I’ve made it to an age when I’m not sure if I have actual memories or whether I’ve concocted them all in my head as I’ve gone along. But I know my dad gave me a lot of cool stuff, concepts to live by mostly, but one of the grooviest things he turned me onto was USC football.
The 2017 Pac-12 regular season is over, so what have we learned? Well, some of the most compelling stuff was revealed about its coaches. We learned that, in Gary Anderson, Oregon State made one of the worst hires in recent memory. The state of Arizona has two overrated coaches who will dazzle in September, pretty much suck in Autumn and would have been fired if the desert programs had any tradition or aspirations for greatness. Jim Mora was a chap ass who failed wonderfully despite having two of the very best quarterbacks in the program’s history. Colorado’s a stranger in a strange land and any recent success was a fluke. The Mike Leach experiment is mostly over even though I appreciate a fat, sloppily-dressed coach as much as the next guy. And there’s reason for hope at Cal … not really, I just wanted to see who was paying attention.
There’s a play-calling sickness in college football – football at every level, really – and no team is safe. It’s called the zone read and in a copycat football universe, it is infecting everything in its path. Its symptoms include: abandonment of traditional power running games, disasters in short yardage and goal-line situations, paralyzing playcalling predictability and silly, unforced turnovers. It’s affecting the health of college football, won’t you please help?