Farrar - Ask the old football coach: brilliantly brainless advice from the ghosts of gridiron past

Ask the Old Football Coach

Ask the Old Football Coach

Brilliantly Brainless Advice from the Ghosts of Gridiron Past

Jesse Farrar

An imprint of Globe Pequot

Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

Copyright 2017 by Jesse Farrar

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

ISBN 978-1-4930-3007-1 (hardback)

ISBN 978-1-4930-3006-4 (e-book)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to Jerry Stiller

Introduction

The casual professional football fan, of which there are evidently hundreds of millions, has no idea what a hypocrite he is. Despite devoting virtually no thought at all to the inner workings, backroom deals, and contractual complexities that make his Sunday afternoon prostrate beer-guzzling a socially acceptable pastime, he fancies himself a total fanatic of the local team, and spends an inordinate amount of money every year on baubles expressing same.

That may well be true of most of us. If it didnt explicitly occur on the field, between our trips to the bathroom, it may as well not have happened. Unlike basketball, baseball, or hockey, whose devotees may rattle off at the drop of a hat a few obscure playoff conventions or the finer points of the CBA, many NFL fans would be hard-pressed to recite the current standard for a completed pass. Football may very well be number one in our heartsfor now at leastbut we tend to keep much of the game itself, from rulebook to playbook, at a stiff arms length. I think I understand why.

The game that used to exist only on Ivy League school quads and far-flung radio broadcasts is long dead. That game, like the one we know and love today, was random, cruel, and unapologetically violent. But, unlike the primetime ratings bonanza now foisted upon America three times a week, the football of the past was largely unloved. It was also unpolished, amateurish, dull, unoriginal, and nearly invisible to most of the country, which is not coincidental.

Within that context, turning on a contemporary edition of NBCs Sunday Night Football , say, and bearing witness to the sparkling sheen of professionalism and focus-grouped marketing thats been pasted over the pockmarked surface of the sport per se is, in a word, utterly discombobulating. To wit, in what sense should we understand the glamorous new arena, miles away from its two-decade-old dilapidated predecessor, in a sprawling Coming Soon! mixed-use suburban oasis, financed largely by the working-class fans who can no longer afford to attend events there, to have been sold out?

Or at what point do we stop rooting for players based on which college received between two to six years of their unpaid, high-risk labor in exchange for a meal plan and exposure, and start rooting for players based on which modern-day robber barons father paid a nominal franchise fee in the county closest to where we were born? And if players are terminated midway through their contract for using drugs that help them maintain a competitive edge, heal more rapidly, or cope with the damage they do to their bodies every day, are we still their fans?

Maybe you have the time and mental bandwidth to consider these and more conundrums while you watch, dear reader, or perhaps not. But regardless, by an overwhelming margin, you are still watching despite it all, and the NFL knows it. Efforts to redress the important social issues plaguing the game, the league, and the general broadcast experience will therefore be token at best. More likely, these issues will be exacerbated.

But still, we watch. Why?

Consider these words from John Heisman, widely considered to be one of footballs most influential architects:

We all know that by collegians the game is esteemed the king of sports, and it deserves no less ranking, for it has the power to create and to arouse college spirit as does nothing else from one end of the campus to another. Now college spirit is a mighty fine thing. It teaches the meaning of the words loyalty, fidelity, love of country, patriotism.

There you have it. Despite all the grifting, the commercialization, and the ground-up human capital, we never miss a game because, at the end of the day, we are insane. Were completely, undeniably, swinging-a-dead-cat-around-in-a-parking-lot-and-hollering-level bonkers, with no intention to get better and no conceivable remedy. True nutjobs!

Only the truly insane, after all, would see patriotism in a sport that is regularly compensated by the military to salute the troops before games, or loyalty in a league that forcibly drafts its talent. (Admittedly, the fidelity of the artificially piped-in crowd noise is decent, but whatever.) More to the point, these values reflect the undeniably ill-informed, genteel, and superstitious worldview shared by, wouldnt you know it, basically every football coach and player ever.

Luckily for us, many of these influential men... these fearless trailblazers... these bigtime dummies if you will (and if you wont, I will) had the foresight to codify their thoughts in an easily roasted and riffable format during the short window in history that would legally allow their inane goofball rants to be reprinted without permission. So without further ado, I am now going to do that. Please enjoy.

P.S. If you happen to find your work in the pages to come, I am deeply sorry. Tell your great grandchildren to roast this book when I am dead.

On Mechanics

In making a forward pass, assume that an opponent is directly in the way and practice rising on your toes and starting the pass from the highest point you can reach. The ball should travel on a line horizontal to the ground.

W. H. Lillard, Football Rudiments , 1911

Or, hell, just grip it however you want and throw it wherever. Were still kinda working the kinks out of this thing.

On Coach Interference

Coaching from the side lines is prohibited in the rules because it is considered an unfair practice. The game is to be played by the players using their own muscle and their own brains. If an onlooker, having seen all the hands in a game of cards, undertook to tell one of the players what card to play, the other players would have just cause to object.