Here's an odd piece that went from a hyper-local piece in the Midland Daily News to ESPN overnight; it turns out that the guy who robbed a gun shop in Gladwin (about a half-hour north of Midland) was a missing-and-presumed-dead amateur MMA fighter.
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Time flies. When I started the blog, Ralph Klein was a big-mouthed premier of Alberta, prone to say something that would not sit well in the salons of Toronto or Vancouver on a quarterly basis. Now, he's on his last legs heading to hospice care.
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Did Mike Tomlin put a hit on read-option QBs?
But as Tomlin's comment hints, the read-option carries risk and exacts from the quarterback a physical price that the small sample size doesn't yet prove teams are willing to pay.
So while the read-option may be the hot concept of the NFL moment, opposing defenses view it instead as something to be stamped out.
"We look forward to stopping it," Tomlin said. "We look forward to eliminating it."
That can be read two ways. One way is to be able to counter-scheme the read-option and render it ineffective. The shotgun was introduced a half-century ago by the 49ers as a running set, which confounded the NFL until George Halas pulled out his old single-wing defense playbooks and stuffed SF when they played his Bears. Some hot DC might come up with a scheme to contain the spread.
Or, you hit the quarterback enough where they stop wanting to run the spread before they get turned into sandwich spread. I'm reminded of this snark about Tubthumping ("I get knocked down, but I get up again") on this worst-song list; "Please, let's all keep knocking them down. I don't care what they say, eventually they'll stay down for good."
It wasn't that long ago that the Steelers had a QB that could run the spread. Kordell Stewart used to drive folks crazy with a proto-Wildcat and Dennis Dixon saw some time as a third-stringer promoted to starter; however, Dixon is now understudying Michael Vick on the other side of PA. You're not running the spread with Big Ben, so you want to make the spread go away if your Tomlin.
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