Posts tagged Ahmad Bradshaw

Reads Listens Views 2/8/2013

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Goofy picture. Good runner. Lache Sistrunk (Photo by Mike Davis).
Goofy picture. Good runner. Lache Sistrunk (Photo by Mike Davis).

Quick Take: Lache Seastrunk

One of my favorite runners in the NFL is Ahmad Bradshaw. He was never going to be a dominant player, but there’s no denying his combination of skill and heart. One of my favorite games I’ve ever watched of a running back was Bradshaw at Marshall versus an excellent Tennessee run defense. Bradshaw had to work incredibly hard to just reach the line of scrimmage on most runs and it was a telling performance of his NFL future.

Bradshaw’s footwork, pad level, quickness, and balance have been hallmarks of his game. If he didn’t have a chronic foot injury, his career would have been even better than what we saw in New York. This sounds a bit like a career epitaph for the back whom the Giants released this week. Who knows. Whether or not he continues to thrive, he earned the respect of anyone who truly watches football.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/bCL87fQxXK8]

A player who reminds me of Bradshaw after a first look is Baylor sophomore Lache Seastrunk. Quick feet, excellent burst, the skill to layer cuts and set up defenders in tight spaces, and moments of excellent pad level and fight after contact. Most of my readers probably know about him. If you’re a casual college fan, here’s an introduction.

Thank You

First, thank you all for the birthday wishes on Wednesday. It’s incredibly humble to get the kind of outpouring I received on Twitter. If you’re a new follower as a result, I’d like to thank you for checking out what I do. Each Friday at the RSP blog, I post a variety of things to read, listen, and view about football and anything else that I find insightful, funny, or entertaining.

It’s also the time I like to thank my readers who purchase the Rookie Scouting Portfolio publication. Available for download every April 1 (no joke) for going on eight years, the RSP is an online .PDF publication devoted to the play-by-play study of NFL prospects at the offensive skill positions. The publication has a menu that bookmarks the document so you have two types of analysis. The first portion is a magazine-style, pre-draft analysis of 120-150 pages that includes position rankings, player comparisons, skill set analysis of each position, and sleepers.

The second portion is where I show all my work: between 700-800 pages of grading reports, play-by-play analysis of every player and game I watched, and a glossary that defines every criteria in my grading reports. My readers who want the bottom line love the first half of the book and appreciate the transparency of this section. My hardcore readers love the fact that they can dive as deep as they want into these raw play-by-play notes.

Included with the RSP (since 2012) is a post-draft document between 50-70 pages that comes out a week after the NFL Draft with updated post-draft rankings, tiers, team fit analysis, and fantasy cheat sheet with value analysis (Russell Wilson was calculated as the best value last year). Fantasy owners can’t get enough of it.

The RSP is $19.95 and I donate 10 percent of each sale to Darkness to Light, a non-profit dedicated to training individuals and communities on the prevention of sexual abuse. Past years of publications (2006-2012) are available for $9.95 and I also donate 10 percent of each sale to D2L. You can prepay for the 2013 RSP now.

Listens

Robert Henson, the bassist I used to play with in high school, is now a professional musician who tours with Corey Smith, has a group called Telegram, and performs around the southeast with every kind of idiom imaginable, ranging from pit orchestras to folk to jazz.  Here’s Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” with a heavy dose of Texas BBQ at the Velvet Note, new venue in Atlanta with world class acoustics. Funny and well done.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/hUVQR4Yww1o]

Views

Rightfully so, we’re in awe of Adrian Peterson’s second-half run of production while recovering from an ACL injury and a sports hernia. However, I think perhaps we ought to turn to our spouses and feel that same sense of awe when we think of them giving birth to our children. Here are two guys from Holland opting to experience what contractions feel like. Funny and partially insightful. I say partially because my friend Sarah who posted this video on her Facebook page titled, “Labor. It’s not for the feint of heart,” followed up with this comment:

“The really funny thing is that they STILL have no idea what it’s like because

  1. They knew they could bow out at any time and didn’t have to see it to completion and
  2. They missed the whole push-a-living-being-out-your-vagina part.

BUT, a valiant endeavor, nonetheless.”

[youtube=http://youtu.be/A44oEcmDn1c]

Perhaps football’s Wolverine will give this a try for a charitable cause – once he recovers from that hernia.

Football Reads

Non-Football Reads

Updated Writers Project Values and 5-ish’s Readers Team Roster

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I have a feeling Matt Stafford will be on a lot of RSP Writers Project Teams. Reader 5-ish, whose knowledge rivals several writers I know, debuts a team for us below with Stafford as his starter.

The RSP Writers Project has been a blast this week and there was a lot of fantastic feedback from writers and readers this week. After taking a quick time out this week to tweak the project, it is now back in full force with a lower cap, revised player values, and thanks to reader and Footballguys subscriber Donnie Smith, a spreadsheet that wasn’t created by someone who stopped learning how to use Excel in the early part of this decade.

Here’s where you can download the new spreadsheet, instructions, and questions.

5-ish’s RSP Writers Project Team

I’ve always been a big Bradshaw fan. It appears 5-ish has similar respect for the runner’s game. Photo by Ted Kerwin

One of the Footballguys.com staff’s favorite subscribers that frequent the Shark Pool message board is “5-ish.” He’s like many of our great subscribers, knowledgeable about the game, a good sense of humor, and always willing to engage in friendly debate.

5-ish submitted his RSP readers team Continue reading →

Random Post-Super Bowl Thoughts and Rants

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The Super Bowl game is kind of like Michelangelo's famous work. The spectacle, not so much. Photo by Nathan Rupert.

I turn 42 today. I don’t feel 42 except when my knees feel like they’re 60 after playing Jene Bramel in a pick up game of basketball and it serves as confirmation that I still have to shed another 20 pounds. Since it is my birthday, I feel like sharing my thoughts on the spectacle in Indy that was the Super Bowl. So if you will indulge me I’ll take it as a birthday gift.

“Super Bowl Sunday”

I want you to to look at Michelangelo’s sculpture of David.  The craftsmanship and the detail raise the aesthetic beauty of the human body to a spiritual level. It’s a great work of art.

Now I want you to imagine David dressed in an Armani tux, surrounded by singers and dancers in Goliath costumes performing to a light show that begins with dry ice clouds and ends with fireworks, and the display hall draped in Budweiser and Geico banners. That’s what the Super Bowl has done to the NFL Championship Game. Overkill.

I understand why the NFL dresses its big game in emperor’s clothes. Just don’t tell me that I have to like it. The game is beautiful and compelling without its commercialization.

I admit I enjoy the television commercials, the Kia ad with Motley Crue, Chuck Liddell, and the surreal sequences of a rodeo rider on a rhino and two lumberjacks sawing a gigantic sub was terrific. So was the Chevy truck ad set post-Mayan Apocalypse. However you know what I thought of the halftime performance that delays the third quarter?

I can’t tell you because I didn’t see it. It seemed like a good time to do the dishes and clean the litter box.

Ahmad Bradshaw

The Giants runner had an uneven game and his “accidental touchdown” could have cost his team a championship. However, I feel sympathy for Bradshaw.  Continue reading →

The RSP Blog’s Top 20 RB Prospects (2006-2011) Part I

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Ahmad Bradshaw easily made my top 20 RB prospects for the RSP. His performance on an undermanned team against superior opposition transcended his stats. Photo by Ted Kerwin.

One of the most frequent requests I’ve heard from readers over the years is to rank players at their position across several draft classes. It’s an entertaining thing to read, but I’ve always been reticent about doing it. There are a lot of approaches I could take with the ranking process and I’m not sure if any of them will feel good enough to stand behind.

I could rank by checklist scores, but I don’t believe in ranking players solely by the quantitative criteria I used to derive a score in the Rookie Scouting Portfolio publication. This is only half of the analysis that I perform. The other half is providing a detailed context behind the scoring that often fills in the gaps that the data leaves behind. Even then, there is a factor I call “The Great Emotional Divide,” which separates productive NFL players from massively talented NFL prospects. Another valid question is whether I should judge these players based on what I’ve seen from them in the NFL. If so then am I doing justice to the rookies from the 2011 class?

None of this makes me feel like I’m on solid ground. I don’t like rankings because they are highly fluid thoughts frozen during a brief period in time. Some readers may believe my business as author of the Rookie Scouting Portfolio is ranking players, but they’re mistaken.

My primary goal with the RSP is to profile these players and analyze their games. The ranking is perhaps the least important part of the analysis. It’s the conversation starter. The attention-getter. The marketing schtick. It’s the cocktail party, three-sentence summation of a complex subject that you need to learn or you come across as rude or socially awkward. As much as I value Twitter for attracting readers like you to the work I do, I’m not much on cocktail party chatter. Nothing wrong with it if that’s your thing, it’s just not mine if I can avoid it.

Ultimately, I only ranked players I studied during my time authoring the RSP (2006-2011). I decided to rank these players according to the potential I saw in them before they went pro. I don’t define potential by where I ranked them in the past, but what I think they could have (or did) become based on these factors:

Continue reading →