John T. Reed’s football coaching blog

Read my article about the experiences of my oldest son Dan and me with regard to his being recruited to play college football, and playing college football. The article os in my secondary website www.johntreed.net because it is too ong for the www.johntreed.com host. College football recruiting lessons learned

Eli manning was up 23-20 over Dallas when he dropped back for a pass with 1:38 left in the game. No one was open. He threw the ball away to avoid a sack. That left :40 on the clock unnecessarily. NY then kicked a field goal to make it 26-20, but Tony Romo came back down and scored the game-winning TD and extra point at 0:13. If Manning had taken a sack as he should have, the game would have ended :27 earlier almost certainly with a NY win. Eli has generally behaved in the past as if he had read my...

I coached briefly at the San Ramon Valley T-Birds youth football program in 1997. When I arrived, they explicitly told me I could not run the single-wing offense, for which I was somewhat known at my previous youth team, the San Ramon Bears. But I was amused to learn that the T-Birds were very proud of their “Crunch” series, which is essentially a single-wing formation and series of plays, albeit with the quarterback under center. Tom Flores’s book Football the Violent Chess Match, shows almost the same formation as the SRV T-Bird “crunch,” only Flores identifies it as the Yale...

These are quotes and news items that I have come across that confirm the value of the contrarian approach to various fields. I advocate it both in football coaching (See my book The Contrarian Edge for Football Offense) and in active investment strategies. My explanations and comments are in [red]. Chessmaster Garry Kasparov What separates a winner from a loser at the grandmaster level is the willingness to do the unthinkable. A brilliant strategy is, certainly, a matter of intelligence, but intelligence without audaciousness is not enough. I must have the guts to explode the game, to upend my opponent’s...

Ray Caldwell “Coach Reed, love your whole series of coaching books - great guides for the young football coach especially for youth football! (Took an O-7 team of seventh graders to the championship game as eighth graders!) And, your baseball books are invaluable for the rookie coaches who did not play a lot of baseball (like me) or those experienced coaches who are willing to think outside the box! (All the other coaches got so mad at me when we won games by only focusing on swinging at strikes and base running!! My kids loved sliding on those big cardboard...