Type of bind: Unknown Type of bind
Label: Prentice-Hall
Manufacturer: Prentice-Hall
Page Count: 244
Printing Date: 1960
Publishing house: Prentice-Hall
Sale Popularity Level: 1877686
Studio: Prentice-Hall
User popularity level:
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If I had a daughter
I'd dress her up in green
And send her over to Baylor
To coach the football team.
Just kidding. The original is, I think, a Georgia Tech song.
Anyway, the Baylour football team? Not the Women's basketball team? Or the Men's tennis team? Or the 4x400 team?
In any case, I never got sent off to Baylor. And I don't know much about football. But when my son comes to visit, he sometimes watches football, and I read this book so that I would "know a quick kick from a winged-T." It isn't about the Baylour Bears, but it is by "Bear" Bryant, a truly great football coach. This book was written in 1960, so it is a little dated. For example, it does not discuss the "wishbone" offense that Bryant used in the 1970s. It does not even mention the two-point conversion.
The author, Paul Bryant graduated from the University of Alabama in 1936, having played on the Crimson Tide's 1934 national championship team. As head coach at the University of Kentucky, he led the 1950 team to a victory over the Oklahoma Sooners. As Bryant related in this book, his team made a dramatic goal-line stand in that game and wound up winning 13-7. The voting for the national championship was held prior to the game rather than afterwards, so Oklahoma was awarded the national championship rather than Kentucky, but in 2005 the surviving Kentucky players were honored as national champions.
At Texas A&M, as he mentions in the book, Bryant led the 1954 team through an infamous pre-season training camp at Junction, Texas. 76 of his 111 players quit within ten days. The rest of the team basically, um, left it in the training camp and went 1-9 during the actual season, Bryant's only losing season as a head coach. Two years later, his team, including several of those who had been at Junction, was undefeated, won the Southwest Conference championship, and failed to go to a bowl game only due to, um, being on probation.
At Alabama, Bryant's teams won the Associated Press national championship in 1961, 1964 and 1965, and finished third (although undefeated and untied) in 1966. The fine 1973 team (UPI national champions) missed the AP national championship by one point in the bowl game. After a third place finish in 1975 and second in 1977, his teams won two more Associated Press national championships, in 1978 and 1979. Bryant retired after the 1982 season and died a month later.
Bryant was nicknamed "Bear" because he wrestled a bear at a carnival once when he was just barely a teen-ager. And he often wore a distinctive checkered "houndstooth" hat.
The book itself is interesting and teaches many fundamentals. It shows the importance of being organized. Bryant also makes the point that there is a big difference between being willing to put in the work it takes to become good and wanting to do that work.
There are a number of anecdotes that Bryant uses to make his points. He discusses how a long punt made late in a game went further than the coverage and was returned against his team for the winning touchdown. Not only did that show the problems with such kicks, it also led him to adopt a "spread" punt formation.
He showed that while preparation is a good idea, it does not always work. His team prepared carefully on how to recover an opponent's onside kick. When Cincinnati tried one, his best-handed eleven players were there and ready. But Cincinnati still recovered their kick. Before a game against Houston, his quarterback was warned that if the team were ahead by less than a touchdown with very first and ten from its own territory late in the game, a sideline pass would be a very bad idea. Such a pass seriously risked an interception and game-losing touchdown. But his quarterback got into exactly that situation and tried such a pass, getting it intercepted. Luckily, Houston did not score.
There is an interesting discusion of Bryant's "prevent defense" which he calls the "victory defense." These defenses often fail, but Bryant had good sucess with it, and he used his best player in it to be the only one not to go after the ball, but to stay back to guard against some tipped ball or other "unlikely" eventuality.
One other Bryant anecdote showed that it is important for players to be reminded of some of the rules in a few relatively unusual situations. What if one has the ball at one's own one-yard line? And suppose it is very late in the game and one is clinging to a one-point lead. Suppose it is third down, so after an incomplete pass there is still a chance to punt. What should one be particularly aware of? Right. The risk of giving up a safety. That might lose the game on the spot. Well, how does one give up a safety? Get tackled behind the line of scrimmage. Lateral the ball out of the end zone. Get called for holding (did ... Read More
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