Posts tagged Football Perspective

Reads Listens Views 12/7/2012

0 Comments read Reads Listens Views

Listens

[youtube=http://youtu.be/xQd4go1ESvM]

My bud Adrian is traveling through Asia. He met a Dane in Thailand, who hipped him to this Norwegian soul singer-instrumentalist. If you want proof that the world is round just let this pass through your brain one more time: A Texan in Thailand having a guy from Denmark recommend a Norwegian musician who sings soul.

And he’s good. Here’s another.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/DA_tIvWd5-0]

Thank You

If you’re a new follower of this blog or my Twitter account, thank you for doing so. This blog provides analysis year-round as I research, write, and edit my annual publication the Rookie Scouting Portfolio. Now it its eighth year, the RSP is available for download every April 1st. Beginning last year, I allowed readers to prepay/order the RSP beginning in March for the April download due to reader demand to make it so. I will do the same again this year – stay tuned.

Most of all, I want to thank those of you who purchased the 2012 RSP and/or previous RSPs, which are available year-round.  Thanks to you, I have donated over $1800 to Darkness to Light to fulfill my pledge to readers. D2L is a non-profit with the mission of preventing sexual abuse through community training and awareness. As someone who understands the lasting damage that can happen from this type of abuse, raising awareness may not always prevent this predatory behavior, but the ability to help parents and communities understand how to deal with abuse can limit the scope of the damage that often occurs when a victim’s cries for help are met with denial or blame.

If you haven’t purchased the RSP in the past but you enjoy the content on this blog, I encourage you to take the plunge. Past issues of the RSP (2006-2011) are available for $9.95 at the link above. The 2012 RSP is $19.95 and I donate 10 percent of each sale to this cause. Get something that my buddies at DLFootball.com say is worth every penny while supporting a great cause in a fight to prevent sexual abuse.

Fantasy Throwdown

To give full disclosure, yes, I beat my wife in a Throwdown. She challenged me to a game of Fantasy Throwdown last week. Click on the photo for a close up of the score.

AvM ThrowdownBut this wasn’t the best family game of the week. My daughter, Chandler, read my blog post and challenged her sports-loving boyfriend.  Didn’t turn out so well for the boyfriend.

MvA copy Chandler ThrowdownAlthough the Cowboys game wasn’t scored when she took this screen shot, she won a nail-biter. Not bad for someone who has only watched football a little bit in her life. Perhaps there’s some sort of osmosis in play here, right? Wishful thinking I suppose. Anyhow, try FantasyThrowdown. It’s free, simple to play, and addictive.

Football Reads

Non-Football Reads

  • Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math – If you read one thing today – no, if you read one thing this year – read this article by Bill McKibben. Yes, there’s still hope.
  • The Cliff Notes to McKibben’s Must-Read – Yes, I know something about you guys, thanks to the power of analytics. Read it.
  • Capitalism vs. Climate – Naomi Klein’s article from The Nation. Her main takeaway? “The fact that the earth’s atmosphere cannot safely absorb the amount of carbon we are pumping into it is a symptom of a much larger crisis, one born of the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we need, and that if something runs out it can be seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract.”

Views

[youtube=http://youtu.be/tBNHPk-Lnkk]

Perhaps another reason not to believe everything you see on TV? Fantastic stuff.

RSP Writers Project Q&A: Chase Stuart, Footballguys, Football Perspective, and Pro Football Reference

0 Comments read RSP Writers Project
Can Peyton Manning add years to Anquan Boldin’s career? Chase Stuart hopes so. Find out more about his RSP Writers team below. Photo by Michael Wifall.

Chase Stuart took an aggressive, offensive approach to the Rookie Scouting Portfolio Writers Project, spending $93.5 million of his $150 million salary cap on his offense. Can’t say I blame him. He has a nice mix of young skill talent and veteran grit and his dollar cost averaging for his offensive line could pay off.

Although his defense has some clear weaknesses, he also has talented players that should do a good job of playing aggressive football when Stuart’s team has a lead. If this team gets behind early it could be problematic, but I can see how this offense is set up for this team to go 10-6, even in a tough division.

Learn more about Stuart’s team below as the writer at Footballguys.com, Pro Football Reference, and (his new blog) Football Perspective provides an engaging take on the RSP Writers Project. Continue reading →

RSP Writers Project: Chase Stuart, Footballguys, Football Perspective, and Pro Football Reference

0 Comments read RSP Writers Project
Chase Stuart spent $93.5 million of his $150 million camp on offense. By those standards, Peyton Manning was a bargain. Photo by Jeffrey Beall.

Chase Stuart is probably what my dad envisioned when he had his first son back in 1970: a Manhattan lawyer with a proclivity for stats and history. Well Pops, one out of three ain’t bad – in baseball. Of course, his third try was the charm: my little brother is a Columbia grad student earning his master’s in statistics. But lets’ get back to Stuart and his aggressive offensive mentality you’re about to see below.

At Footballguys.com, Stuart writes a popular series called “Player Points,” which I think always has a great takeaway worth remembering about a player. He also blogs for the venerable Pro Football Reference site that has earned kudos from some of the top football journalists around. And recently, Stuart created his own excellent blog, Football Perspective.

Because Stuart has everything going for him, I have to try (note the word “try”) to knock this Jets fan down a peg with the observation that his team philosophically looks a lot like the 2012 New England Patriots or Colts of the Manning era. Continue reading →

Reads Listens Views 6/22/2012

0 Comments read Reads Listens Views
Happy Friday. Hope you’re as pumped as Tuck today. If not, don’t worry. The RSP Writers Project will be back within a day or two. Photo by Chris Pusateri.

RSP Football Writers Project Update

I got some additional input from Football Outsiders columnist Ben Muth on players values this week. – Muth, a former college and NFL offensive lineman whose popular column grades offensive line performance, was gracious enough to make some tweaks along with me and Rotoworld’s Josh Norris to get the values of the linemen aligned with the rest of the player values.

This isn’t to detract from the excellent work Matt Bitonti did. There were more tweaks to the values in addition to the offensive line. And for the most part, the issue wasn’t the values of the players that Matt set, but the skeleton of how linemen should be valued versus other positions.

Simply put, we needed a trial run to see where to adjust. Matt did a fine job of putting everything together with the expectations I communicated to him and if he hadn’t, we would have been able to present the project this week for what I’m calling a “trial run.” And judging by the response, Continue reading →