FB: Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference

[OzJohnnie]

I like that beanie and the light jacket at the top.  I may have to hit the online bookstore.

[OzJohnnie]

I know there is a no politics rule here, but I can't help myself.  I have to say it: I really hope Trump isn't the next president.  I can't handle four years of The Apprentice, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Reality shows and the glorification of Hey-Look-At-Me-Cause-I'm-Loud-And-Crass is really depressing.  We may as well elect the guys from Hunting Bigfoot and end it all now.

Bring Gagliardi out of retirement, I say.  Gags for Prez.

[Mr. Ypsi]

I know there is a no politics rule here, but I can't help myself.  I have to say it: I really hope Trump isn't the next president.  I can't handle four years of The Apprentice, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Reality shows and the glorification of Hey-Look-At-Me-Cause-I'm-Loud-And-Crass is really depressing.  We may as well elect the guys from Hunting Bigfoot and end it all now.

Bring Gagliardi out of retirement, I say.  Gags for Prez.

Fear not, Oz.  Despite what the Constitution says, my dog has a better chance of being President than The Donald.

I don't think he even wants to be President - he is just an attention-seeking megalomaniac.

[DuffMan]

Congrats to SJU's Sam Sura, who was named a D3Football.com Preseason First-Team All-American!

[carletonknights]

Three MIAC players made the list: Sura, Boyce from Gustavus, and Sonnenfeld (2nd Team) from Augsburg.  One running back and two recievers

[OldAuggie]

Three MIAC players made the list: Sura, Boyce from Gustavus, and Sonnenfeld (2nd Team) from Augsburg.  One running back and two recievers

Congrats to all of them!

[d-train]

Three MIAC players made the list:

...and six Mt. Union players on the first team. 

[carletonknights]

Three MIAC players made the list:

...and six Mt. Union players on the first team. 

Unreal

[hazzben]

I know there is a no politics rule here, but I can't help myself.  I have to say it: I really hope Trump isn't the next president.  I can't handle four years of The Apprentice, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Reality shows and the glorification of Hey-Look-At-Me-Cause-I'm-Loud-And-Crass is really depressing.  We may as well elect the guys from Hunting Bigfoot and end it all now.

Bring Gagliardi out of retirement, I say.  Gags for Prez.

Fear not, Oz.  Despite what the Constitution says, my dog has a better chance of being President than The Donald.

I don't think he even wants to be President - he is just an attention-seeking megalomaniac.

This.

[OzJohnnie]

Congrats to SJU's Sam Sura, who was named a D3Football.com Preseason First-Team All-American!

I'm quietly hoping for a beast-like season from Sura. He's got a good shot at being the best DIII RB come season's end, I reckon.

[Pat Coleman]

Three MIAC players made the list:

...and six Mt. Union players on the first team. 

Unreal

Mount Union is pretty real and has been for a while now.

[OzJohnnie]

We are having some friends over for a dinner party tonight and I just thought of Duffman and a thread from years ago. The wife just asked me to toss the salad.

[sjusection105]

Fellas I need your help/opinion on something.
One of my nieces who is an incoming Jr. at the Carlson School of Management at the U of M has been dating this guy for a couple years and he's really a decent kid. There is one flaw..... he's a frickin' Tommie! I saw him again on Saturday at a family wedding and again,I'm impressed with what a decent kid he is. It's the Tommie thing that has me conflicted. Should I encourage him to transfer to the U of M? But knowing that the likelihood  of the Carlson School transferring credits from UST are slim and he may also be shattered  when the rejection letter arrives?    They're both business majors, just that's she's at the better school and will have more opportunities upon graduation.  Or , just leave it as it is knowing that they're young and who knows how things will work out.

[OzJohnnie]

Aussie Rules is going through an interesting transition.  The stats revolution has changed the game more in the last 15 years than it has changed in the previous 150.  A few teams, led by Hawthorn (thank God), are coaching to styles never before pursued in the game.  The closest I can think of for this sort of revolutionary change is when the zone defense was introduced in basketball.  The unfortunate bit is that it is opening huge disparities in team capabilities (Hawthorn humiliated Carlton on Friday night 173 - 35 after successively tearing open both Fremantle and Sydney, masters of the old style).

Elite fitness means players can now run all day all over the ground and statistical analysis has led to rapidly evolving game plans where we have only two teams playing what is now the 'modern' game at a consistently elite level, Hawthorn and West Coast (due for an epic clash in Perth in two weeks).  Hawthorn was all alone for the previous two years with the modern style.  A couple other teams (all led by ex-Hawthorn assistants, as is West Coast) like Richmond and the Western Bulldogs, are desperately trying to break into the elite modern game but are just a little behind.  Everyone else is bunkering down in the innovations of late '90's/early '00's and getting the crap kicked out of them as the elite teams start firing on all cylinders in the last part of the season (West Coast creamed Sydney by 52 points on Sunday evening while Richmond hammered Fremantle all over the ground Saturday afternoon but choked at key points and lost at the buzzer).

The evolution of Aussie Rules is interesting.  The the first 130 years of football it was played the same way, guys largely staying in their positions and long kicks back and forth.  Domination was achieved through physicality and individual athletic effort.  The game was not mentally dynamic and coaching largely amounted to shifting players in positions to achieve athletic imbalances.

In the mid-90's two innovations started to influence the game: elite sports training and looking to other sporting codes for innovations.  Elite fitness meant that players could do more than play a position, they could do almost anything the coach asked of them.  Players now regularly run/sprint 11 or 12 miles over the 2 1/2 hours of game.  That sort of endurance, and spread across the team not limited to just a few 'freaks' caused teams to start doubling down on the traditional coaching plan and building brutally tough teams.  Both Brisbane and Geelong had years of dominance with big, athletic, mean-as-hell players in the '00's, winning six Grand Finals between them in 10 years.

But eventually everyone can stack a side with elite athletes so the second trend of borrowing from other codes led to a series of innovations.  First was 'The Flood', or everyone, all 22 players, flooding back in defense and clogging up all the lanes to score.  That, of course, was a really hard position to play offense in return from so transition play, or the basketball Fast Break, came with flying breaks out of the backline down the field.  To stop that, the lines of soccer came to the game trying to zone a defensive area and stop fast break transitions (Geelong in 2007).  In order to keep a well drilled Geelong team from running rampant, Hawthorn introduced a man floating free in the defensive zone and took the 2008 Grand Final.  This trend of defensive minded footy led to an unfortunate outcome, the poor teams bogged down the game defensively in order to prevent blowouts, if not get victory, and the game started to get pedestrian, particularly for non-top team clashes.

To break that pattern along came Alastair Clarkson, coach of Hawthorn, who has introduced two innovations which make the game tactically unrecognisable from that of just 20 years ago.  First he created the floating zone in defense.  Rather than an extra man in defense floating free in the zone, the whole zone floats across the backline.  This freed up more offensive firepower in the front line (getting the spare man back up front).  West Coast has pushed this idea one further and run a floating zone with one man less in defense, having statistically analysed ball approaches from different teams and different directions and then drilled the defenders to position the zone based on the upfield situation.  Hawthorn has copied this innovation.  And it's easy to see that football has quickly become a thinking man's game and too dynamic for coaches to send specific instructions, instead players must know the 'set' that is on and react accordingly in real-time.

The second innovation Clarkson introduced was really insightful, because he realised that as soon as someone copied his defensive innovation then his offense would be shutdown.  So he revolutionised the offensive gameplan in AFL.  Traditionally, big kicking forwards were the forward target with two, maybe three targets on team.  A team would typically have 5 or 6 players kick a goal, some individuals hauling over 15 in a game.  If you have a predicable target then the a floating zone in defense is a killer.  Your big forward is starved of good opportunities because he's continually double and triple teamed as the zone collapses on the point of attack play after play.  Today, Hawthorn average over 11 goal kickers in a game and if someone kicks 5 it's a bad sign that the offense has become too predictable.  Complex weaving runs from multiple angles on set plans make delivery by the mid-fielders a well-timed and unpredictable affair.  And the offense changes the play dynamically based on the defensive set.  Again, a thinking man's game moving too fast to be coached.

I wrote the this long essay after witnessing the Carlton smashing of Friday night and being overwhelmed at watching Hawthorn turn a league game into a training run.  You watch the Hawthorn players in the different sections of the field forming three huddles to set the new play for that section of the field.  It's unlike anything AFL has seen before and the teams still trying to play the first wave of innovations, like Carlton, are being destroyed by the teams that are making the transition to this more modern and dynamic football.

Hawthorn play Richmond this coming Friday and we'll see now the new kids stack up against the masters.  I suspect the masters will have some lessons they are looking to teach.  And then it's next Saturday night in Perth when Hawthorn line up against West Coast in what will be the first ever clash between two masters of the new game, West Coast having come out blazing in their second year under a new head coach purloined from the Hawthorn assistant ranks.  It will be really interesting to see how the new game plays against itself and to see if one of the coaches cracks and returns to Flooding or some other tactic to just slow the game down and keep scores close.

[raiderguy]

Fellas I need your help/opinion on something.
One of my nieces who is an incoming Jr. at the Carlson School of Management at the U of M has been dating this guy for a couple years and he's really a decent kid. There is one flaw..... he's a frickin' Tommie! I saw him again on Saturday at a family wedding and again,I'm  ;Dmajors, just that's she's at the better school and will have more opportunities upon graduation.  Or , just leave it as it is knowing that they're young and who knows how things will work out.

You should know better than most that.......Tommies always suck!  . The kid may be a good guy on the surface but he has a fatal flaw that may raise it's ugly head when you least expect it. He chose to become a Tommy. Oh the shame of it all.