John T. Reed’s news blog

Army football is surprising again. They are up 28-13 against undefeated Buffalo, which was the 7.5 point favorite, in the fourth quarter. I frequently express my annoyance at their not reading my Football Clock Management book. But today they ran a play from it—the fake take-a-knee. Fake take-a-knee That is an unusual play in that I was criticized heavily for it as being unethical. Those critics are not reading it carefully enough. It would be unethical and probably get whistled dead if the QB started to take a knee literally. But my book just says to align in a take-a-knee...

  I am here today not because I want to be. I am terrified.  irrelevant; attempt to acquire credibility via sympathy; She is a 51 year-old college professor who essentially makes her living as a public speaker. To get a PhD, she was subjected to a panel of professors questioning her competence in her PhD field.   I am here because I believe it is my civic duty to tell you what happened to me while Brett Kavanaugh and I were in high school. There is no such duty. What we know for sure is that she is trying to...

I am about 3/4 through the new book Autonomy: the quest to build the driverless car and how it will reshape out world.The authors claim we are going to shift to driverless electric or hydrogen-fuel-cell powered, two-seater cars that we do not own.They further say that these will cut the cost of that which we now do with cars we own by 80%. They say you would only need about 15% as many of these new cars as the current number of cars to be able to give everyone about a one-minute wait for the ride they need. And they...

Blocking is key to offensive success in football. On a typical running play it is what nine or ten of the offensive players are supposed to be doing. (After a handoff, the QB should be pretending he still has the ball to decoy some defenders.) How do you expect to succeed if some of your nine or ten blockers are not doing their jobs? Everyone is a blocker Who is in charge of your team’s blocking? Most youth or freshman or JV coaches say the line coach is in charge of that. My ass! Receivers and running backs also need...

I saw the fourth quarter of the Army-Hawai’i game at West Point yesterday. Army managed to hang on for a 28-21 victory—ending Hawai’i’s three-game win streak.The story to me was that Hawai’i came in to the game having averaged 47 points a game including 59 against Navy. (43 against both CO State and Rice). Army too slow to play man pass defense My son Mike who coached high school football with me was watching with me. I marveled at Army doing well on DEFENSE against a team like HI which was described as having a “high-flying” offense. “How the hell...