John T. Reed’s news blog

My Best Man sent me an article that said Madden changed the way TV announcers cover football. True. He introduced game film study to announcing. . The article also said he adamantly opposed youth tackle football recommending flag instead. In that, he did not know what the hell he was talking about. . You may think that being one of the greatest NFL head coaches means you are also a great college, high school and youth coach. Nope. I wrote the only book about coaching freshman and JV high school football. The assumption before my book was that freshman and...

John Madden died today at 85. He has the highest head coach winning percentage in NFL history: .759. (Guy Chamberlain had .784 but I guess his career was too short by someone choosing an arbitrary cut off above his total 81 games.) I often cite his and the other top NFL winning percentages like Vince Lombardi (.738) as evidence that football is a more coachable sport than baseball. The all-time highest win percentage there is .615 for Joe MaCarthy. Actually, I am not sure about that. MLB seems not to want us to know how low the highest win percentages...

In yesterday’s Armed Forces Bowl, Army waited until :03 to call timeout for the winning FG kick. That is straight out of my book Football Clock Management. You may think I cannot take credit for that. . Before my book, coaches called such FG timeouts in high single digits or even with double digits left on the clock. I’ll give you a famous example. In the 1982 Cal-Stanford Big Game, Stanford QB John Elway got his team into winning field goal range and called time with :08 left. After the good kick, there were :05 left. Also, Stanford excessively celebrated...

In his hamfisted, mandate- and majority-less efforts to out-FDR FDR, Biden is likely to out-Hoover Hoover. . Hoover was a GOP Stanford Engineer, international miracle man who was assigned to several thorny messes and fixed them in the 1920s. Unfortunately, his main trick was to use a massive US government project approach. He was not involved with the building of the Panama Canal which was completed in 1914, but he used that approach to everything. . After being elected president in 1928, he DID help start the Depression in 1930 by signing the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Once the Depression started, he...

In today’s Wall Sreet Journal, Burton Malkiel, says I bonds are a great hedge against inflation. I pause to let many readers genuflect at the mention of Malkiel. He is the author of the great book A Random Walk Down Wall Street. However, I think he is full of crap on I bonds. Like TIPS, they adjust for inflation twice a year. You do not get the adjusted interest until maturity at 30 years or when you cash them in. You have to pay a penalty for cashing them in before five years. . If they had existed in the...