John T. Reed’s football coaching blog

I just saw a coach decline the delay penalty to prevent the field goal kicker from getting to kick from five yards further away. Then the offensive coach deliberately told one of his linemen to false start. That moved them back five yards for the field goal kick. Why would you want to be farther away from the goal posts? You would not. Those two coaches—Arkansas and TX A&M—are nuts. Why would they think it’s better to kick from farther away? Pre-1974 NFL rules. 1974 is when the NFL moved the goal posts from the goal line to the end line...

51% versus 44%? At the end of the Saints-Raiders game, they scored a TD which left them one point down They went for two and got it thereby winning the game. ESPN said the probability they would win in OT, if they had kicked the single extra point was 51% and the probability of getting the two-point conversion was only 44%.if that’s the case, the Raiders made the wrong decision and got lucky. Some say you can’t argue with results. Yes, you can. All decisions are to be judged based on what the decision maker knew at the time. How...

GAM reader/user wins 2008 Pop Warner national championship Good morning Mr. Reed On Friday, our peewee team won the national championship 15-12. I wanted to thank you on behalf of the Raritan Bay Cougars, my son Jordan, and more importantly me for all the help and guidance you provided us. Without this defense and all the help you provided [by emails during the season] we would have never gotten this far and definitely not beaten the last team we played. Their offense killed everyone. As I have told you before, if you need anything to help you promote your book,...

This is an email from a reader: Hi John,.I would like to take a moment to let you know about some of my experiences with your books. Please feel free to share this..I started off coaching football for my sons when they were 5 and 6. It was because the coach from the year before did such a terrible job I felt there must be a better way. At that age it was flag football, only so much you can teach. It went well because I had a different mindset, that it was MY job to make this a good...

A long article in today’s Wall Street Journal is the Moneyball (book and movie) of basketball. I am not a basketball fan, but this article is excellent and useful even for us non-fans. Google the title to read it online: “Remaking Basketball the Warriors’ Way.” Silicon Valley strategy applied to basketball It says that a group of Silicon Valley executives, including billionaire Larry Ellison (Oracle) looked at basketball with a business perspective and found a market inefficiency: three-point shots were more valuable than the NBA coaches and players seemed to realize. Three-point attempts are a better value than two-point The...