Michael Lewis piece on the evolution of the left tackle in Sports Illustrated this week

http://www.guidautile.com/blog/img/simpson/Marge_palla_bowling.jpg

You don't find the precision running games anymore, probably because in the free-agency era, offensive lines aren't together year after year like they used to be. I loved the intricate timing of the Giants' great power toss that carried them to their first Super Bowl victory in the 1986 season.

Joe Morris carrying behind the vicious down-blocks of Mark Bavaro, with Chris Godfrey pulling and Maurice Carthon leading. Man, it was beautiful. Then one day it was gone. I asked Bill Parcells about it.

"Yeah, I hated to lose it, too," he said. "But you can't coach it anymore. It takes up too much of your practice time."

annnd

How could the Raiders screw up their offensive line drafts so badly, especially Robert Gallery? Interesting thing about him. Tony Mandarich was the classic O-line bust, but the explanation was a little easier to understand. At Michigan State he was on the juice, the steroids, or so the rumor went. When he got off it in the NFL, poof, there went his strength. The only explanation I heard about Gallery was from Charley Casserly when he was Houston's GM. He said that Iowa offensive linemen fool you because they're so well-coached that technique outweighed natural ability, and that equation wouldn't work in the NFL.

His cover story about Ole Miss tackle Michael Oher in tomorrow' NYT magazine (also adapted from the book) is exceptional.

Coach Freeze recalls the moment he realized that Big Mike was not any ordinary giant: a football practice at which this new boy, who had just been admitted on academic probation, had no purpose. Big Mike just wandered onto the field, picked up a huge tackling dummy — the thing weighed at least 50 pounds — and took off with it at high speed. “Did you see that — did you see the way that kid moved?” Freeze asked another coach. “He ran with that dummy like it weighed nothing.” Freeze’s next thought was that he had misjudged the boy’s mass. No human being who moved that quickly could possibly weigh as much as 300 pounds. “That’s when I had them weigh him,” Freeze says. “One of the coaches took him into the gym and put him on the scale, but he overloaded the scale.” The team doctor drove him away and put him on what the Briarcrest coaches were later told was a cattle scale: 344 pounds, it read. On the light side, for a cow — delightfully beefy for a high-school sophomore. Especially one who could run. “I didn’t know whether he could play,” Freeze says now. “But I knew this: we didn’t have anyone like him on campus.”

For his first year it didn’t matter. He failed his classes and didn’t play anything. As far as the Briarcrest teachers could determine, he didn’t have a thought or a fact or an idea in his head. But then almost by accident they figured out that he needed to be tested orally, whereupon he proved to them that he deserved high D’s instead of low F’s. It wasn’t clear that he was going to acquire enough credits to graduate with his class, but Simpson and Graves stopped thinking they were going to send him back out on the streets, and they let him play sports. He joined the basketball team at the end of his sophomore year and soon afterward the track-and-field team (throwing the discus and putting the shot). In his junior year he finally got onto the football field.

The problem there, at first, resembled his problems in the classroom. He had no foundation, no idea what he was meant to do as a member of a team. He said he had played football his freshman year at Westwood, but there was no sign of it in his performance. When Freeze saw how fast he could move, he pegged him as a defensive tackle. And so for the first six games of the 2003 season, he played defense. He wasn’t any worse than his replacement, but he wasn’t much better either. One of his more talented teammates, Joseph Crone, thought Big Mike’s main contribution came before the game, when the opposing team stumbled out of its locker room or bus and took the measure of the Briarcrest Christian School. “They’d see all of us,” Crone says, “and then they’d see Mike and say, ‘Oh, God.”’

lewis wrote a profile of parcells... pretty dope

I didn't really want to know about him needing any sex at all, eww, etc. But it's pretty good insight.

Unless you just want to hate well-off white churchgoers in the South for the intrinsic qualities I just gave, I can't see why you would have a problem with the Tuohys. They aren't even "old money." And Leigh Anne rules. "Quentin that's your business and you do what you like, but if Michael ever does that I'm going to cut his penis off."

And even if you skip every chapter about Memphis and Oher, you still get your money's worth from all the stuff about Walsh, Parcells, that dude Lemmings, Jonathan Ogden, Jon Ayers, LT, and the first chapter, which is the best version of Joe Theismann's Forced Retirement I've ever heard or seen.

Also did you guys know that this book never would have been written if it weren't for TABITHA SOREN???? WAHT.

ally it's totally true though! you've seen eddie murphy: raw! science!

Maybe Oher actually did "[change] the Tuohys as much as they have changed him," but I can't help thinking that they really took advantage of him along the way. Lewis is usually pretty insightful and reasonable when he writes about sports, but I think his issues with class are as damaging to this book as his issues with race; he never really questions the motivations of his old prep school buddy, even though they're pretty glaring if you know anything about booster culture.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/sports/playmagazine/28lewis.html?_r=2&ref=playmagazine&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

awesome lewis article abt kickers~~~

look who's an SI preseason all america.

http://i.cdn.turner.com/sivault/multimedia/photo_gallery/0808/cfb.preseason.all.america.team/images/michael-oher(JimCowsertSMI).jpg

guys...

http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/theblindside/
http://www.theblindsidemovie.com/

what the fuck.

http://images.apple.com/moviesxml/s/wb/posters/theblindside_l200909111110.jpg

Guessing this movie will NOT start with footage of LT creaming Theismann.

omg thank god you're back ade :D

:3

>:3

my bother and i were dying @ this trailer last night

I'm about halfway through this and it's really good a football neophyte like me; though I do think that Lewis overextends himself and uses some narrative techniques which just. don't. work.

don't really get the hate upthread for the Tuohys; sure they're fundie church goers from the South, but it's not like they went trawling through Memphis ghettoes searching for kids with athletic potential whom they can exploit and package and send off to Ole Miss

by the way, there should be a 'for' somewhere in the above post