Some Blog Site

Thanksgiving weekend was a good one for college football, especially for Michigan fans. But there were some other games that spurred some thoughts in my head, so now you get this blog post.

1. I am not a fan of rematches for championships. I don’t care if Alabama is ranked second in the country – we already know they are worse than LSU. If you don’t win your conference, why should you be in the championship game? Think of the conference championship games as a playoff round to get into the national championship game.

   Let some other team have a crack at LSU.

2. If Alabama does play LSU and wins, all that will do is tie the series at 1-1 and we will need a tiebreaker.

   If they do play, I will be cheering for LSU. Partly because of the head coaches (+ for Les Miles, – for Nick Saban) and partly because I want the people who decided to put Alabama in the championship game to regret it. I’ve already seen that game; I want a different one.

3. Same with MSU-Wisconsin. This is a vote against having cross-division games in the conference.

   Hey B1G, add a few more teams to the conference so each division will have 8 members and then we won’t have to contend with this scenario anymore.

4. On a related note: since Wisconsin lost to various teams (including MSU) by Hail Marys Hail Maries hail Mary passes, everyone knows that is their weakness.

   If I were running MSU, I’d throw a few deep passes to start the game. Get ahead early.

5. That Michigan game was closer than I would have liked. And OSU falls to 6-6. Maybe they would have done better this year if they hadn’t hired Adam Sandler as their coach.

   

   Not that I want them doing better or anything.

A 10k is a long enough race that you have some time to think. So while I was running my last 10k, I noted some things.

The main thing is that I appreciate good spectators. Whether it’s a 5k, 10k, half marathon, or full marathon, it’s nice to have people cheering.

What prompted this was the spectator who yelled “Run faster!” to me.

I assume she meant well and wasn’t trying to taunt me. But her words were less than encouraging. So here are my thoughts on how to cheer for a runner.
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There are still a few Warrior Dashes left to be run this year, so maybe this post on how to train for Warrior Dash will be helpful to some people.

Before my race, I was wondering things like “What are the obstacles going to be like?” and “What should I be doing to get ready for Warrior Dash?”

The official WD website said basically not to worry about the obstacles and just be able to run a 5k. It used to say something like “run as far as you can” for training. It looks like they have updated it since then, and now it has an official plan. It has a running part and a strength training part, but no obstacle part. That’s where I come in.

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Welcome back to the Warrior Dash recap. When we last left our hero, he was running the race. Let’s see where he is now…

The Obstacles

I’ll just list each obstacle and what I thought of it. And I have listed some helpful tips and hints for how to handle these Warrior Dash obstacles. After I realized that the obstacles were prime locations for passing people, my goal was to pass people in the obstacles. Note: the term “cargo net” means ropes connected together to make a grid of one-foot square sections.
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Since I know most of you weren’t there with me at the Warrior Dash, here is my recap of the day:

Background

Warrior Dash is a 3.1-mile race with about a dozen obstacles, most of which require climbing or crawling plus mud.

In my preparation for the half marathon in September, I wanted to do a 5k in July and a 10k in August. There were some 5k races in July around here, but this was the most appealing. If I want to run 3.1 miles, I can do that just about anywhere. A 5k obstacle course, however, doesn’t come along every day.
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Since we’re in the sports doldrums (between hockey and football seasons), there’s a lull in the play-calling world. I know baseball is being played, but there aren’t many different defenses you can have in a baseball game. But enough about baseball – don’t get distracted from the main topic…

To fill the void of play calling during the summer months, I present to you Defensive Schemes for Parents.

You can look at this in at least 2 ways:

1. You’re a parent who wants to understand sports lingo, or
2. You know sports but don’t know how to handle the number of children you have

Guide to Football-style Diagrams: O is for offense (children in this case) and X is for defense (parents in this case).

I haven’t quite figured out what’s analogous to the goal line. But whatever it is, I have to make sure my kids don’t get there.

Transcript:
For a two-parent family,
1 child = double team
2 children = man to man
3 children = zone
4 children = prevent

I know I said I wouldn’t have any more football posts for a while, but I forgot about the release of the 2011 NFL schedule. And between now and the start of the season, I may go back and analyze previous seasons to get more samples of prediction methods.

In the last week or two, we had the NFL draft and the announcement of the 2011 schedule. Now that we know who will play whom and when (that is, if the NFL and players get their act together and resume football as we knew it), we can start predicting wins and losses.

I keep my predictions over at Some Fun Site. During the course of 2010, I saw that predictions based on the previous season’s results were just as good as predictions that updated themselves week-by-week. View results of previous football seasons.

2010 Summary

Last year, I predicted that

• Arizona = 12-4
• Carolina = 7-9
• Chicago = 5-11
• Cleveland = 2-14
• Detroit = 1-15
• New Orleans = 16-0
• Pittsburgh = 11-5
• San Diego = 15-1
• St. Louis = 0-16
• Tampa Bay = 2-14

How they actually did was

• Arizona = 5 -11
• Carolina = 2 -14
• Chicago = 11-5
• Cleveland = 5 -11
• Detroit = 6 -10
• New Orleans = 11-5
• Pittsburgh = 12-4
• San Diego = 9 -7
• St. Louis = 7 -9
• Tampa Bay = 10-6

Only one of those was close. So much for the consensus picks…

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