I’m not a coffee “guru” or aficionado or any kind of expert, but I am one important thing: an addict. I also have little patience for exotic brewing techniques, though I also frequently burn my coffee on the old-school Mr. Coffee brewer and generally get annoyed. That is, that was the case until I found the solution: The Clever Coffee Dripper. Forgive me for this (entirely unsolicited commercial), but I assure you that the quality (and quantity) of my caffeine intake is not unrelated to this website.

The device is simple, which is what I like about it. It’s literally just a cup that has a gravity held seal at the bottom; you insert a filter into the top along with hot water, and then put the dripper on top of a cup and — voila — you have coffee in your cup, and the grinds are easy to throw away. This all sounds shockingly silly and simple until one remembers the great lengths (and often expense) of brewing decent coffee. (And often the expense of brewing mediocre or bad coffee is even greater, given that Keurig machines cost around $200 bucks and your per-coffee cost hovers just shy of a dollar per cup. (Link is to a PDF.)) Here is a quick video showing how simple this little guy is:

So I highly recommend this (this post is purely out of my affection for this thing, as I am currently drinking a cup of its product), and much of my recent content, going back to the fall, can be credited in part to this device. You can check it out here, though if you Google for it you can find additional information elsewhere.

An in-game demonstration from the great Steelers (and here, former Bengals) defensive coordinator, versus the old Run and Shoot Houston Oilers:

One 240-pound athlete who can move like a hungry leopard is pretty much like all the others, a fact that cannot be allowed to stand between the motivated draftnik and that coveted senior draft analyst title. Luckily, there is Scoutspeak, a language designed to baffle laymen with submolecular analysis of every high-cut, sudden prospect who can high-point, bucket step and take proper angles but gets upright, runs with poor lean, and fails to syncopate his duodenum while percolating the jabberwocky.

Every Scoutspeak term does correspond with some real physical attribute, and true experts like Mayock can pepper their explanations with jargon without delving into non-Newtonian football minutiae. Others use Scoutspeak to conceal ignorance. The Paradox of Draft Analysis states that the more detailed the observations about a prospect’s kinesiology, the less likely the writer-speaker is to have ever seen the prospect play football.

That’s Mike Tanier writing at the Fifth Down. Read the whole thing.

According to the investigation, the players regularly contributed cash into a pool and received improper cash payments of two kinds from the pool, based on their play in the previous week’s game.

Williams administered the program with the knowledge of other defensive coaches and occasionally contributed funds, according to the league investigation.

Payments were made for plays such as interceptions and fumble recoveries. But the program also included “bounty” payments for “cart-offs,” meaning that the opposing player was carried off the field, and “knockouts,” meaning that the opposing player was not able to return.

The investigation showed that the total amount of funds in the pool may have reached $50,000 or more at its height during the 2009 playoffs. The program paid players $1,500 for a “knockout” and $1,000 for a “cart-off,” with payouts doubling or tripling during the playoffs.

“The payments here are particularly troubling because they involved not just payments for ‘performance,’ but also for injuring opposing players,” Goodell said in a statement. “The bounty rule promotes two key elements of NFL football: player safety and competitive integrity.”

Read the full report.

Not football, but I found this rather, ah, dramatic:

Following a dispute over stolen “gold” in an online video game, Trevor Lucas devised an incredibly detailed and disturbing plan over the course of a year and a half to get revenge on the would-be “thief,” CG, a minor living with his mother in Wisconsin. Lucas discovered CG’s home address, drove twenty hours to CG’s home, and impersonated a law enforcement officer in an attempt to lure CG out of the house and kidnap him. When CG’s mother refused to allow Lucas into the house, he attempted to gain entry by pointing a handgun directly at her face. But CG’s mother quickly slammed the front door before he could react, and Lucas fled while she called police. He was eventually arrested in his home state of Massachusetts. Lucas pled guilty to brandishing a firearm during a crime of violence and the district court sentenced him to 210 months’ imprisonment. He now appeals his sentence, presenting a barrage of arguments claiming the district court committed error at sentencing and the sentence was substantively unreasonable. We find none of these contentions meritorious, and accordingly affirm Lucas’s sentence.

You can find the entire opinion here. The whole thing is troubling:
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Sort of, though he knew how take care of the ladies:

H/t CoachHuey.

– Beginner’s guide to conference realignment. Below is catlab’s take:

- Pass rush, thinking about the big picture.

- Jim Harbaugh on quarterbacking.

- Tom Bissell on Madden and the future of video game sports.

- Defensive line play in the 46 Nickel.

- “Bob,” R.I.P.

- Steve Spurrier’s coach hiring criteria: No smokers and no sloppy fatties.

(more…)

– Blutarsky on the realities of a playoff.

- Russell Wilson gives up his baseball career to pursue football.

- Jonah Lehrer on concussions and high school football.

- We finally have an answer: There is no such thing as “South Detroit.”

- Brian Phillips on the BCS, the end of the season, and, as always, Justin Blackmon and Brandon Weeden.

- A reading list for Law and Literature. I prefer this book.

- A history of breast implants.

- Tracking the “Pizza Princple.” I sincerely hope history doesn’t hold in this case.

- Waiting for Ditka.

- And I thought marketing had gotten salacious here.

I need a little help from my tech-savvy readers: Someone (apparently in Russia, no joke) has created a spam/mirror site of Smart Football by adding “.net” to my hostname and copying over the site. Right now it is more of an annoyance than a problem, though I am getting streams of hits through via domain from various IP addresses around the country (at least a few per second, though the traffic is not overwhelming). Yahoo is the DNS provider and I have reported the site, and I have made complaints to Google as well. The actual web host seems impenetrable, so I’ve had little success reporting anything.

My concern is that the site would convert itself at some point to some kind of attack site or one that fishes for information. If you have any advice or ideas please leave them in the comments. You may also email me at chris [at] smartfootball.com but I’ve prefer to keep the discussion here, if possible. Any help is appreciated.

I have been mulling about a few things I would like to do to the site:

• Develop iPad/iPhone/Android Mobile versions of Smart Football.
• Polish up the sidebar — what would be most useful to have on it?
• Clean up the header, title, etc.
• Add Google Plus to the social share at bottom — any other sharing tools people wish they had?
• Embed advertising in RSS feeds.

I’m also open to any other suggestions or ideas. If you or someone you know has design and/or programming capabilities feel free to reach out to me at chris [at] smartfootball.com. Much appreciated.