SB Nation User Blog: tehGrindCrusher

Glossary of Battle Red Blog Terms

tehGrindCrusher — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:06:30 -0000

Lately we've been getting a lot of people who follow other teams over here at BRB. Some of them have expressed that they are occasionally confused at some of the terms we use here. With that in mind, I present to you all a glossary of terms that we use here at BRB. I should point out that some of these terms are blatantly stolen from DGDB&D. Full credit to MDC and bfd for coming up with them.

BRB regulars, if you can think of any other terms, please put them in the comments and I will update this fanpost to reflect them.

Mr. Mittens, Zoolander, Eli Manning's Fluffer - David Carr

Winstonsaurus - Eric Winston

Barbaro - Charles Spencer, former LT of the Texans who got injured in a freak accident and never could get back to health.

Zima - A demonic substance that, when ingested rapidly, turns otherwise sane bloggers into raving lunatics.

Scott - Rumored co-founder of BRB. In actuality Tim's evil alter ego who only appears after Tim downs too much Zima.

LVJ - Kevin Bentley. Short for Lyndon Veins Johnson. To find out why, head over to DGDB&D (I'd link to them but I can't from here).

Smoove Will - Will Demps

Patrick Willis - Before the San Francisco game, we discovered that some of our friends at Niners Nation think a wee bit too highly of their (admittedly very excellent) linebacker. I'll let someone else explain it from here. Take it away, TexansForever:

When the ball is snapped, WIllis bursts out of his Jersey and flies 20 feet up into the air (spinning in a 360) as he is surrounded by a Holy Light and wings sprout from his back.

He then splits into the three aspects, Coverer, Tackler and Son. Each aspect then converges on an opposing player and blankets him in a radiant light of blinding glory while the offense falls prostrate in divine worship.

Rosencopter - One of the darkest days in franchise history. Sage Rosenfels' attempt to get one more first down against Indy that led to the Texans coughing up a 17 point lead with five minutes left to play.

DeJesus - DeMeco

The Baddest Person Who Ever Lived - Andre Johnson (I just made that up, but it is 100% accurate, I swear)

teh Schaub - Our quarterback

BESFs - The Baby Eating Sister F*ckers, also known as the Tennessee Titans. To find out why, click here.

Satan, Beelzebub - The owner of the BESFs.

Radio - Vince Young

Vodka - Kerry Collins

Apostrophe - Andre' Davis

Durga - A Hindu goddess to whom Texans fans pray for good luck.

BANNED! – Threatening to ban somebody for no reason.

Ballhawk Gamecock – The player formerly known as Fred Bennett

Hugene – Eugene Seale

Evil Genius – Frank Okam

Bitchephant – Kama’s “wheels”

THOR – James Casey (The Hero Of Rice) and minor deity

Bone Crusher, The Season Ender - Bernard Pollard

The Comicle - A Houston newspaper whose coverage of sports often appears to be written by bored chimpanzees.

Little Dicky Justice, Age 12 - Vince Young's soulmate. Also, one of the chief chimpanzees at the Comicle.

Pancakes - A Texas-sized version of the Sally Struthers character from South Park. Also writes for the Comicle.

K-Dub - Kevin Walter

OD - Owen Daniels

Cowgirls, Cokeboys - A team that plays in Southern Oklahoma.

Jerah - Owner of the aforementioned team.

Frenchy - Jacques Reeves.

Methopotamia - Where the BESFs and Satan reside.

Coors Light - Tim’s beverage of choice. Bad mouthing it will result in being BANNED!

Horse vomit - The secret ingredient in Coors Light.

The Human Coke Machine - Vonta Leach

The Vonta Leach KTFO Award - An award formerly given by DGDB&D for people who had been knocked the f*ck out in a style the Human Coke Machine would approve of. Ought to be resurrected (hint, hint).

Fun with Fish

tehGrindCrusher — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:51:08 -0000

I have to give Chris credit for this, because I first found the images on his site. Seems that the Texans Talk people have been photoshopping Jeff Fisher into some pictures after he showed up at that charity event with a Peyton Manning jersey on. All of this led to this youtube which you have to see to below. Schadenfreude never felt so good, did it? My personal favorite picture is below.

via img196.imageshack.us

Football Outsiders on teh Schaub

tehGrindCrusher — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:12:43 -0000

While Peter King continues to barely mention Schaub or pay him backhanded compliments, our friends at Football Outsiders have a much better opinion of him. Better, in fact, that Kurt Warner, Matt Ryan and the Manning brothers. Unfortunately, they're not as high on Steve Slaton, and deservedly so. There's also some interesting commentary on Chris Johnson in the piece as well. In any event, reading these guys is a breath of fresh air compared to Peter King and company.

Today is a good day

tehGrindCrusher — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:30:51 -0000

To tell your loved ones how you feel about them.

To think about how good you have it.

To ponder how you got where you are.

To take a moment to think about loved ones who aren't here anymore.

To appreciate people who are braver than you.

To consider the idea that, no matter how many warts and faults this country has, it remains a wonderful place, a land of opportunity, a beacon of hope.

To remember.

via www.myrnaslist.com

Ochocinco - Better run/pass/kick threat than Matt Turk?

tehGrindCrusher — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 11:33:04 -0000

I shit you not, my friends. Our own Matt "The Ultimate Weapon" Turk may have some competition. Turns out Chad Ochocinco may be as good an all-round threat as Turk. I don't know if you guys have seen this, but I just stumbled across it.

Ochocinco can kick extra points and kickoffs. Looks like he's got plenty of leg, too.

Also, why can't SBNation give us the ability to embed YouTubes into threads? That would be badass.

Football: A Passion Play in Three Acts

tehGrindCrusher — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:24:23 -0000

ACT I: THE GAME

It begins with earth. A field of grass, cut to just a few inches above the ground. Someone has marked out a rectangle on the field by drawing white lines on it, perhaps with paint or chalk. The rectangle is further divided by a series of white lines that run across it at five yard intervals and then further marked with the addition of hashmarks and yardage numbers. Perhaps there is a special logo in the endzone or at the field's middle.

What is interesting about this field is not the fact that men walk or run on it. It is the fact that men put their hands on it and eventually their entire bodies will end up on it, face up, face down, alone or in a group. A referee puts the ball on the field and some men will place a single hand on the grass. The man who puts his hand on the ground in this way does not do so because he has fallen or seeks to stoop at an altar or a confessional booth. No. In this sense, the act of putting one's hand on the ground is nothing more than the coiling of a spring. The creation of tension. Sweat slides in single beads from the faces of these men, falling to the earth like a solitary drip from a faucet. If it is cold, steam will jet from the mouths and noses of these men as if they were bulls charging. Tension ratchets up until there is only one possible action - a controlled explosion of muscle, aggression and grunts aimed at the opponent, timed to coincide with the snapping of the ball. That's what the hand on the ground means.

It doesn't matter where this field is. What matters is the game that is played there. Boys and men will come to this strip of earth to play there. There might be twenty people in the stands (all parents), 20,000 or even 100,000. The men on the field may notice the people in the stands, they may not. They are playing the game. The game could take place under the sun's glare or under a harsh flashbulb bath of lights illuminating the rectangle as though god was peering down from heaven at this collection of men engaged in controlled, violent battle for supremacy.

It ends in the heavens. Sometimes the heavens provide blazing sun, sometimes streams of rain, sometimes fog. Sometimes the weather is perfect. Often the voices of fans are mixed in with the sun, rain or fog. Each condition is a different test. Each condition gives us something else to consider, to lament, to love. Our voices of praise, ecstasy or anguish are no more than birds carrying messages to the heavens, the same heavens that set the conditions for the players and illuminate the game.

ACT II: THE PLAYERS

It begins with muscle. To play this game, you can be small, but you can't be weak. The game does not reward style, it does not stop to consider how good a man looks when he blocks his opponent. You can showboat on the way to the endzone, or not. The game doesn't care. In order to be a success, however, you cannot lack strength. The season is won in the summer, in the weightroom, as much as it is in the fall and winter on the field. To play well, a man must be a great athlete, but he must also be a physical specimen.

It continues in the mind. An NFL playbook is thick. An NFL player isn't. In order to be the best, a player must exercise his mind as much as he does his muscle. Bill Walsh wasn't a dumb jock. Even the simplest plays in an NFL playbook are complex combinations of individual actions, exquisitely sequenced and choreographed, and depend highly on the constantly-changing conditions on the field of play. They are an elegant Swiss watch, where men are the gears and aggression and violence the hour and minute hands.

It ends in the heart. To play this game, you can be small, but you can't be weak. But the strength in your muscle must be equal to the strength in your heart if you hope to stand a chance in this game. It is not necessarily true that sports don't build character, only reveal it. But it is true that if you don't have character, if you lack the means of discovering your true strength, you will find yourself lacking on the football field regardless of how much weight you can bench press.

ACT III: THE FANS

It starts with hope. Hope that, after the draft, a team will have addressed its weaknesses enough to contend this year. During OTA's, the hope that rookies will contribute and free agents will have an impact. During training camp, the hope that the team will mesh and nobody will get hurt. And yet none of this matters, because football as a sport doesn't matter until the first time a kicker puts his instep into a ball in anger and the games actually count. A buildup that spans months of anticipation, frustration and speculation is suddenly over, the kicker's foot exploding them all as the first ball flies high into the heavens on its way towards the other team. Game on.

Each game offers fulfillment, yet it also tantalizes. In the week between games, fans dissect and analyze every possible moment of each game. Each game serves to clarify part of a larger picture, but it poses as many questions as it answers. It shrouds the future in mystery even as it brings the present into light. It is an ant trapped in amber from prehistoric times - it gives us clues to the bigger picture but doesn't show us everything.

And then it ends. For some fans, it ends in glory. For all others, the season's end is bittersweet. Perhaps your team did better than expected. If so, then your sadness at the end of the season is lightened by the knowledge that your team did good things this year. Perhaps your team did worse than expected and you have to deal with the crushing knowledge that your team failed in sixteen excruciatingly slow installments and you were powerless to help, but had to watch.

The football season is approximately 150 days long, less than half a year. By the end of the season, all but one team will have failed in its goal. Imagine this: in the course of a painfully short season, each fan will have experienced tragedy, triumph and tragedy again. No wonder that football fans have all, whether they have thought about it or not, subconsciously flirted with - and rejected - the wisdom of the Buddha.

It ends, just as it began, with hope. Hope that your team will draft the right players, hire the right free coaches, bring in the right free agents. Hope that the next time, in seven months time, the men who line up to place their hands in the grass, who battle all across the rectangle as god and fans watch will end up the conquerors. In the meanwhile, there are arguments to be had, speculations to make and beers to drink. There has to be some way to kill time in the offseason, right?

But now, none of that matters. Football season is here.

Introduce yourself here

tehGrindCrusher — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 19:33:15 -0000

This little corner of the internet has attracted quite a few new names lately. With the season about to start up, I thought it might be a good idea for us to introduce ourselves to one another. I've seen other sites on SB Nation do this and it seems to bring out a lot of people. Perhaps we can even convince a few lurkers to register and contribute. Just share as much information as you feel comfortable sharing.

I'll go first. I was born and raised in Houston but I live far away in a hot, dusty place now. I've been a fan of Houston sports since as long as I can remember. I went to my first Astros game with my dad back in something like 81 or 82 when I was 8/9 years old. I've supported the Houston teams, with the Astros and Oilers being my favorites, ever since then. I kind of gave up on pro football when the Oilers left town but I immediately became a Texans fan when it was announced that the NFL would return to Houston. I watched the first game agains the Cowboys and have since watched every game I can, which was unfortunately not that much once I moved overseas. However, the innernets have been a blessing and last season I was able to catch every single game on my trusty laptop.

Outside of following sports I like to play sports and really like action-type sports. I used to be a backpacking/climbing guide and climbing, along with surfing and skiing, are my greatest passions in life (outside of my wife and two sons). I also like playing guitar, cycling and poker and I'm a wannabe barbecuer. I'm kind of a dilettante, I suppose.

Besides the Houston sports teams, I also follow Ajax Amsterdam, the greatest soccer team in the history of the galaxy.

Hope to hear from everyone else out here, including perhaps a few lurkers.

Go Texans!

Luling City Market this Saturday?

tehGrindCrusher — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:49:21 -0000

BFD was kind enough to post about my request for quality barbecue here. I've decided that Luling City Market was the best place to go. I should be there at noon this Saturday and would be happy to meet up if anyone is around. If not, at least I'll have some good brisket to cry into.

Let me know if you're interested.

I need ten more words to make this the right length.

Rolling the Dice: Defense and Hold 'Em Part II,

tehGrindCrusher — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 03:06:18 -0000

As a follow-up to my last post, which attempted to use poker to as a proxy for football, and explain why aggression is important to each, I'm going to give what I hope is a thought-provoking (and somewhat novel) theory on how a team with lesser defensive talent can neutralize some of the advantages a team with a superior offense enjoys. It may run a bit long, but bear with me, because it should be an interesting discussion. As I did last time, I'm going to start with poker, weave a little game theory into my argument, and conclude by tying it in to football.

Suppose for a minute that you entered the World Series of Poker Main Event and somehow, through a combination of intuition and luck, have made it to the final two. You are heads up (yay!) and have only one person left to knock out. If you do, money, fame, fortune and a bevy of hot blondes are yours for the taking -- you'll be so rich that you could cover your bed with money and roll around on it while you cavort with a variety of lovely women. Sounds great, right?

There's only one more obstacle to overcome before you can release your inner baller, and his name is Patrik Antonius. Antonius is one of the most feared players on the planet. He plays in, and wins, the biggest games in the world. He's not afraid of anything, isn't intimidated by the money, and is basically a stone-cold killer as far as poker is concerned. You playing against him is like trying to go one-on-one against Yao Ming. You know that over time, his edge is so great that your chips will practically jump into his stack on their own. Your only hope appears to be luck, right? Is there any other hope you have of defeating your foe and becoming the poker celebrity that you've always wanted to be?

Let's be clear: in the long run, you have no edge, and no hope of winning - any more than you have against Yao Ming. However, tournaments - particularly the heads-up portion at the end - are all about the short term. All you have to do is win one big pot against your opponent and you either win the tournament or cripple your opponent to the point that he'll be eliminated in short order.

All hold-em starting hands are ranked in order of their strength. This is most important in a heads-up situation because it's more rare that a person makes a big hand (i.e. a straight or flush) and, therefore, a high card (like an unpaired ace or king) or pair is most likely to win the hand. In a nutshell, the strongest hand in a heads-up situation is a pair of aces, and the weakest hand is an unsuited 32.

The biggest advantage your opponent will have over you is that he will quickly be able to put you on a range of hands. So if you raise with only strong starting hands like aces, kings and ace-king, he'll be firing bets at any pot you don't raise knowing you'll probably fold. Furthermore, if you start putting money into the pot with one of your premium hands and he hangs around, he's probably got something that beats you. Eww.

So, what's this magic strategy that you can use against superior opposition? In order to keep your opponent guessing, you'll need to mix up your play. In practice this means occasionally raising with your weaker hands so that your opponent has a harder time figuring out what your hand range is. If, for example, you raise with aces, kings, queens and ace-king but also raise with 32 and 42, you've played almost twice as many hands and your opponent will have a harder time putting you on a specific hand.

There's an even better way to mix up your range, and it's so effective you could actually tell your opponent what your strategy is and it wouldn't matter. It's simple: randomization. You randomize the cards you play against him. Let me explain why (and how) that works. Then I'll relate it to football.

In the above example, you've widened your range by adding two hands to it. An observant opponent will sniff that out pretty quickly. A better strategy is to find some kind of randomizing element to determine when you play your weaker hands. Based on the size of the money in the pot and the size of the bet you intend to make, game theory, in the form of the Nash equilibrium, can tell you how often you need to mix in your bluffs in order to make yourself un-readable by your opponents (I won't go into detail in this post, but if you're interested, you can check out the math here).

The idea is that you bluff enough that your opponent can't tell whether you are playing a strong hand or a weak one. The way you choose when to bluff is by randomly selecting a hand you would normally fold in the first betting round and raise with it. You determine how often you do that by using the aforementioned Nash equilibrium, but you don't really have to be that exact. For simplicity's sake, you could probably raise with about twenty percent of the hands you'd ordinarily fold and that would be tricky enough.

You've now created an unexploitable strategy that, in the short term, increases your chances of winning. In the long term, your opponent will pick you apart in the later betting rounds, but like I said earlier, tournament heads up sessions are rarely long, so you've given yourself as good a chance as possible. And since you're playing random cards, your opponent will not know if you're betting because you have a good hand or a bad one, even if you tell him what you're doing.

So, how do you pick a random hand? There are any number of ways, but the easiest way is to look at your watch. If you're bluffing twenty percent of the time, you just look down at your watch, and if the second hand is anywhere between one and twelve seconds (twelve being twenty percent of 60), you bet. It's that simple.

It's important to note that you only need to do this in games where you don't have an edge. It's an, uhm, defensive strategy that seeks to make your intentions harder to read. If you're already better than everyone you're playing against, then you don't need to go to such lengths to make yourself harder to read.

Well, that's awesome, but how does it relate to football? I'm glad you asked. This kind of strategy works best against when you're playing against someone who is good at divining what you're going to do. So you would want to use it against a team with a quarterback that is able to notice larger patterns in your defensive play, sniff out your tendencies and anticipate what you're going to do, and make split-second decisions based on what he sees. Sounds a lot like Peyton Manning.

In practice, it would work something like this: the Texans line up in a base defensive formation, depending on down, distance and game situation. They can run any number of different sets at the offense from this formation - they can blitz one or more players, they can drop back into coverage, they can read-and-react, whatever. Let's say that in any given formation, there are ten possible sets. Some of the time, the defensive coordinator is going to call a play based on what he thinks the opposing quarterback's tendencies are: which receiver he's been favoring, if a running back has been running the screen particularly well, etc. Basically the standard cat-and-mouse game between offense and defense.

However, because the qb in this situation is Peyton Manning, he is able to sniff out what the defense is likely doing and make the right adjustment most of the time, because he's also aware of the defense's tendencies, etc. Here's where our poker-game theory example comes into play. A certain percentage of the time, our defensive coordinator is going to send in a random play. He won't change the defensive formation, but he's going to use whatever random number generator he wants to and use that to determine which play he's going to call.

He won't do it all the time, because there is a lot of value in adjusting your defense to what the offense is doing well or poorly. If he's really mathematically inclined, he can use the Nash equilibrium to determine how frequently he'll do it in each particular situation. But even if he does it, say, twenty percent of the time, he can have a real impact on Peyton's game management. Again, you would not want to do this against a qb like Vince Young who has a limited ability to read the field, but it could be effective against a Tom Brady or Peyton Manning.

It may sound like I've just spent a ton of time and space discussing something radical and far-fetched, and I would be surprised if any coach ever did this, but I think a lot of modern coaching theory supports this idea, even if it isn't so academic.

For example, here's a quote from a great article in The Atlantic. The author spent a day with Andy Reid watching footage of the 1958 NFL Championship game and wrote about Reid's analysis. From the article:

"If I’m calling the plays" on offense, [Reid] went on, "I get paid to get into a rhythm with the guy calling the defense" on the other side. When a coach achieves the right "rhythm," he can sense what his opponent is thinking—and for Reid, grasping the "rhythm" of the classic game was fairly easy. "I can see what the offense is doing," he said. "You can almost call it offensively and defensively."

The strategy I've laid out is simply a scientific way of determining how not to get into that rhythm that Reid talks about. Another example of the importance of unpredictability is the idea of scripting a team's first fifteen or twenty plays on offense. The reason this is done is so that a defense can't anticipate what the offense will do. My theory is just a way to extend that unpredictability into the rest of the game.

This has turned into a long post, and it's not quite as sexy as talking about the draft or our free agent needs. But I hope those of you who have stuck with me this far have something new to think about when you put on your Andre Johnson pajamas and dream of Steve Slaton running over Albert Haynesworth.

How Defense is Like Playing Hold 'Em

tehGrindCrusher — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:25:17 -0000

Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Game Theory.

Now that we have a new defensive coordinator who, if Pancakes is to be believed, is in love with the blitz I thought I would give my own two cents on why pressuring the quarterback is the single most important part of playing defense. I'm no specialist in defensive shells a la Matt, but bear with me and you'll see that there is a solid foundation for what I'm going to propose.

For the purposes of this post, I'm going to compare football, specifically defense to poker, specifically no-limit hold 'em. Stay with me - the comparison works. For all the image that poker has as a game of wild bluffs and douchebags wearing their sunglasses indoors, there is actually a fundamental theorem that tells you in simple terms what you need to do to be a good player. Sure, there's a bunch of underlying mathematical gobbledygook that explains it, but the premise is amazingly simple: get your opponents to make costly mistakes by paying cards differently than they would if they knew your hand. Note that the deviousness and misdirection is implicit in the theory. As I'll show you later on in the post, so is aggression.

The best poker player, then, is the one who is able to profit the most from his opponents' mistakes while losing the least from his own. Being a good poker player does not mean making no mistakes - it means that you make a mistake on purpose in order to get your opponent to make a more costly mistake.

There are two kinds of ways to get your opponents to make mistakes: you can have them put money in the pot with the worst hand or you can make them fold the best hand, giving you all the money in the pot. The first point is pretty obvious, but it's the implications of the second point that make no-limit hold 'em so powerful, and make the comparison to no-limit hold 'em so relevant.

The majority of poker games have fixed betting limits. No-limit hold 'em, on the other hand, allows players to bet as much as they'd like. Because of this, every player is basically risking their entire stack on every hand they play. The threat of losing one's entire stack is a the key part of the game. If you're playing in a $1-2$ fixed-limit game with a $200 stack, you might lose $15 in a big pot. But if you're playing in a $1-$2 no-limit game with that same $200 stack, you could lose the entire stack in a single hand. As you can see, a player who is correctly aggressive can constantly put his opponents at risk of losing their stack and can cause them to play much more conservatively (and therefore make mistakes by throwing better hands away).

Example: Let's assume for a moment that you are playing poker against someone you know pretty well. With one betting round (of four) left there's $100 dollars in the pot and you both have $400 left to bet. You don't know exactly what your opponent has, but you have an idea of the range of hands he's likely playing and you estimate that, if both players check the hand down (meaning no one bets anymore) and the hand were played to the end, you will win 50 percent of the time. Your average profit is basically zero because you'll win half the time and your opponent will win half the time. If you play the hand out this way 100 times, you will win $100 half the time and lose $100 the other half of the time, for a net profit of $0.00. Bogus!

On the other hand, you estimate that if you bet out at your opponent, say $100, regardless of your own hand, he will fold half the time and call half the time. If he folds, you win the current money in the pot. If he calls, you'll win half the time. Since you are betting out regardless of your own hand, you will be betting with the best hand some of the time and betting with the worst hand (i.e. bluffing) some of the time.

Your aggression has just turned a breakeven situation into a winning one! 50 percent of the time you'll win the existing pot ($100) and the other 50 percent of the time you'll split the the $300 in the pot ($100 already in, plus your $100 bet and his $100 call). If you played the hand out 100 times, instead of breaking even, your net profit is $.50: you win $50 50 times and $0 50 times. (50 +0)/100 = .5 Bonus!

That may not sound like a lot, and there are some assumptions in there, but it is a useful demontration of how aggression can be useful. Which brings us to football.

The goal of aggression in hold 'em is to get your opponents to make a mistake by throwing away a better hand. Sure, sometimes they'll have a monster and then you'll lose. But if you can get them to throw away a few marginal hands that are better than yours by bluffing correctly, you've gotten them to make a mistake, which is your goal all along.

The same goes for defense. Just as with a poker hand, a football defense has its strengths and weaknesses. And, just as aggression can turn your weaker hands into money winners, it can also be used to cover up a defense's weaknesses. If you have a weak secondary but are able to get consistent pressure on a quarterback, you'll see a lot more bad throws out there, leading to more interceptions and incompletions.

There are many different styles of poker play, but they can be categorized based on how many hands a person plays. Players who don't bet a lot (called passive) will generally call bets and hope their hand holds up, but won't bet on their own. This style tends to be unprofitable. I would equate this style with the way the Texans D played under Richard Smith - they didn't commit a lot of extra resources to pressuring the quarterback (i.e. played passively), which put undue pressure on the secondary. The problem with this style of play is that you give up a lot of opportunities (read time) while you are waiting for your pass-rushers to get to the qb, and in the short season that is the NFL, you don't have that many opportunities.

The other style of poker involves betting your hands (so it's called aggressive play). There are risks involved, since opponents can trap you when they have a strong hand (sort of like a screen pass) but, per my example above, overall aggression is the way to go. This is where the Texans need to be.

I know this is a long-winded way of explaining something that everyone probably already knows, but it's worth pointing out that in games like poker (and also football) aggression is not only exciting, it's also a winning strategy.

Maybe Richard Smith needs to go read up on his poker theory.

There's a few other thoughts I have pertaining to defense and game theory. If I feel up to it I might get around to posting them one day.