turn into with another off-season under Madden and some additional reps at the OLB spot?I realize that, while we get nine-ten starters back, not all of them are going to win the starting role next season. Which brings us to the PhxHorn Replaced Starter Corollary - if an experienced starter is replaced by a new face, the new face will be capable of performance superior to that of the former starter. Another way of saying, of course, that the eleven guys who will open against Hawaii are going to be better as a unit than the they guys who played against UA in the Cotton Bowl.Without speculating on how the various position wars will shake out, there are two obvious spots where new faces will be called upon - the two DE spots. Redding looks to be a lock for one - the question is how much falloff will we see from Big Ced. I'm undoubtedly being optimistic, but feel - subject to Cory's off-season S&C work - that there may be little, or no, drop off and will likely be an improvement in terms of pass rush. Ced was
a yeoman worker, who took one for the team by moving outside - however, we never got a strong pass rush from the right side and Redding should provide that. On the left side, I see no way there won't be a dropoff from Hump - both for leadership, combative attitude and overall playing skill. Yet, there are some awfully talented youngsters lining up for PT shots this spring and I fully believe one, or more, will emerge to minimize the dropoff effects.At any rate, I'm tired of typing - bottom line is the defense will be better next year, and possibly much better, although we've reached a statistical level where major numerical improvements are hard to achieve. And, they'll need to be that way - the offense is going to take some time to come together, and it may not reach the production we'd all like until the last part of the season, if at all. I'm not going to discuss special teams - these fits of uncontrollable weeping are unseemly in a middle-aged man, and my wild cursings are disturbing my already overly sensitive neighbors.Your thoughts?
Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,Is that a description of our defenses during the Mackovic era, or not - an era when shoulder pads were optional equipment and many of our defenders considered post-collegiate careers on the pro rodeo circuit? Now, consider the final two lines in the same poem:And, what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem, waiting to be born.Ominous words for ominous times, and filled with foreboding and a sense of dread - exactly the type of emotions we want the Reese Rage to inflict (defensively speaking, of course) on our soon to be hapless opposition. As most of you know, I am not big on the naming of defenses, but "Rough Beasts" has a certain visceral appeal to the darker side of my nature. Consider some huge creature (" a shape with lion body, and the head of a man", to quote WBY), crawling across the turf, its coat marred by oozing combat wounds, its one good eye filled with a feral light and unwaveringly focused on the jugular of its foe - or the ACL, take your pick. That, campers, is a defensive image with which to be reckoned.OK, you scream insensitively, but what does this **** have to do with next year's defense? And, will you ever get to the ******* point? Well, getting to the point may be OK if you're evaluating pencil sharpeners, but patience remains a virtue where many of us could benefit from improvement. Certainly, the minions of evil that represent the American travel industry wish that I would manifest improvements in that area. In the space of two short years, we have gone from a defensively inept group ranked 85th to a total defense ranking of 6th - heady gain, that. More important to some of us old timers, we no longer resemble aspiring toreadors against the run, improving from 86th to 17th ranking-wise and allowing 56% fewer yards per game on the ground than the ill-fated 1997 crew. In the same timeframe, yards per carry dropped to 2.7 from an embarrassing 4.7 Very gratifyingly, TFLs ballooned from 3.5 per game in 1997, to 4.2 in 1998, and to a very robust 11.2 per game last season.Pass defense had its own set of glowing improvements. Most will remember opposing QBs dropping back to pass and leisurely whipping out their cell phones to arrange evening action (assuming it was the normal 2:30 September day game - do you hear me, DeLoss?) while our pass rush struggled to get pass the LOS, and their receivers ran three and four different routes to get open. Well, no more - combined QB pressures and sacks tripled from 1997 to 1997 - from 5.5 per game to 15. In fact, we improved in every single pass defense measurement over the two years.Of course, past performance - even when the trend is clearly upwards - is of interest only to the extent it can serve as an accurate predictor of future performance. If the three primary components of defensive performance - personnel, scheme, and schedule - are examined, there's clearly plenty of reasons to think we should be expecting a dominating defensive effort in 2000. The schemes won't change appreciably, the schedule is less stringent (although there will be more passing teams to be faced), and personnel will be upgraded.As to personnel, consider that nine starters return and ten of the guys who started in the Cotton Bowl are back. The PhxHorn Iron Law Of Improvement, which states that performance gains are realized, over time, in a negatively exponential fashion clearly comes into play. Basically, that says (and there are exceptions, as I'm positive several people will point out), that maximum incremental improvements occur between the first and second years, with the improvement delta being less in each of the following years. If you consider the youth of last year's defense, then to expect major performance gains from the returners is by no means hallucinatory. Consider the impact of guys such as Rawls, T Jones, Brooks, Hill, and Jackson - to name a few - last year, when they were, for the most part, limited to special teams action in 1998. Those guys are nowhere near the peak of their respective learning curves. Jones, to single out one guy, is an absolutely fascinating subject - I think the kid is still only nineteen, yet he's 6-4/6-5, 230ish, and runs a sub-4.5 - what may he turn into with another off-season under Madden and some additional reps at the OLB spot?I realize that, while we get nine-ten starters back, not all of them are going to win the starting role next season. Which brings us to the PhxHorn Replaced Starter Corollary - if an experienced starter is replaced by a new face, the new face will be capable of performance superior to that of the former starter. Another way of saying, of course, that the eleven guys who will open against Hawaii are going to be better as a unit than the they guys who played against UA in the Cotton Bowl.Without speculating on how the various position wars will shake out, there are two obvious spots where new faces will be called upon - the two DE spots. Redding looks to be a lock for one - the question is how much falloff will we see from Big Ced. I'm undoubtedly being optimistic, but feel - subject to Cory's off-season S&C work - that there may be little, or no, drop off and will likely be an improvement in terms of pass rush. Ced was
a yeoman worker, who took one for the team by moving outside - however, we never got a strong pass rush from the right side and Redding should provide that. On the left side, I see no way there won't be a dropoff from Hump - both for leadership, combative attitude and overall playing skill. Yet, there are some awfully talented youngsters lining up for PT shots this spring and I fully believe one, or more, will emerge to minimize the dropoff effects.At any rate, I'm tired of typing - bottom line is the defense will be better next year, and possibly much better, although we've reached a statistical level where major numerical improvements are hard to achieve. And, they'll need to be that way - the offense is going to take some time to come together, and it may not reach the production we'd all like until the last part of the season, if at all. I'm not going to discuss special teams - these fits of uncontrollable weeping are unseemly in a middle-aged man, and my wild cursings are disturbing my already overly sensitive neighbors.Your thoughts?
