Has the spread offense reached its apex?

I will discuss a bit of facts about the rise of the spread offense including its various pass and run elements (heavily abridged, each individual chain has its own history), and argue that it has morphed from an equalizing offense, one used by less talented programs to level the playing field, to one that merely amplifies the latent talent, so talented teams can expose mismatched defenders but there are now fewer opportunities for less talented teams and the spread may not be well situated for these "up-and-coming" programs now that it is so popular. At the lower levels it will remain and can continue to thrive where it is well coached as a tool to highlight talented athletes, particularly as more and more good athletes grow up throwing the football and becoming effective passers. The Pros are likely to never catch on to "the zone read" and such plays, just as the traditional option is not widespread in the pros either. Last, the days of the spread as "the next big thing" are over. It is the classic case that when the public at large realizes what's going on and every TV commentator is discussing how innovative you are, you are no longer innovative and someone new is soon to be annointed the next "genius."

Introduction

As an astute commentator pointed out, all four of the BCS bowl winners ran some version (actually a very similar version) of the spread offense. I am not sure if Texas once lined up with two backs in the backfield (not counting Vince Young!). All but Penn St rushed for significantly more than 200 yards in those spread sets, and few would argue that Penn St is not a physical team and they might have been the least spread of all the winners. Of the other teams in the BCS, Pro-Style offensive teams like USC and Notre Dame ran lots of "spread stuff," and in ND's case I think it actually hurt them since their offensive line had difficulty pass protecting.

The zone read was on full display throughout the bowl season. In the West Virginia-Georgia game the TV ran some great shots of the play and explained well who is being read and the idea behind the play. They obviously had lots of examples of great blocking and running to make a believer of nearly anyone. Of course that game featured innovator and Johnny Appleseed of the spread-run game Rich Rodriguez (Tulane, Clemson, and WVU, who spread his knowledge first hand to teams like Northwestern and others who themselves have propogated the offense), but the BCS title game was the crescendo, with a quarterback dependent offense run by maybe its best triggerman ever. Vince Young's performance is well chronicled, with 30 completions in 40 pass attempts (with virtually zero yards after the catch for Texas's receivers) and 200 yards rushing. Last year Alex Smith became the number one pick as a run-pass threat under now-Florida Coach Urban Meyer, who himself won his first bowl-game at Florida. Meyer is considered one of the "gurus" of the spread-O, yet he was a relative neophyte to the offense before going to Bowling Green in 2001, when he studyied and adapted some of the Northwestern and Rodriguez run schemes along with the Louisville Cardinals passing game when John L. Smith (now Michigan St HC), Bobby Petrino (Louisville HC) and Scott Linehan (Miami Dolphins OC) were coaching there.

The offense's rise has been meteoric. I was inundated with questions and articles on Urban Meyer's O and the spread option game were always some of the most trafficked ones on the blog. Next season the schemes will be even more prevalent, especially at the HS level. But where next?

The Pros

Eventually all offenses are tested in the NFL. The final verdict on any scheme or philosophy is eventually tested, chewed up, synthesized, and sent back under the 24 hour/365 day scrutiny that is professional football. Time, money, technology, and the best football minds always level a verdict. Other offenses can survive at lower levels (and often can be more successful than what the Pros themselves do with their more sophisticated passing games and less success of deception based offenses like the Wing-T), but the book will be written at the pro level, or at least adapted by it. The Run and shoot had its weaknesses exposed (primarily the zone blitz) but it also had its best aspects co-opted by nearly every offense. Its mark is real, if subtle.

The difference with the spread offense though is that, unlike the run and shoot or many other "philosophy" offenses, it actually came from the Pros, or at least the spread roots reach back further in the Pros than even at many colleges. The one-back attack as practiced by Dennis Erickson, Mike Price, etc goes back to the old Jack Neuimeier (sp?) offense, but the zone running game and 3 and 4 receiver sets and the shotgun goes back to the Gibbs Redskins, the Buffalo Bills K-Gun, and even the Don Coryell or Sid Gillman offenses. The reason is simple: that's where the quarterbacks were. Dan Fouts, Marino and these other guys were the best players on their teams and coaches as diverse as Coryell and Don Shula had offenses designed to be both quarterback friendly and dependent. (I'm ignoring for the moment the Bill Walsh lineage, but his concepts I think were co-opted a bit later and integrated into the "modern Pro offense" which I think is really a combination of the Walsh West Coast scouting, preparation, timing, etc and the one-back offenses, some of the concepts pre-date as well as post-date Walsh's reign.)

Further, the "spread" is not so different than what the Pros currently do. Watch Texas Tech and they will run the "mesh" six ways from Sunday. Watch the Colts, and they will run it a bunch too. The big question then becomes, what about all this spread-to-run business?

The question has two answers. One, many teams already do this, as evidenced by how many teams are one-back oriented. Watch the top running teams in the NFL: the Chiefs, Broncos, and the like, and they will spread to run a good percentage of the time. Even the Redskins, a power team, like to use lots of motion and multi-receiver sets to get the D thinking pass before using H-backs to kick out, pull, or lead into the hole.

The second question is, what about the quarterbacks? The Falcons have been one of the best rushing teams in the NFL for the past few seasons, due in no small part to Michael Vick. They run lots of bootleg with him off of the outside zone and inside zone runs, for the same reason that Texas or West Virginia run the zone read: to get double-teams on the playside and either make the backside defensive end stay home or pay with a big QB run. Yet, the Falcons haven't gone to the zone-read. Vick has been injured at times. We see big rushing days by a Donovan McNabb or even good runs by a Jake Plummer, but where are the 100 yard rushing days we have seen from Vince Young, Troy Smith, or even guys like Alex Smith or Northwestern's old QB Zak Kustok?

First, the common argument against this is the team speed of the NFL defenses. The spread works best when you have great one-on-one matchups. Texas and Ohio St. are so dangerous because they force you to "pick your poison" and leave one-on-one either the receivers, RBs, or the QB. USC played at least one and mostly two safeties deep nearly the whole game. When Pete Carroll did blitz he often brought zone blitzes--surprisingly afraid of getting beat deep by the outside receivers of Texas. Consequently Young picked them apart but also ran the ball so well. The argument is at the pros the speed of the defense can nullify some of this. The Pro safeties can defend the deep ball and stick your QB for no gain.

I think the better argument though is simply the nature of the league. The problem isn't only that those safeties can range the whole field, it is that when they hit your QB they send him to the hospital. The NFL already can't keep their signal callers healthy for a whole season: McNabb and Vick have both constantly battled injuries, but so have far less mobile QBs like Chad Pennington, Rex Grossman, Culpepper, etc. Can you imagine the Colts, with Peyton Manning--all $50 million+ of him--running a QB run of any kind with that much at risk? No first down is worth losing your franchise.

The harsh fact is that financially, Vince Young costs the school just as much as his backup: one scholarship. Even more, Peyton Manning, Brady, McNabb, these guys are your team for 10+ years. At most you get four years from a college QB. More likely you get two seasons. The "spread" may actually make Vince Young's decision to go to the Pros for him. Were he to return, could he request that the coaches not run him as much, to reduce his likelihood of injury? Keep another guy in to protect him more so he doesn't take as many shots? The spread has always given up shots to its QBs; the good ones just get the ball out first.

At the Pro level these risks are unacceptable, with fan-bases, cap room, and playoff hopes all riding on their signal caller.

Big-Time College

Certainly next year it will be everywhere. The big issue though is what do the small teams do now? It used to be that you could "get good" by being a spread team. In just the last four years Urban Meyer resuscitated two programs and cashed in at Florida, in no small part by being a "spread guy." When Ohio St and Texas are running the same offense as you and scoring 50 points, how can you sell yourself as being "different" and "wide open"?

Being spread is simply no longer enough. Some of the most inept offensive performances I've seen this year were by "spread teams." I watched Oregon get dismantled with their spread O in the bowl game, as they went 5-wides a majority of the time. This is an unwise move when the defense has five covermen who can cover your receivers man to man and when their front 4 or 5 can break a guy free vs. your OL nearly everytime. They had far more success and were less predictable when they added TEs and RBs and used more misdirection and/or power. Their OC is Gary Crowton, another spread guru from the Louisiana Tech days who had a mediocre Pro stint and an up-and-down campaign at BYU.

Purdue this year, a staple of spread offenses and hero who went from perpetual loser to Rose Bowls and Big 10 contention, continued their downward offensive spiral, as their defense, which had continued to prop them up over the past few years collapsed as well. Purdue over the past few seasons has run into the same problem Oregon had. In the beginning, when they started spreading four and five wides even Michigan or Ohio St did not have five good covermen. Now even Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and the like all have 6 or 7 good ones. Result? Lots of 3 and 4 yard passes and even more plays with five receivers out and zero open.

The offense has arguably become the opposite of an equalizer, it has become an amplifier: if you are talented you can really rack up the points because no one can cover Vince Young, Ted Ginn or the like one-on-one, but if you're not, you just get sacked and no one gets open. Purdue even tried to add the spread option stuff this year but an offensive line that could not get movement and a lack of playmakers stunted the offense's production.

I think the O has reached its apex as savior. Coaches are not going to get fat contracts anymore based on being "spread." There will be holdouts and the good coaches, Rodriguez and the like, are going to continue to win games and move the ball because they are great teachers and believe in what they do, but something else is going to have to be "the rage." (If I had to predict something I would have said the jet/fly offense, but it has not caught on as much as I'd thought, and its success appears inversely proportional to team speed. I saw a youth team score 50 with it, HS teams are winning championships, College teams have already begun to drop it after LSU scored twice on it in the Nat'l championship game, and I saw two pro teams run it this year, both for loss of yardage.)

Lower Levels/HS, etc

It's harder to predict where this will go, as I can guarentee 20 years from now there are going to be some "true spread teams" and "spread run teams" lingering just as there are successful double-wing, wing-t, run and shoot, and splitback veer teams. Well coached and coordinated offenses will continue to be successful. I also think that putting your best player at the "Vince Young QB" spot is a great way to win football games. The days of having an I-back and just feeding your best guy carries and having a statue at QB who throws 5 passes a game is (mercifully!) about over.

Why is that? This is a whole other discussion, but the big reason I think is the proliferation of information on good quarterbacking. Instead of one or two kids who can throw a decent spiral and a couple guys around a city who know a few decent QB drills, now there are books, manuals, videos etc for parents, kids, coaches alike. Lots of kids, from inner-city to suburban can learn the fundamentals of quarterbacking. There is no reason that "athletes" can't throw the ball, at least well enough for HS. There might be issues that arise later in College or the Pros with complex coverages, but if I had a 4.5 guy who could throw a bit running my offense, I guarentee you I can win some games.

Further, the "spread" and the "zone read" do force the defense to account for all 11 men. The safeties must step up for the QB, as he is another threat, thus putting either your RB running against reduced fronts, or receivers one-on-one. This is logical and good football. Again though, as teams get better at defending it, can the team with 19 kids on varsity run this as an equalizer? Uncertain. It is unlikely to help as much as maybe it has in the past.

Conclusion

This was meant as a brief overview. The "spread" can be many different things, but it is not so new. This is probably why it is both so effective and why its rise (and predicted decline) has been so fast.

The big issues are that no longer can I be "different" from the other teams in my conference or in the state by being a spread guy. Second, teams see it more and can defend better. It still is a great way to highlight great players, and, being so QB intensive, a great player can be extremely effective, particularly at the lower levels. At the Pros, too much money and the risk of injuries appear too great to put total emphasis on the QB, as there already exists so much. Great players may come along though and prove me wrong, but Walter Peyton with a cannon running QB for a team, even if he wins a title, may or may not disprove my theory.

Is the Internet Safe?

From Legal Affairs:

The Internet was a digital backwater in 1988, and many people might assume that, while computer viruses are still an inconvenience, computers are vastly more secure than they were back in the primitive days when Morris set his worm loose. But although hundreds of millions of personal computers are now connected to the Internet and ostensibly protected by firewalls and antivirus software, our technological infrastructure is in fact less secure than it was in 1988. Because the current computing and networking environment is so sprawling and dynamic, and because its ever-more-powerful building blocks are owned and managed by regular citizens rather than technical experts, our vulnerability has increased substantially with the heightened dependence on the Internet by the public at large. Well-crafted worms and viruses routinely infect vast swaths of Net-connected personal computers. In January 2003, for instance, the Sapphire/Slammer worm attacked a particular kind of Microsoft server and infected 90 percent of those servers—around 120,000 servers in total—within 10 minutes. In August 2003, the "sobig.f" virus managed, within five days of its release, to account for approximately 70 percent of worldwide e-mail traffic; it deposited 23.2 million virus-laden e-mails on AOL's doorstep alone. In May 2004, a version of the Sasser worm infected more than half a million computers in three days. If any of these pieces of malware had been truly "mal"—for example, programmed to erase hard drives or to randomly transpose numbers inside spreadsheets or to add profanity at random intervals to Word documents found on infected computers—nothing would have stood in the way.

In the absence of a fundamental shift in current computing architecture or practices, most of us stand at the mercy of hackers whose predilections to create havoc have so far fallen short of their casually obtained capacities to ruin our PCs. In an era in which an out-of-the-box PC can be compromised within a minute of being connected to the Internet, such self-restraint is a thin reed on which to rest our security. It is plausible that in the next few years, Internet users will experience a September 11 moment—a system-wide infection that does more than create an upward blip in Internet data traffic or cause an ill-tempered PC to be restarted more often than usual.

How might such a crisis unfold? Suppose that a worm is released somewhere in Russia, exploiting security flaws in a commonly used web server and in a web browser found on both Mac and Windows platforms. The worm quickly spreads through two mechanisms. First, it randomly "knocks" on the doors of Internet-connected machines, immediately infecting the vulnerable web servers that answer. Unwitting consumers, using vulnerable web browsers, visit the infected servers, which infect users' computers. Compromised machines are completely open to instruction by the worm, and some worms ask the machines to remain in a holding pattern, awaiting further direction. Computers like this are known, appropriately enough, as "zombies." Imagine that our worm asks its zombies to look for other nearby machines to infect for a day or two and then tells the machines to erase their own hard drives at the stroke of midnight. (A smart virus would naturally adjust for time zones to make sure the collective crash took place at the same time around the globe.)

This is not science fiction. It is merely a reapplication of the template of the Morris episode, a template that has been replicated countless times. The Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center, formed in the wake of the Morris worm, took up the task of counting the number of security incidents each year. The increase in incidents since 1997 has been roughly geometric, doubling nearly every year through 2003. CERT/CC announced in 2004 that it would no longer keep track of the figure, since attacks had become so commonplace and widespread as to be indistinguishable from one another.

Combine one well-written worm of the sort that can evade firewalls and antivirus software with one truly malicious worm-writer, and we have the prospect of a networked meltdown that can blight cyberspace and spill over to the real world: no check-in at some airline counters; no overnight deliveries or other forms of package and letter distribution; the inability of payroll software to produce paychecks for millions of workers; the elimination, release, or nefarious alteration of vital records hosted at medical offices, schools, town halls, and other data repositories that cannot afford a full-time IT staff to perform backups and ward off technological demons.

....

The Internet was a digital backwater in 1988, and many people might assume that, while computer viruses are still an inconvenience, computers are vastly more secure than they were back in the primitive days when Morris set his worm loose. But although hundreds of millions of personal computers are now connected to the Internet and ostensibly protected by firewalls and antivirus software, our technological infrastructure is in fact less secure than it was in 1988. Because the current computing and networking environment is so sprawling and dynamic, and because its ever-more-powerful building blocks are owned and managed by regular citizens rather than technical experts, our vulnerability has increased substantially with the heightened dependence on the Internet by the public at large. Well-crafted worms and viruses routinely infect vast swaths of Net-connected personal computers. In January 2003, for instance, the Sapphire/Slammer worm attacked a particular kind of Microsoft server and infected 90 percent of those servers—around 120,000 servers in total—within 10 minutes. In August 2003, the "sobig.f" virus managed, within five days of its release, to account for approximately 70 percent of worldwide e-mail traffic; it deposited 23.2 million virus-laden e-mails on AOL's doorstep alone. In May 2004, a version of the Sasser worm infected more than half a million computers in three days. If any of these pieces of malware had been truly "mal"—for example, programmed to erase hard drives or to randomly transpose numbers inside spreadsheets or to add profanity at random intervals to Word documents found on infected computers—nothing would have stood in the way.

In the absence of a fundamental shift in current computing architecture or practices, most of us stand at the mercy of hackers whose predilections to create havoc have so far fallen short of their casually obtained capacities to ruin our PCs. In an era in which an out-of-the-box PC can be compromised within a minute of being connected to the Internet, such self-restraint is a thin reed on which to rest our security. It is plausible that in the next few years, Internet users will experience a September 11 moment—a system-wide infection that does more than create an upward blip in Internet data traffic or cause an ill-tempered PC to be restarted more often than usual.

How might such a crisis unfold? Suppose that a worm is released somewhere in Russia, exploiting security flaws in a commonly used web server and in a web browser found on both Mac and Windows platforms. The worm quickly spreads through two mechanisms. First, it randomly "knocks" on the doors of Internet-connected machines, immediately infecting the vulnerable web servers that answer. Unwitting consumers, using vulnerable web browsers, visit the infected servers, which infect users' computers. Compromised machines are completely open to instruction by the worm, and some worms ask the machines to remain in a holding pattern, awaiting further direction. Computers like this are known, appropriately enough, as "zombies." Imagine that our worm asks its zombies to look for other nearby machines to infect for a day or two and then tells the machines to erase their own hard drives at the stroke of midnight. (A smart virus would naturally adjust for time zones to make sure the collective crash took place at the same time around the globe.)

This is not science fiction. It is merely a reapplication of the template of the Morris episode, a template that has been replicated countless times. The Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center, formed in the wake of the Morris worm, took up the task of counting the number of security incidents each year. The increase in incidents since 1997 has been roughly geometric, doubling nearly every year through 2003. CERT/CC announced in 2004 that it would no longer keep track of the figure, since attacks had become so commonplace and widespread as to be indistinguishable from one another.

Combine one well-written worm of the sort that can evade firewalls and antivirus software with one truly malicious worm-writer, and we have the prospect of a networked meltdown that can blight cyberspace and spill over to the real world: no check-in at some airline counters; no overnight deliveries or other forms of package and letter distribution; the inability of payroll software to produce paychecks for millions of workers; the elimination, release, or nefarious alteration of vital records hosted at medical offices, schools, town halls, and other data repositories that cannot afford a full-time IT staff to perform backups and ward off technological demons.

...

A profoundly fortuitous convergence of historical factors has led us to today's marvelous status quo, and many of us (with a few well-known exceptions like record company CEOs and cyber-stalkees) have enjoyed the benefits of the generative Internet/PC grid while being at most inconvenienced by its drawbacks. Unfortunately, this quasi-utopia can't last. The explosive growth of the Internet, both in amount of usage and in the breadth of uses to which it can be put, means we now have plenty to lose if our connectivity goes seriously awry. The same generativity that fueled this growth poses the greatest threat to our connectivity. The remarkable speed with which new software from left field can achieve ubiquity means that well-crafted malware from left field can take down Net-connected PCs en masse. In short, our wonderful PCs are fundamentally vulnerable to a massive cyberattack.

To link to the Internet, online consumers have increasingly been using always-on broadband, and connecting with ever more powerful computers—computers that are therefore capable of creating far more mischief should they be compromised. For example, many viruses and worms do more than propagate nowadays, even if they fall short of triggering PC hard drive erasure. Take, for instance, the transmission of spam. It is now commonplace to find viruses that are capable of turning a PC into its own Internet server, sending spam by the thousands or millions to e-mail addresses harvested from the hard disk of the machine itself or randomized Web searches—all this happening in the background as the PC's owner notices no difference in the machine's behavior.

In an experiment conducted in the fall of 2003, a researcher named Luke Dudney connected to the Internet a PC that simulated running an "open proxy," a condition in which a PC acts to forward Internet traffic from others. Within nine hours, the computer had been found by spammers, who began attempting to send mail through it. In the 66 hours that followed, they requested that Dudney's computer send 229,468 individual messages to 3,360,181 would-be recipients. (Dudney's computer pretended to forward the spam, but threw it away.)

A massive set of always-on powerful PCs with high bandwidth run by unskilled users is a phenomenon new to the 21st century. Today's viruses are highly and near-instantly communicable, capable of sweeping through a substantial worldwide target population in a matter of hours. The symptoms may reveal themselves to users instantly, or the virus could spread for a while without demonstrating any symptoms, at the choice of the virus author. Even protected systems can fall prey to a widespread infection, since the propagation of a virus can disrupt network connectivity. Some viruses are programmed to attack specific network destinations by seeking to access them again and again. Such a "distributed denial-of-service" attack can disrupt access to all but the most well-connected and well-defended servers.

And the punchline of the article:

THE MODERN INTERNET IS AT A WATERSHED MOMENT. Its generativity, and that of the PC, has produced extraordinary progress in the development of information technology, which in turn has led to extraordinary progress in the development of forms of creative and political expression. Regulatory authorities have applauded this progress, but many are increasingly concerned by its excesses. To them, the experimentalist spirit that made the most of this generativity seems out of place now that millions of business and home users rely on the Internet and PCs to serve scores of functions vital to everyday life.

The challenge facing those interested in a vibrant global Internet is to maintain that experimentalist spirit in the face of these pressures.

One path leads to two Internets: a new, experimentalist one that would restart the generative cycle among a narrow set of researchers and hackers, and that would be invisible and inaccessible to ordinary consumers; and a mainstream Internet where little new would happen and existing technology firms would lock in and refine existing applications.

Another, more inviting path would try to maintain the fundamental generativity of the existing grid while solving the problems that tend to incite the enemies of the Internet free-for-all. It requires making the grid more secure—perhaps by making some of the activities to which regulators most object more regulable—while continuing to enable the rapid deployment of the sort of amateur programming that has made the Internet such a stunning success.

How might this be achieved? The starting point for preserving generativity in this new computing environment should be to refine the principle of "end-to-end neutrality." This notion, sacred to Internet architects, holds that the Internet's basic purpose is to indiscriminately route packets of data from point A to point Z, and that any added controls or "features" typically should be incorporated only at the edges of the network, not in the middle. Security, encryption, error checking—all these actions should be performed by smart PCs at the "ends" rather than by the network to which they connect. This is meant to preserve the flexibility of the network and maximum choice for its users.

...

Collaborative is the key word. What is needed at this point, above all else, is a 21st century international Manhattan Project which brings together people of good faith in government, academia, and the private sector for the purpose of shoring up the miraculous information technology grid that is too easy to take for granted and whose seeming self-maintenance has led us into an undue complacence. The group's charter would embrace the ethos of amateur innovation while being clear-eyed about the ways in which the research Internet and hobbyist PC of the 1970s and 1980s are straining under the pressures of serving as the world's information backbone.

The transition to a networking infrastructure that is more secure yet roughly as dynamic as the current one will not be smooth. A decentralized and, more important, exuberantly anarchic Internet does not readily lend itself to collective action. But the danger is real and growing. We can act now to correct the vulnerabilities and ensure that those who wish to contribute to the global information grid can continue to do so without having to occupy the privileged perches of established firms or powerful governments, or conduct themselves outside the law.

Or we can wait for disaster to strike and, in the time it takes to replace today's PCs with a 21st-century Mr. Coffee, lose the Internet as we know it.

The Cult of Coach

From Slate:

The Coach as Culture Hero
What's so great about the guy with the whistle around his neck?
By Timothy Noah
Posted Friday, Jan. 6, 2006, at 4:39 PM ET

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty. Click image to expand.
Narrative nonfiction has lately gone gaga over coaches. Michael Lewis, who ordinarily writes in an elegantly skeptical vein, pays homage to the tough-loving jock who taught him persistence in Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life. David Halberstam, whose The Best and the Brightest skewered the blind arrogance of the Vietnam War's Ivy-educated architects, takes an altogether different stance toward authority in The Education of a Coach, about the lessons one coach learned from his father, who was also a coach. A new anthology titled Coach: 25 Writers Reflect on People Who Made a Difference, invites John Edgar Wideman, Pat Conroy, David Maraniss, Charles McGrath, and Francine Prose to ponder the centrality of coaches to their lives.

There is surely no American archetype more preposterously overpraised at this cultural moment than the Coach. He has become a vessel of redemption, a wise old pappy who could tell us a thing or two about this thing we call life if only we'd bother to listen. The Coach is the voice of dedication and grit, of giving 110 percent, of never saying no to your dreams. His subject is the playing field, but his message is universal. Persist and you will either prevail or go down knowing you gave it everything you had. It's all about heart.

Not every contribution to the Coach anthology is warm and fuzzy. Prose expresses loathing for her coach, one Miss G., an authoritarian bitch who undermined Prose's fragile confidence in her physical self and gave her an F that nearly kept her out of the college of her choice. Prose's grumbling is kind of refreshing. My own chief memory of high-school coaches (in my case, they were all physical-education teachers, since I was never on a team) is that they enjoyed being mean to the fat kids. That kept skinny-but-uncoordinated kids like me out of the line of fire.

Even in stating her lingering resentment toward her coach, Prose joins the anthology's other contributors in overstating the importance of coaches. I can't even remember the names of my coaches; in my mind's eye they all blur together into one sunburned composite who wore sunglasses even when he was indoors and overused the word "outstanding." As far as dispensing life lessons went, one of them was quoted in the Los Angeles Times earlier this week praising Jack Abramoff's work ethic.

While the article's tone is negative, and its apparent suggestion is a change in norms for a reduction in the importance of coaches, it does raise two points: coaches are important to many, many people, and usually, but not always, for the right reasons.

Coaches (doubly for those that teach as well) are remembered long after the games are won or lost and practice has ended. The strange fact is that as a teacher/coach you will be exposed to many people who you will never come into contact with again, and likely will forget. I find that I tend to remember some of the kids who made some key play or something special in practice or a game most vividly. The kids themselves may remember it, but even if they do, they are more likely to be affected by the small moments: the slight in practice; you too busy to talk when they came to your office with what felt like the weight of the world on their shoulders; when you did take extra time to talk or encourage them; pushed them to new levels; or lead by example.

To teach and to coach are still the most noble professions. Coaching is arguably harder because there is an immediate goal--winning games--that both controls your job security and often your ability to teach important values and lessons in life. Also, speaking honestly, football and whatever direct knowledge about schemes or techniques matters much less than what the kids learn in school.

The advantage of coaching is that I believe football naturally encourages important values and lessons in the spirit of fair competition and pursuit of self-betterment: to get on the field kids must work hard and better themselves; they learn not to taunt competitors and be gracious in victory; football requires impeccable coordination between all 11 men, unlike say tennis or even basketball; not hustling is likely to get you exposed on a given play and knocked on your butt or an obvious mistake. Bad habits and bad values help create losers. Last, the very fact that football is a "game" rather than "school" is that (in the vast majority of cases) kids can actually fail, safely. Never playing a down in football or failing to prepare properly for a game is not fatal to life, in fact, it may teach great life lessons. Failing at school, or work, or in family or relationships is unlikely to be so harmless.