What I'm reading

1. 2009 Coach of the Year Clinic Manual. Nothing revolutionary, but some good stuff. Chip Kelly of Oregon has a good article (which is actually available here), as does Monte Kiffin, now of Tennessee (about his famous "Tampa Two," of course). Paul Johnson of Georgia Tech has a good one too, which includes this gem:

We give teams that play that kind of front [i.e. try to read the A-back's block to give them cues on what kind of blocking scheme Georgia Tech is using to block the various defenders "assigned" to the different possible ballcarriers in the option] something a little funky. When they play the eight-man front on defense, they tie the safety and outside linebacker to the release of the playside slot. They tell the linebacker if the slot runs straight up the field, the strong safety takes the quarterback and the free safety runs for the pitch. If the slot arcs, the linebacker stays outside on the slot and the safety runs the alley for the quarterback. That is not a bad way to play and is probably smart. If we find them doing that, we automatic with a safety call. We run the slot on the inside release, but he passes the linebacker and blocks the safety. [In other words he basically fakes blocking one guy and blocks a different guy, though it is subtle and designed to defeat what the defenders were taught all week to look for as a blocking tendency.] The defense has two defenders on the quarterback and no one on the pitch. We did that a bunch against Georgia in our last regular season game.

Yup. The insight here is that it's not necessarily that Georgia didn't know the option, it's that they maybe overthought the whole thing, trying to guess and calculate what was coming when. Sometimes the answer is just to keep it simple, read and react, and play football.

2. Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays, by David Foster Wallace. The guy could write.

3. Harper's Magazine. Just got a subscription.

4. The Most Of P.G. Wodehouse (Collection of P.G. Wodehouse stories). Another guy who could flat write. Many of these stories are ridiculous but that's often where their fun lies.

5. In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic, by David Wessel (the Wall Street Journal's economics editor). It's not out yet, but looks good, and I will be reading it. I've avoided most of the new books on the economic collapse, but it appears this is the one to read (at least so far). I've also always enjoyed Wessel's work.

Weekend reading

1. Gus Malzahn's book on The Hurry-Up, No-Huddle: An Offensive Philosophy. I've described Malzahn's theory before, and the basic principles are laid out in this book. Basically, for Malzahn, "no-huddle" means "ludicrous speed" and he proceeds accordingly. The book is light on Xs and Os but that's really a virtue; he wants to sell you on the no-huddle as it can be applied to other offenses, and in any event his Xs and Os are pretty straightforward. He wrote this when he was still a high school coach.

2. How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. I didn't really think I'd enjoy this as much as I have. Tons of great anecdotes, though the science is better than Malcolm Gladwell (though both share The New Yorker style, which makes sense since both write frequently for the magazine). Neuroscience and behavioral economics have been much on my mind recently (no pun intended), and I intend to elaborate further on how I think their insights relate to football and my general disposition towards more rationality is better. I remain unconvinced that the non-quantitative, non-analytical approach to scouting, evaluating players, and decisionmaking in football in general is appropriate.

But football is the best of all sports for a reason: each play gives every coach and player the opportunity for a few brief moments to gather their thoughts and plan, but the ultimate results are all decided in the heat of the moment -- the quarterback cannot explain exactly why a player was open, but he doesn't have to. He turns, sees the receiver, and if it feels right, he throws it. He might not have time to break all that down analytically -- any more than the middle linebacker has time to explain why he thought the draw was a draw and not a pass play -- but the brain is sophisticated enough to give him the cues. Dopamine and all that good stuff. That said, our brain makes a lot of systematic errors, typically in the form of relying on certain heuristics, but they can often be overcome. Anyway, more on this later.

3. John Rawls's religion?

4. What makes us happy?

5. I got my copy of the The New Yorker summer fiction issue. Also check out this article whether creative writing should [can?] be taught.

6. Not reading, but a good place to waste several hours: lectures from the world's top scholars.

7. I haven't actually read it yet, but I keep seeing reviews for this book everywhere. (I have probably reached the tipping point of reviews; once you've read three or four of them in full it's hard to justify reading the stupid book, no matter how good it might be.) Anyway, quote:

This book grows out of an attempt to understand the greater sense of agency and competence I have always felt doing manual work, compared to other jobs that were officially recognized as "knowledge work." Perhaps most surprisingly, I often find manual work more engaging intellectually. This book is an attempt to understand why this should be so.

The book is Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford, a guy with a Ph.d. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago who runs a motorcycle repair shop (and writes books, obviously). (Ht Marginal Revolution.)

What I've been reading

1. The Bunch Attack: Using Compressed Formations in the Passing Game - by Andrew Coverdale and Dan Robinson. Sometimes you have to go back and re-read the bible. The title now is a bit anachronistic -- the idea of the "bunch" revolutionizing the passing game is so 1997 -- but this book is still probably the best exegesis on the passing game out there. Of course, also check out Coverdale and Robinson's three volume series on the quick, or three-step passing game.

2. FDR: The First Hundred Days - by Anthony Badger. Can be read in about a day, and I learned things I previously did not know.

3. Notes from Underground- by Dostevsky. I enjoyed this translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Word is that this is one of Mike Leach's favorite books. No comment on any possible parallelism between Leach and Notes's famous opening line, "I am a sick man . . . I am a wicked man."

4. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness - by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. Thaler is the big behavioral economics guru (famous in football circles for doing a behavioral economic analysis on the NFL draft with Cade Massey of Duke*), and Sunstein is a law professor who specializes in administrative and regulatory law (though his writing is prolific and his interests varied). They were colleagues at the U of Chicago, but Sunstein moved to Harvard and now has been nominated to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Policy, which primarily reviews proposed regulations for efficacy and consistency with government wide policies. Sunstein is also a potential future Supreme Court nominee, though it is unlikely he would be tapped to replace Justice Souter.

About the book: I liked it, but I'm not raving. It takes a couple of behavioral economics' biggest or best ideas and stretches it out over the course of the book. I think it would make a great article (indeed, it has made several) but the book is uneven. The early chapters read like a high school level or at best freshman undergraduate level explanation of ideas like anchoring, availability, and representativeness -- all important heuristics to understand, but stretched out too long. But then, the book switches course to specific applications, and its choices are the minutiae of some rather byzantine laws and regulations, from Medicare Reform to potential social security reform. These are not gripping chapters.

I leave aside the broader political questions hovering over the book in terms of judging it (and the book tries mightily to stay apolitical). I note that Thaler and Sunstein call their approach "libertarian-paternalism" -- the idea is that we want to maintain maximum choice but nevertheless design the architecture in a way that makes it easier for people to make the right choices, or even if they make no choice at all. The only vaguely political comment I do have is that Thaler and Sunstein spend a lot of time justifying the "paternalistic" aspect to would be libertarians who are skeptical of all government interference. And indeed, there is much criticism of the book from this faction. But, since the book's initial conception, the political winds have shifted somewhat, and I would have enjoyed a more thorough defense of the "libertarian" half of their approach. The authors are committed to free choice, yet they mostly assume that everyone is with them on the point. This is not to say they are not, but debate is always good -- where there's light there's usually also heat.

5. On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction - by William Zinsser. Blogging is great, but it's probably time I figured out what professionals, who have spent careers writing non-fiction, think and try to do.


* This deserves its own post, but economist Kevin Hassett has developed NFL draft rankings based on the Massey-Thaler paper. Who did the best in the 2009 NFL draft? I'll let Hassett and Thaler. Via the Nudge blog:

Hassett identifies four winners: New England Patriots, Denver Broncos, Detroit Lions Lions, and New York Giants.

New England’s coach, Bill Belichick,…ditched his first-round pick altogether and loaded up on four second-rounders. In addition, he traded some of his later picks for other teams’ second-round picks next year. The big news is that the Giants maneuvered to get two second-round and two third-round picks, elevating their final scores.

The big losers were the Washington Redskins, the New York Jets, and the San Francisco 49ers.

The Redskins once again revealed their extreme economic ignorance, trading away their second-round and fourth-round picks…The Jets made a classic error, falling in love with University of Southern California quarterback Mark Sanchez and virtually guaranteeing they will have a large number of undrafted scrubs on their roster. Given the high salaries at the top of the draft, Sanchez will probably not generate much value above that demanded by his salary, even if he becomes a superstar.

Thaler loves the Patriots draft and also gives a positive review to the Cleveland Browns. After entering the draft with the 5th pick overall, the Browns traded down three times to take center Alex Mack with the 21st pick, plus defensive end Kenyon Coleman, quarterback Brett Ratliff, safety Abram Elam, a second round pick from the Jets, and sixth round picks from the Buccaneers and the Eagles. That’s a lot of chances to pick up some solid starting players. Football pundits didn’t think so highly of the Browns draft, but none of them are economists.

What I've been reading

People ask me all the time what I've been reading, or what I would recommend. I'm still working on a canonical football book post, listing "must reads" for understanding the game (to be honest it's not an easy list). But I want to make this "what I've been reading" bit a semi-regular series. It will of course include both football and non-football books.

1. The Great Crash of 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith - Wish it was less pertinent, but them's the breaks.

2. Concept Passing: Teaching the Modern Passing Game by Dan Gonzalez - An important book. I have an article with contributions from Dan that will be up on the site next week; I recommend checking out both (the article and the book).

3. The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe - Never read this -- until now -- and am pleasantly surprised how both pertinent and entertaining it is. Read the book; avoid the movie.

4. Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Taleb is well, ascerbic, but this is an excellent and important book. I also like it better than the Black Swan, which, while good, often feels somewhat like a bloated chapter out of Fooled by Randomness.

5. Wall Street on the Tundra by Michael Lewis - An article about Iceland ("the only nation on earth that Americans could point to and say, 'Well, at least we didn’t do that.'") for Vanity Fair magazine. Great stuff.

6. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood - Not sure if it is exactly up the alley of a lot of this site's readers, but it was one of the best novel's I've read in some time. Judge Richard Posner wrote an excellent review of the book for the New Republic that can be found here.

7. Blindsided: Why the Left Tackle is Overrated and Other Contrarian Football Thoughts by KC Joyner - Eh