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Bill James Online, only $3 per month.  The last 15 Hey Bills are always in front of the 5th Avenue stage curtain.

Bill sez,

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Which is why we can empathize with the way that Lloyd McClendon, and Eric Wedge, and Mike Hargrove, and Lou Piniella, handle press conferences.  They sit down, they fold their arms, they cross their legs, they compress their lips, and they lower their chins as if to protect Boxing's Magic Button.  

Then they answer questions as minimally as possible.  As though, if they told you how Dustin Ackley needed to protect the outside corner, they would be Pentagon reps, discussing the electronics on an F-22 fighter jet.

We can empathize, but ... why does Pete Carroll answer questions like he did in this press conference?  For instance:

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(on what his earliest exposure was to the zone-read and how his zone-read package is similar or dissimilar to what other people do)

"You want to know everything I know about the zone-read games? No, I got you.

(Launches into historical recap of the Zone Read State of the Art)

It was back in the college days and the most obvious example of it was when we played the Oregon teams and we played them early on. (Former Oregon Head Coach/current Philadelphia Head Coach) Chip Kelly really had the big factor in bringing that to prominence, but he wasn't the only one.

The people running the ‘pistol' up in Reno and there were a lot of people that were doing it in college football. But, that's when we really started to pay attention to it and when we really had to mess with it. I think even back all the way to when we played Illinois in the Rose Bowl it was a big deal with those guys, the quarterback running.

It's been a big factor. Having to stop it and having to deal with it is also having to respect it and regard it in a manner that if we could incorporate it into our football we knew we would be creating more problems for our opponents. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense for the quarterback that doesn't have the dynamics to make something of it.

We fortunately do. Russell (Wilson) is a quarterback that wants to throw the football. He'll run when he has to, but he understands how to utilize it. He's a master at reading it. He's phenomenal at doing it at the times when he's not going to get hit, which is the only reason we keep doing it. If he was getting hit all the time we wouldn't do it. We've just incorporated it in hopes, in compliment to the rest of the things we do. (Former NFL/College Head Coach) Bill Walsh said a long time ago, if you can do a lot of things really well, then you're really hard to defend. We'd like to do a lot of things that make it really taxing for our opponent where they have to figure out how to focus on this and that. It makes us a difficult offense to deal with and Russell is right at the centerpiece of that."

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Ask Pete Carroll any random question about football strategy, and he comes off like Dr. Grumpy discussing the latest fancy maneuvers in component separation surgery.  And -- publicly! -- he will go into detail until the media is hypnotized into a bored trance.  

That's any question.  Ask Carroll (or Belichick, or Harbaugh, or whoever) about the evolution of zone blocking versus power tailbacks, or ask them anything, and they'll start from the year 1975 and go from there.  These head coaches are not propped up by their support staff.

What's different from baseball, is that NFL coaches will do it for SportsCenter at 11 pm.  Why is Carroll willing to do this?

I had a doctor once who decided to answer my question about why he was choosing treatment X.  With a straight face, he launched into a granular talk about biochem and cell mitosis and etc., and he stopped, blank-faced, and he waited for my reply.  You think I kept talking after that?

The Carroll Gambit.  You'd think any coach could easily use it to bludgeon the media into total submission.

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So why is it that McClendon, and Wedge, and Hargrove, and Piniella -- you ask them a question and they get their backs up, like they're not confident in their answers?

Pete Carroll could be burned by the way his statements "echo" to 500 million people.  He handles the 500 million people like they were his three grade-school kids.

Baseball authority figures, and NFL authority figures, are simply cut from a different cloth.  Dick Vermeil was on TV last night, and he came off as friendly, likeable, and supremely self-confident about himself and about life.  Bill Belichick doesn't like reporters, but do you ever get the idea that reporters are forcing him into a rearguard action intellectually?

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Baseball managers aren't dumb.  And they work in data-rich environments.  Dr. D is still trying to put his finger on the difference here.  NFL head coaches are marvels of public technical mastery.  It's not clear to me why MLB managers should come off any differently.

Dr. D knows this much.  It's like the Gillick Mariners:  enjoy Carroll while you can.  He's going to be gone soon.  Savor the moment.

BABVA,

jemanji