I Have an Idea...

... remember that time when that Pheidippides dude ran all the way to Sparta and back?

Yeah, dude, that was awesome. We should do it, too.

Didn't he collapse and die?

I think so. It'll be awesome.

Dude, you're on. Last one there's buying the Old Style.

So, let's recap. Great story. Some Greek dude runs 26 miles, and collapses. Then idiots everywhere decide that it's cool to follow suit, paying $80 for the privilege to run themselves into exhaustion, delirium, and if they're lucky, death. After all, you gotta get your money's worth. So, this New York Times article is pretty funny, actually. Some of the highlights include:

“I had no faculties whatsoever,” said Dawn Dowell, who was among the injured, having blacked out at Mile 19.

Sweet. She sounds like most of the people I've talked to this weekend.

...doctors saw runners with core body temperatures as high as 107 degrees. At those temperatures, Dr. Lucenti said, people are stuttering and mumbling, unable to answer simple questions.

I wonder if a lot of people I meet have 107 degree body temperatures, because I see a lot of stuttering, mumbling, and the inability to answer simple questions. Of course, I teach an undergrad class. Maybe the thermostat's up too high in the classroom.

Brain cells may start to be destroyed when body temperatures are raised too high.

Perhaps this is an epidemic, because I think that I've seen a lot of folks with damaged brain cells lately.

Others, especially those who had trained for months and flown to town for the event, said they were angry, and kept running. Some recognized Mr. Pinkowski, the director, and yelled at him as he walked away from the central race area downtown, he said.

I think that continuing the race should have been mandatory. But there's nothing like yelling at someone who just shattered your hopes and dreams of being a world champion marathon runner... wait... nevermind. If you hadn't made it halfway when they called it, you weren't going to win anything, other than maybe your pride. Apparently, it takes a t-shirt to fulfill some of these marathon runners.

And to top it all off, in the women's race, apparently some chick pulled a Leon Lett:

Adriana Pirtea, a 27-year-old Romanian running in her first marathon, was waving her arms in triumph when, with 10 yards to go, the race favorite, defending champion Berhane Adere, a 34-year-old Ethiopian, caught her and flashed by.

How cool is that? Maybe I'll start watching more marathons. Of course, I'll be sure to have plenty of Gatorade. It can get pretty warm sitting there in the sun for so long. In fact, I may just go to the bar to have a couple beers and watch it on TV with the rest of the fans.

Or not.

-Chairman

Strange Sensations

It sort of feels funny. It's like you've been there before, but it was so long ago that you forgot what it feels like. It's comforting, and strangely exciting. And you're openly happy about it. Though apt, I'm not talking about breastfeeding. I'm talking about Illini football.

Top 20.

No kidding.

The big thing is that we run the ball well, and we can play a little D. The Lou Tepper era was characterized by us running the ball for 2 yards, running the ball for a yard, and then throwing an incompletion, followed by punting. The D was pretty good, so we would lose a bunch of 17-3 games. The Ron Turner era was characterized by us running the ball for 7 yards on 1st down, and then throwing two incompletions and punting. The D wasn't as good, so we lost a bunch of 38-17 games. That's not to say that parts of the Ron Zook era didn't look bad early on. But oddly enough, the funky shotgun spread can be a power running formation. And this year, we're sticking with the run. A lot of that is because Juice Williams hasn't really improved as a passer (though in fairness, he's been banged up pretty good this year).

Some problems have always been game management. Ron Turner's teams looked like Mike Martz teams crossed with the old Oakland Raiders - sloppy with the time management and lots of penalties. We'd be giving away timeouts early in the 3rd quarters because we couldn't get plays in there. We'd take bad roughing the passer calls at the worst possible times. The Ron Zook teams have not been much better, though this last game was looking pretty good. We only had 3 penalties (plus an offsetting personal foul), and one of those was a shady roughing the passer call, where the ref's angle made a hit look worse than it was (from the side, a shoulder and a helmet lead are awfully similar). More interestingly, we didn't use any timeouts, which means that we were communicating well.

From here on out, you figure that we should beat Minnesota, Ball St., and Northwestern. We'll have a good shot at Iowa, but winning on the road is always tough. Ohio St. and Michigan are always problematic. If this trend of good game management continues, we're likely looking at a very nice 9-3 type of season and a bowl game in a nice city. Who knows? Alamo Bowl seems like a reasonable option. Being optimistic, maybe even a Florida game in January?

In any case, it'll be fun to see how this seasons unfolds.

-Chairman

Jacked Up

You'd figure that I would learn my lesson by now. Every year, I schedule flag football games late on Sunday, and every year, I have trouble sleeping on Sunday night. This year, we play at 10. So, basically, I've got my blood flowing hard from about 9 until 11, and then I come home, and try to go to bed. Bad idea. The best part is that I'm actually going out to breakfast at 8 with some of the doctoral students and one of our job candidates. I'm not usually a morning person, but going on 4 hours of sleep (assuming I can hit the sack by 4 - it's 3:10 now) should be interesting. Nothing like representing your program and your school by being a zombie at breakfast. Let's just say that I'll be ordering coffee at breakfast. Happily after breakfast, I can just go back to bed until I have to teach at 3. Of course, it'll be fun to see how I can improvise on what the lecture slides have to say in class. Happily, we won't have any cameras rolling.

This flag football season has not been a memorable one. In retrospect, I shouldn't have tried to put together a team myself this year. I should've just rolled with The Judge and the psych folks, maybe bringing a couple guys over with me. I thought that we had enough manpower to put up a very strong version of 13th Tribe, but some of my regular receivers couldn't play this year. And our recruiting efforts have been down. We haven't had a sub at any of our 3 games, and one game we actually played a man down. Not good times. The sick part of it all is that I may be putting together my best season at QB this year. I'm making some money throws, I've figured out some good route combinations, and am doing a pretty decent job of moving the rock around the field.

So tonight's game was a tough 18-13 loss. We got a little shell shocked in the first half when they just marched down the field and scored on us. We opened up with me getting a little confused by the defense. They didn't really rush me all out, instead having two tall rushers just stand in the passing lanes and try to bat the ball down. I got a ball batted, and on the next play I got overaggressive and threw a pick. Quick slant route where I tried to force it in, and the linebacker jumped in there. A couple plays later, we were down 12-0. Not good. We put together a couple passes, but turned the ball over on downs and they scored again to make it 18-0. We did manage to put together a couple nice passes to close out the first half, which actually helped things out, got me some confidence.

We came out in the 2nd half, and completed a couple short ones, working the ball around to everyone. I also mixed up the rushers with a couple pump fakes and a couple rollout plays. We got a first down, and then, we took a shot deep. Boom. 45 yard bomb down to the 6. Funny story here. One of the refs actually saw that we were down a player, and asked if he could play with us, since he was done working for the night. He was a former player, so he was confident, begging for the deep ball. If there's one thing I can do it's launch that 40-40 ball. 40 yards deep, 40 feet high. He hauled it in, but couldn't stay on his feet, so we took over. They rushed a little harder and almost sacked me, so we switched it over to our fast QB. Incomplete on 3rd, but on 4th, he rolled out right. I stayed in the middle of the field, and saw that he wasn't finding space to run or an open receiver on the strong side, so I yelled, "weak side." He heard me and launched a ball back across the field in my direction. I actually adjusted to the ball and jumped up and took it away from my teammate (who I didn't realize was my teammate until after the play). This was my first TD catch since the year I played with an I-Life team that had Jared as the QB. Let's just say that this doesn't happen often. I throw for plenty. I'll punch one in there on the run everyone once in a while. But I hardly ever catch TD's. If I was thinking more, I would've had a better celebration planned out.

We came out on D, and their QB, maybe feeling a little frisky, decides to launch a deep bomb, as well. Bad idea for them. Great for us. We pick that guy off, and get the ball back pretty quickly. We get a couple short passes, and have the ball just inside our 30 or so. Once again, our new player is begging for that deep ball. So, I send him on that route. I was looking to my short routes first, but the blocking opened up a nice area for me to step up, and as I was stepping up, I saw that the safeties stayed sort of short. My guy was behind everyone. Boom. 50 yards in the air into the endzone. Pretty hot. We get the conversion on a little quick hitter, and were down 18-13 with a little over 2 minutes left to go, needing a stop. We didn't get it until too late. They actually got the ball down to our 2 yard line, but we managed to stop them on 4th down, but with only 15 seconds left. We got the ball out to the 25 with a quick completion, but couldn't get enough laterals together to get into the endzone on the last play of the game. This was the second week in a row where we had a bad first half, but adjusted and played a good 2nd half, and had the game come down to the very end. The sick part is that if we got the ball back with 1:15, instead of just 15 seconds, I really liked our chances with them in prevent.

Oh well. Basically, the story of the game was that our defense didn't wake up until the 2nd half, and our QB (me) was an idiot until the 3rd drive, at which point, we were already down 18-0. So, this puts me at 0-3 for the first time ever. But the thing is, playing w/out subs, and down a man, and keeping every game close has been a pretty satisfying feeling. Don't get me wrong. I hate losing, especially when I have a team that should win. But man, playing with a patchwork team, and doing some good things on the field is a neat feeling. The best part is that the legs are holding up just fine. I'm pretty sore after the games, but that's from being out of shape. The knees feel just fine once I've gotten warmed up. And I actually jumped like a foot in the air to catch that ball, so that's encouraging.

In any case, we have one more game. Hopefully, we can put together some offense and have our defense come out aggressive this time and get a W on the board to close out the career (unless they somehow talk me into coming back for one more season :-) ).

Anyway, I'm off to get a glass of water and try to get a couple hours of sleep before I have to wake up and do breakfast. Uggh.

-Chairman