Football

1. Saints....it doesn't take any imagination to understand how difficult it is to throw a football any distance with somebody in your face. Just try it in your next back yard game. To get rid of the ball with velocity and accuracy with someone in your face may be the hardest thing to do in sports, including hitting the curve ball. Saints qb, Breeze has the one attribute people fail to appreciate: accuracy under fire. Having said all this have you noticed that almost all the good qb's now throw from a really short windup and snapping it from in front of their shoulders. Dan Marino's dad said in an interview twenty years ago that he taught Dan to throw that way when a child. Nobody "got it" back then but all the kids throw that way now. Brett Farve is the last of the wind up freaks.

2. I went to a little shit high school that had less than 200 students in grades 9-12, but for reasons to be revealed later we had several years of championship football, baseball, and track teams. Things slumped for forty or so years but starting last year good ol' Carmel High won a championship and this year is undefeated and playing in the state finals. They are averaging more than fifty points per game and allowing something like seven yards per. Why? I don't know because I don't live there any more but back in my day the class ahead of me had four good athletes that flunked two grades in grammar school which meant that 19 year old men were playing 16 and 17 year old boys. We simply out hit everyone and our practices for a regular kid like me were dam near terrifying. It is normal today for parents of male athletes to hold them back at least one year so they will look better statistically at their sport and be more likely to be awarded scholarships. Clauson at Notre Dame (Oaks Christian, two blocks from my home) was held back two years thus making this quarterback a college sophomore when killing the local high school age suckers. When looking at the preponderance of blowouts at the tournament level in California I think we have the same condition on a larger scale.