I appreciate the kind words. I hadn't really thought about what my niche is on this board. I'd come here for years to read the Recruiting threads because I live too far away to hear the local gossip, and it was rare that this site had less information than the others. I also appreciated that when it did, there was always a link to that other site. I paid for my membership last spring when I saw the 2-years-for-1 promotion because a) I thought that that was a heck of a good deal, and b) I thought that I needed to contribute some money as a way of paying back for what I'd read. I never planned on posting much, if at all. Like I said, I came here mainly for recruiting news, and that was because I didn't have much other access to it, so I had little to share.
I started posting threads this fall when I read what various people were saying, asking, arguing about the coaching side of things. I'm not the most knowledgeable coach that you'll find, but almost anyone with more knowledge about the X's and O's of football is probably not going to be spending a lot of time hanging out on a specific team's fan pages, such as H-Max. I enjoy writing, I love talking about football, I especially love talking about Huskers football, and a lot of the things that were being discussed seemed like the sorts of things that I could add to the conversation, so I've started posting a lot more than I ever would have imagined, almost exclusively in the Football forum.
I don't understand why some people seem to feel the need to attack other members. It's pretty obvious that *** knows what he's talking about when it comes to conditioning, especially, and that he's well above average in pretty much any area where he comments. Why does that bother people? I can disagree with him about details, but it's not like the guy doesn't know what he's talking about. As for the recruiting gurus, some do this for a living, correct? I understand that they have access to info that they can't share openly, so I usually read their posts in the same manner that financial forecasters used to examine the details of the Fed chair's facial expressions in slow motion to decipher what they thought the Fed would do next with the interest rate. Based on the past few years' observations here, I can generally see when they're hinting, and I can look back and see who's right. None of the guys who brag about insider knowledge actually seem to have any, which is pretty much what you'd expect, isn't it? On the other hand, when RR says, "You'll be happy," or something similar, I'm pretty confident that I'll like where that's going.
Anyway, I don't compare myself to any of the above because I would have almost no recruiting knowledge if I didn't include what I read here. There are also certainly more knowledgeable coaches all over, but if you have some sort of basic X's and O's question about football or strategy or schemes vs tactics, etc., I can take a shot at that. When I do, some here might (probably will) know more, and I enjoy hearing from them, too. I'd love to have a beer with a lot of you guys sometime. When talking football, I literally bring a small white board and dry erase markers with me almost all of the time because it saves either other coaches or me having to draw up stuff on napkins and receipts. If having a beer, discussing football, and drawing up plays sounds like fun, we can probably be friends.
