No Mo' Tebow

We’re scarcely two months into the Tim Tebow Era in New York and I can’t wait for it to end. I haven’t felt this antagonistic about a named time period since the George W. Bush Administration.

This is the point where everyone who writes about Tebow positively or negatively has to write about how this is not a reflection on his beliefs, which this is not. Nor is it a reflection on his attitudes toward Brussels sprouts, the size of his adductors, his tolerance for Blue Cheer’s version of “Summertime Blues,” or the shape of his nose. At the same time, we wouldn’t be having this conversation if the combination of his religious hyper-forthrightness and his hyper-collegiate game (shades of Lee Grosscup and Terry Baker!) mixed with a heaping helping of Lolo Jones hadn’t lifted him so far above the other second-/third-string NFL quarterbacks in the public eye that it’s like ants from a Ferris wheel, with running commentary from Rich Eisen.

But speaking of Tebow, and having mentioned Baker and Grosscup, let me quickly and definitively put Tebow in perspective.

From the late 1950s through the 1960s, the passing game evolved to a much greater extent in pro football than in college football. I don’t have a huge suite of numbers to back up my assertions, but I do have these: The first quarterback from that era to win the Heisman Trophy, Terry Baker [1], threw for 1,734 yards. The last Heisman-winning quarterback from that era, Pat Sullivan, threw for 2,012 yards.

By comparison, Tobin Rote threw for 2,003 yards for the 1956 Packers; in 1967, Joe Namath threw for 4,007 yards and Sonny Jurgensen 3,747 [2].

Very few of the best college quarterbacks in football over that time were able to make the transition to the pro game, basically because their collegiate success had nothing to do with their inaccuracy and/or inactivity as passers. Consider these stats from the Heisman-winning QBs of the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, and ask yourself where they’d get someone in today’s Heisman race:

They wouldn’t be able to touch Tebow in his Heisman year:

Though they’d put a scare into Eric Crouch, the last true running QB to win the Heisman:

Two Hall of Famers played quarterback and won the Heisman in the years between 1956 and 1971, but they can't really be compared. Staubach, a smart guy to start with, got smarter in his time away from the game, and Paul Hornung didn’t. He also didn’t get to Canton on his ability to fire a 40-yard buzz-bomb to Gary Knafelc with Concrete Charley Bednarik hanging all over him.[3]

Oh, and incidentally: Staubach is only true quarterback to win a Heisman and be a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Great college quarterbacks lead great college teams. They are rarely great passers as professional football defines great passers; they are occasionally exceptional runners.

Tim Tebow slots perfectly into this definition. He is the successor to Eric Crouch, Charlie Ward, Pat Sullivan, Gary Beban, Terry Baker, and Johnny Lujack.

He’s also the successor to another hotshot college QB who fell short of the Heisman.

Bobby Douglass came out of Kansas in 1968, the year O.J. Simpson won the Heisman. He was the No. 2 quarterback in the voting and seventh overall, finishing behind Terry Hanratty (another quarterback of a good college team who lacked the right stuff to make it in the NFL) and ahead of Brian Dowling, Yale’s modern-day Merriwell.

You look at the numbers in a modern-day context and wonder what the fuss was about. In his senior year at Kansas Douglass went only 84-for-168 for 1,305 yards and 12 touchdowns, though he did run for 495 yards and another 12 TDs. He ran a high-powered attack; the Jayhawk offense averaged more than 400 yards and 35 points a game in Douglass’ senior year – good numbers even in today’s porous Big 12. You can see why he turned some heads.

The Bears drafted Douglass in the second round and immediately anointed him the successor to no one in particular, since the quarterback position with George Halas was a revolving-door job less important than the backup-right-tackle position.

In his rookie year, sharing time with the demi-immortal Jack Concannon, Douglass passed for 773 yards and ran for another 408. He threw five TD passes, ran for two more, and threw eight interceptions. And his team went 1-6.

This cannot be entirely ascribed to Douglass, just as the Broncos’ 6-1 record in 2012 with Tebow at the helm cannot be ascribed entirely to Tebow. Douglass’ receivers were Bobby Wallace and Dick Gordon; his tight end was also (and mainly) the team’s kicker; and the once-vaunted defense consisted of Dick Butkus (between knee surgeries), Doug Buffone, Ed O’Bradovich, and the same sorts of warmish bodies you find outside a PDQ around 2 a.m. Sunday morning.

Douglass’ numbers suggest Tebow, but what really suggests Tebow is watching Douglass in action. The surviving footage engenders a feeling of dumbstruck amazement usually reserved for people who consent to have cannons fired into their abdomens. Like Tebow, Douglass was a lefty, and also like Tebow, Douglass was mechanically challenged. He couldn’t duplicate his motion if you made him play on a Xerox machine.
With that said, no matter what angle Douglass threw the ball from it could travel. There’s footage of him throwing a 60-yard dart on the run to a wide-open Jim Seymour, and in interview footage he said he could throw a football 100 yards in the air.

Tebow’s Achilles heel is direction; Douglass’ was touch. If a ball left Bobby Douglass’ hand traveling in the general direction of Austin Denney or Mac Percival, it was likely traveling at a rate of speed approaching escape velocity. Chuck Yeager piloted slower projectiles.

Douglass was also by his own admission not on exactly familiar terms with the playbook. The most popular play with Douglass at the helm was the broken play. Some of those plays turned out remarkably well, in the sense that it takes NFL Films several minutes to show a single play from start to finish; however, an offense built around the broken play is ultimately a broken offense, doomed to failure.

It also drives coaches nuts. Douglass’ career was marked by numerous benchings in favor of lesser talents who could run the plays, pedestrian as they might have been.

Douglass’ 1970 season was cut short by a broken wrist (though he did throw four TD passes with that broken wrist in the one game he played), but 1971 and ’72 represent the zenith of Douglass’ career. In those years he threw for 2,400 yards and ran for 1,200, with 25 combined touchdowns and 27 interceptions. His teams went 7-18.

Douglass sits at the extreme end of the running quarterback in the saemi-modern NFL, but it’s there where the most valuable lessons are regarding Tim Tebow. It also says something larger about running quarterbacks in general.

There have been almost 50 Super Bowls, and quarterbacks generally classified as running quarterbacks have won none. Several very mobile quarterbacks have won Super Bowls – Steve Young, Aaron Rodgers, John Elway, Brett Favre, Staubach – but no quarterback from the Randall Cunningham/Cam Netwon/Michael Vick school has won a Super Bowl [4]. The game’s continuing evolution almost assures that a runner will win a Super Bowl someday, but someday may be further off than you think.

The reason for running QBs’ lack of ultimate success can be found by watching them in pivotal games. At some point in these big games the decision for a running quarterback whether to pass or run is so equivocal, because they’re so good at both skills, that they either make the wrong choice or no choice at all. With a quarterback that only runs when forced, the decision is unequivocal. They run so they can pass. The decision is simpler, and because it’s simpler it’s made more quickly, and it’s usually the appropriate decision.

The Canadian Football League is a running-quarterback’s league, but for the last several years the most successful team has been the Montreal Alouettes, and its quarterback, Anthony Calvillo, only runs when forced. Fewer decisions equal better decisions.

So the career equation for Tim Tebow appears to be lack of pro success (because of college success not translating into pro success) + more lack of pro success (because of lack of appropriate tools to engender pro success) = early departure from the NFL. Likewise, all you lovers of Robert Griffin III’s week-one performance may want to take a seat for another decade. As my hardcore-49ers-fan friend Tom said yesterday as we were driving to the Packer game, “They have to be taught quarterback before they can win.” There’s a lot of truth to that.


[1] Paul Hornung doesn’t count, as you’ll see.

[2] I’m being selective here. By the end of the ‘60s the aerial circus that was the AFL was no more and pro football entered a sort of Dark Ages dominated by running backs. A quarterback wouldn’t throw for more than 4,000 yards until Dan Fouts in 1979. And strangely enough, college football followed that pattern right along. College football in the '70s was an endless progression of wishbones and power-I's and veers. After QBs won seven of the 12 Heismans from 1960-71, they wouldn’t win another until Doug Flutie in 1983.

[3] And don’t get me started on what did get Hornung there.

[4] You can throw Joe Kapp in there, just because.

Of Course, You Know This Means WAR

Yeah, I’m back. Don’t get all excited or anything.

The hot stat in baseball is replacement value. It’s expressed in different ways, including WAR, or “wins above replacement,” but its basic premise is this: if you replaced player X on your team with a statistically average player, would he perform better or worse than the player he replaced – and by extension, would the team be better or worse?

Of course, this being a baseball statistic it has all kinds of tendrils – would the team be better offensively? Defensively? Would he hit in the clutch? Would he get on base? Would he throw out base-stealers? Would he give up the gopher ball in late-and-close situations? – but the idea of replacement value really boils down to how close a given player comes to the norm.

Replacement value is semi-self-fulfilling. Successful teams have more above-the-norm players, but it’s not clear whether those teams are successful because they have more above-the-norm players, or more of those teams’ players are above the norm because they’re on successful teams. Success begets performance and vice versa, and don’t forget: “Mother and Child Reunion” was first a chicken-and-egg dish served in a Chinese restaurant.

Football being less stat-driven than baseball (though not for lack of want-to), replacement value is not the hot topic it is on the diamond. Replacement value is less valuable in football because three-quarters of an NFL roster is on the field for one-third of a game or more. Many of those players are going to be at or below replacement value. It’s unavoidable. It’s the definition of the mean in a  world where all the children are above average.

(With all the situational offenses and defenses sometimes you’re better-served looking at the replacement value within a position on a given team – moving from the designated run-stuffer to the designated pass-rusher on defense or looking at the first-down back versus the third-down back. One of the reasons the Giants are so good is that Brandon Jacobs and Ahmad Bradshaw are both above replacement. Ditto for Osi Umenyiora and Jason Pierre-Paul.)

In football, replacement value is good for answering tough questions at the top of the pyramid. Who’s better – Peyton Manning or Tom Brady? How can you tell?

The baseball answer to that, delivered from the pulpit of replacement value, is to take Manning and Brady away from their teams, replace them with a player whose replacement value is at the norm, and see what happens.

That’s a loaded question. Take Albert Pujols out of the St. Louis lineup and there’s an Albert Pujols-shaped hole that can't be filled by Matt Holliday or Lance Berkman. The Cardinals still have to bat nine; they can slip in a Skip Schumaker and go into run-manufacturing mode, but it’s a partial transformation at best. They’re not going to go all bunt-y and start running Berkman like he was Michael Bourn.

Contrast that with football. The most crushing blow to an offense in 2011 outside of Peyton Manning occurred when the Vikings lost Adrian Peterson. How did the ‘Queens react? By not running the same offense at all. Joe Webb got the keys, the passing attack flipped around, the running attack was stood on its head, and while it wasn’t more successful it wasn’t markedly less successful. The point is that given resources and resourcefulness it can be done.

Indianapolis, of course, did none of those things, because it wasn’t built to do them. Joseph Addai and Donald Brown are running backs whose chief asset is not running the ball 30 times a game. They’re the Trevor Hoffman fastball, effective not because it’s used but because it might be used the next pitch … or maybe the pitch after that. The offense built around Peyton Manning could not be rebuilt around anyone else, certainly not Curtis Painter, Dan Orlovsky, or Kerry Collins, and the defense wasn’t good enough to deliver a win when the offense couldn’t outscore the opposition. So on the surface you’d guess that Peyton Manning had the greatest replacement value of any player in recent times.

Not so fast; we still have the Brady-Manning question to answer. Why did the Patriots not disintegrate when they lost Tom Brady in 2008, while the Colts went kablooey when they lost Manning in 2011? Defense is a big part of the answer, and having a defensive coach as head coach. The Indianapolis defense was shredded by injuries in 2011; New England in 2008 had a great defense, with Richard Seymour, Vince Wilfork, Mike Vrabel, Tedy Bruschi, Rodney Harrison, Jerrod Mayo, and Adalius Thomas all playing at a high level. They weren’t the 16-0 defense of the year before, but they were a top-10 defense, and the best defense the Pats have had since.

Even so, the offense was the league’s sixth-best unit, with the same crappy running game that New England has always had. Good receivers to be sure – Wes Welker and Randy Moss – but not really better than Wayne and Garcon and Dallas Clark in Indy. So you think maybe Matt Cassel was better than Curtis Painter?

Maybe a little, but maybe not that much. If Tom Brady’s replacement value is significantly lower than Peyton Manning’s, replacing Brady with Cassel doesn’t hurt nearly as much as replacing Manning with Painter-slash- Collins-slash- Orlovsky. So we come back to the original conclusion: Manning is better than Brady.

Yes, to the extent that his replacement value is higher. You may want Brady over Manning in a big game, and that’s your right. Replacement value doesn’t go there.

All of which is the long way ‘round to the big question: What player is/was the most indispensable to his team?

The simplest way to look at this is to examine the change in record from the year before the player left to the year he left, and then if he went to a new team the difference between the year before the player came and the year he came. A couple of simple change equations, acknowledging that the loss of one player does not define any team’s season.

Let’s work with the top 50 players of all time according to Pro Football Reference, and let’s look at changes that occurred in the meat of that player’s career, if that’s possible.

It gets dicey. Carl Eller and Johnny Unitas changed teams at the tail-end of their careers, when they were close to being replacement-level players. That’s not the same as Marshall Faulk changing teams after three years or T.O. being dealt to the Eagles in the prime of his career.

This little work is split in two, with a list of players who went from one team to a different team this time, and a list of players who didn’t go anywhere saved for the next episode, along with a big wrapup.

Now, the list of players who switched teams.

Lest you think the transition from Brett Favre to Aaron Rodgers was smooth and productive, guess again. The Packers got more than 50 percent worse; the Jets got 125 percent better. And the QB aside, the Favre-led team was nearly indistinguishable from the Rodgers-led team; it wasn’t like the defense collapsed or the offense was gutted by injuries. Favre at that stage of his career was that much better than Rodgers at that stage of his career. It was a big difference.

The difference between Warren Moon and Billy Joe Tolliver was likewise huge. Unlike the calculated move Green Bay made from the old pro (Favre) to his successor (Rodgers), Houston went from a productive star, to a 28-year-old journeyman who could serve as the poster boy for sub-replacement-level quarterbacks. If Curtis Painter were older, less intelligent, and longer off the tee he would be Billy Joe Tolliver. Given that, a precipitous decline was inevitable.

Interesting stuff abounds in these numbers. Love him or hate him, T.O. made the Eagles better and the ‘Niners worse – though he had the opposite effect when he went from Philly to Dallas three years later. Randy Moss, meanwhile, has had the opposite effect everywhere he's gone. Randy Moss is a player whose teams get worse when he arrives. That doesn't mean teams aren't good when Moss arrives, or that they don't prosper at some point during his tenure. They just don't get better when he arrives – and they get better when he leaves.

You can see how two safeties, Paul Krause and Emlen Tunnell, stabilized young defenses, and how three great defensive backs – Rod Woodson, Ronnie Lott, and Herb Adderley – were unable to do much for established defenses.

You can also see that L.T. is a good player. The Chargers may have underestimated how good – or perhaps they simply forgot that addition by subtraction is still subtraction. How could the Chargers without Tomlinson possibly be a better team than the Chargers with him?

And then there's Marshall Faulk. When he went from the Colts to the Rams he pulled off the amazing combination of making his new team nine games better, while the team he left got 10 games better. There has never been an NFL trade that made each team that much better.

This is good, but there's still the Peyton Manning situation to consider. And we will ... next time. 

And I promise there will be a next time.

Packers-Bears: The Pretend End of the Pretend Road

At last, to paraphrase my minivan, we have arrived at our destination. Route guidance will cease. Enjoy your stay.

I can’t remember why I decided to pursue an all-time-greatest-teams playdown. Oh, wait; I do. I had spent many months analyzing NFL teams and constructing all-time lineups as part of the process of writing a book called Jim and Kit’s Big Book of All-Time Football Lineups (note to self: whack the title), and once I had a sufficient supply of lineups and snide Leo Sugar references I felt duty-bound to do something with them, and if the book wasn’t happening the playdown was a reasonable second choice.

I suppose I could have just thrown a bracket up there and given it the Colin Cowherd treatment and run an illegal gambling operation and had everyone in the office chip in a twenty to play, but that’s not how I operate. Long and overblown, baby, with absolutely no income potential: that’s Big Kitty Style.

So I started this thing on May 20, 2011, with a running account of Chargers-Chiefs, and almost 235 days later to the day here I am, playing out a post-Pro Bowl finale featuring the Bears and Packers banging leather helmet against leather helmet in a commercial-free, flyover-less, non-Kevin Harlaned paean to the wonders of football longevity.

Let’s nuke the hecklers right away, because Lord knows I love explaining once again how the two overwhelming favorites to get here got here.

Forget that one of these teams is in my backyard and the other is just over the fence. The Bears are here because over 90-plus years they’ve assembled more high-quality linemen on both sides of the ball than anyone. Anyone; not even close. The Bears also have four Hall of Fame running backs, five Hall of Fame linebackers, the two greatest kick returners ever, and pro football’s very own Babe Ruth, all coached by the guy who gave the NFL CPR for a decade.

The Packers are here because it snowed.

Well, more than that. The Packers are here because they have four great quarterbacks, three tremendous wide receivers, six HOF running backs, the highest-rated defensive player ever (Reggie White), a slew of HOF linemen and three HOFers in the secondary, with Vince Lombardi driving the bus.

And because it snowed.

The Packers and Bears are 1-2 in all-time wins, and first and fourth in all-time winning percentage. They are 1-2 in Hall of Famers, and between them they have 22 World Championships – almost one-fourth of all NFL titles. Lest you think it’s merely a function of longevity, the other team that was there at practically the beginning, the ChiStlAz Cardinals, has two NFL championships and no Super Bowl wins, and the rest of the pre-1935 teams – the Lions, Eagles, Redskins, and Giants – have been the Pimlico clay to the Packers and Bears’ Secretariat.

Oh, there are differences. The Packers were never coached by anyone as large as Abe Gibron, though Mike Sherman's astonishing paunch-that-launched-a-thousand-ships wins extra points for its shock value. The Bears peaked earlier than the Packers; the team has two championships in the last 50 years, versus the Packers’ five. Contemporary history totally favors the Packers, notwithstanding certain moments from Devin Hester and Jay Cutler’s chins, but we’re talking history history, and that has the teams in nearly a dead heat.

There were other worthy candidates for the finals; the Colts, Rams and – yes, J.B. – the Vikings all could claim positions. Teams like the Cowboys, Chiefs and 49ers offered intriguing possibilities and upset potential. If scores of years and hundreds of games weren’t weighing down the results, there might have been more upsets. But statistical probability grinds a straight path through this canyon, and at the end of the path you find Bears-Packers. There will be no more explanations.

Instead, a pregame tale of the tape. The Bears have managed to turn an impressive historical assortment of offensive talent into a subpar historical offense. If you index their offensive rankings on a year-by-year basis the Bears have a historical offensive ranking of 89, against a baseline of 100. Conversely, the Packers have an indexed offensive ranking of 111 – exactly as much above the norm as the Bears are below the norm.

Defensively it’s a different story. The Bears are far above the norm, as you’d expect – their indexed rating is 118 – but the Packers are at 113. On pretend paper, this is a game pitting a below-average-offensive/very-good-defensive team against a very-good-offensive/very-good-defensive team.

In that regard the pretend game is not much different from this week’s semi-pretend national-championship college-football game. It took about 10 minutes of watching LSU and Alabama this season to recognize that ‘Bama has a pretty good offense and a stellar defense, and LSU has a dysfunctional offense and an exceptional defense. Was there ever really any doubt that anything would happen in the Faux National Championship other than exactly what happened? I realize the endless weeks of buildup boosted the GNP by keeping 197 quasi-expert commentators employed through the holidays, but really. Step back, view things dispassionately, call it like you see it, and move on.

Leaving the world of real pretend national championships to return to the more comfortable yet lower-paying world of pretend pretend world championships, the crucial question is the eternal crucial question: How much weight do you give prewar performances, and how do you adequately weight the accomplishments of prewar players?

From 1921-41 the Packers were 163-65-18; the Bears were 177-62-30. The Packers are down 14 in the win column, but only down three in the loss column. That suggests some schedule-padding on the Bears’ part, not to mention a whole bunch of quasi-exhibitions ending in either scoreless ties or blowouts.

Yes, blowouts. The all-time Bears have scored 24,234 points. The all-time Packers have scored 24,975 points. However, if you want to start NFL time at 1946, the Bears have scored 18,973 points to the Packers’ 20,245. The Bears ran up the scores through the ‘20s, picking on the likes of the Akron Indians and the Louisville Colonels. The Packers had their games with the Racine Tornadoes of the football world but did proportionally less barnstorming than the Bears, holding down their numbers and creating an historical statistical dead heat that’s actually anything but.

Speaking to that point, the Bears have 16 HOFers who began their careers pre-war. The Packers have eight. The players can’t be thrown out because their accomplishments are legitimate, and they obviously outperformed their peers. But their contributions need to be discounted about 20 percent in this milieu to account for schedule-padding and generally inferior competition.

One note on that 20 percent discount: Almost every great lineman of the 1930s except for the centers Mel Hein and Alex Wojciehowicz played for the Bears, because when the NFL draft was instituted the Bears drafted linemen when almost every other team drafted skill-position players. The fact that the Bears had all the good linemen and were not flat-out dominant throughout the era suggests three things: the skill-position players were overrated, the offense was antiquated, and the great linemen may not have been all that great. You could discount these players – Fortmann, Stydahar, Kiesling, Musso, Turner -- 30 percent and not be overdoing it.

Outside of the dead-ball era, the difference between the two teams is one-seventh of a game per year – a dead heat record-wise, like we said, though inside that dead heat the Packers scored more points, won more championships, and played defense about as well, and the only reasonably good Bear quarterback, Sid Luckman, padded his stats during the war years. So you could read the tea leaves and say there’s a case for the Packers.

There’s also a case for the Bears. There’s the 1940 NFL Championship, the 1983 Bears, arguably one of best teams ever, and Walter Payton, Gale Sayers, and Dick Butkus – players who shifted the game’s tectonic plates.

We could find a dozen more reasons why this game is basically dead even, so we might as well play it out, knowing that there will eventually be a winner.

(This is not an empty declaration. Two years ago the championship game of the Australian Football League, that delightful mélange of volleyball, rugby, and fragmentation bomb, ended in a tie, so the next weekend they played another one. Imagine if you tried that with the Super Bowl. Al Michaels would blow a motherboard.)

The Packers kick off on a blustery 12-degree day at Soldier Field. Sayers runs the ball out to the 40, and the Bears immediately take advantage of the field position by running three plays for seven yards and punting.

The Packers get the ball, get a first down and nothing more, and kick back to the Bears. The Bears run five and kick back to the Packers, who go three-and-out and kick back to the Bears. The Bears gain ground steadily on these exchanges, moving their starting field position from their own 40 to the Green Bay 44.

The Bears pound the ball close to field-goal range, only to come away empty-handed when Reggie White strips the ball from Sid Luckman and Willie Davis returns the fumble to the Bears 34. At that point Starr goes to work methodically, using Forrest Gregg’s ability to neutralize Doug Atkins on the pass rush to connect on a series of short passes to Hornung, Canadeo, and Sterling Sharpe. That softens the middle for Jim Taylor, who hammers it into the end zone from seven yards out, putting the Packers on top 7-0.

The Bears get another great kickoff return – out to the Packer 48 – but do nothing with it, in the process pointing up the Bears’ major flaw, something that had appeared in previous games but had always been subsumed by strong line play and good defense. Sid Luckman is an overrated quarterback – he’s one of two prewar QBs to start for an all-time team, and he ain’t no Sammy Baugh -- but beyond him the Bears have no quarterback, so he has to play. If he’s able to hand the ball off to Payton and Sayers most of the game and only throw the ball as a change of pace, he’s fine. But shut down the run and force the pass and Luckman has neither the skills nor the skill players to play effectively.

And that’s what happens here. White, Davis and Jordan (with help from Ray Nitschke) control the running game. Adderley, Woodson and Wood cover the receivers. On defense, the Bears aren’t quite strong enough in the D-line to put consistent pressure on the Packers’ quarterbacks (Brett Favre gets a couple of series after Bart Starr gets knocked woozy in the second quarter), and don’t have the D-backs to run with the receivers.

The result deteriorates like the grass at midfield. Pressed into a passing situation, Luckman throws a flare meant for Bill Hewitt right into the arms of Charles Woodson, who undercuts the route, breaks beautifully on the ball, and returns the pick to the Bears 35. The drive produces a Chester Marcol field goal – matched after a long return on the ensuing kickoff leads to a short drive for a three-pointer.

With the lid off the goal and the Bear mystique shattered, the Packers move right back down the field. This time it’s Favre, hooking up with Sharpe on a 24-yard catch-and-run and Hutson on a 45-yard post-corner route that puts the Packers up by two touchdowns.

The Bears are not equipped to play from behind. The Packers’ front line attacks the run with abandon and let their defensive backs handle their business – which they do without difficulty. Offensively, the Packers dial back the aggressiveness as gameday turns dark and blustery; they tack on a third-quarter field goal and withstand a very late Bears touchdown to prevail 20-10.

The stat sheet doesn’t have much to say. Taylor runs for 61 yards and a score. Hornung and McNally each catch four passes out of the backfield. Lofton has a couple of catches, Hutson catches five with a score, and Sharpe snags four.

Defensively, White has 2.5 sacks, Davis has 1.5, and designated pass rusher Ted Hendricks gets home once. In addition to Woodson’s pick, Bobby Dillon and Leroy Butler intercept Luckman, whose day is generally luckless.

Speaking of the Bears’ offense, their vaunted running attack doesn’t amount to much. Even with Bronko Nagurski leading the way, Payton can only manage 71 yards on 19 carries. Sayers is even less productive, with 59 yards rushing, though he does catch six passes for 81 yards. In fact, the passing yards are almost exclusively allocated from the tight end down; Harlon Hill’s two catches and Bill Hewitt’s three are hardly the stuff championships are made of.

So there you go. It pains me greatly to anoint the Green Bay Packers as the champions of the first-and-only Football With 1 Stick Gum all-time playdowns. Why does it annoy me? For those outside of the Packers’ sphere, it seems like hopeless homerism. For those inside the sphere, it’s the only possible outcome. And personally, I have a tremendous antipathy towards the Packers. When the Packers win it buoys the spirits of those around me, and has that pleasant residual effects. But at the same time, it's so cliched. It's like yet another riff on the "Hoosiers" theme starring Dennis Quaid, where the plucky band of underdogs hit the winning shot as time expires. I'm quite anti-cliche, thank you; I love underdogs like Matthew Stafford loves corn dogs, but I prefer the ones with the funky uniforms that get eliminated in round 2. The Packers, the Titletown ouevre, the innumerable houses and mailboxes and lawn tractors and pickup trucks and silos and tea cozies dolled up in green and gold, it gets old after a while. Especially when there's a team like the Saskatchewan Roughriders out there needing some love.

In the end, the weight of talent over time couldn't be denied. The Packers got a few breaks but generally had the most balanced team from line-to-backs on both sides of the ball. They had enough prewar players to create a deep roster and enough great postwar players to provide the necessary punch. There could have been many other outcomes, but this is the one that got home this time.

Fortunately for pretend matchups like this, there’s always a tomorrow. And it starts today. But only after I savor this one for a couple of minutes.

Shootout At The Fantasy Factory

I'll level with you: There is an ulterior motive to this, beyond the undeniable thrill of laying unadulterated smart-aleck comments on a fawning public. It's fantasy football.

The underlying premise of much of Football with 1 Stick Gum is that professional football teams have tendencies, and these tendencies cannot change overnight. Even in the age of free agency teams cannot simply be swapped out, the way you'd pop out Madden 9 and pop in Madden 10. Teams cannot transform; they can only evolve.

Furthermore, there are only so many plays that can be run in a game, and only so many yards that can be gained in a season. Yards gained in the NFL have increased season over season, but slowly. There has never been one season where everything simply exploded beyond the simple addition of games and teams, not even the post-AAFC and post-AFL merger years. It's not really possible. The laws of time and effort take over, and everything, as always, regresses to the mean.

As an aside, this tendency is even more pronounced the further down the football chain you travel. In the early ‘80s the University of Wisconsin hired Don Morton as its head coach. Morton made his reputation at the University of Tulsa as the progenitor of the veer offense, a sort of half-assed wishbone with a couple of pass plays. Morton came to Madison and tried to install the veer using the athletes who were running the Badgers’ patented crummy pro-style offense. It was enough to make the body-passers, the pot-smokers and the other miscellaneous faithful moon for the days of Mike “The Polish Rifle” Kalasmiki.

At that time I was moonlighting as a color commentator for the radio broadcasts of Wisconsin high-school football powerhouse D.C. Everest. They ran the veer too, and ran bubble screens and run-‘n’-shoot passes and plays that would never have showed up on Don Morton’s board if he had stayed at Madison a millennium.

The difference? The veer was D.C. Everest’s system, not the coach’s system. In Madison, the veer was Don Morton’s system, not Wisconsin’s system. The Badger players were the wrong ones to run the plays, and the plays were the wrong plays to boot. Wisconsin not only couldn’t flip a switch over to a new system, but the new system was a total botch. (Something to think about, Fighting Irish fans.)

What does this have to do with fantasy football? Basically, it means that everything the so-called experts think is special really isn't as special as they'd have you believe. If you read the magazines – and I've read a scad-load – you'd think that every player in the league is going to do 10 percent better than he did last year. And then there are the rookies – my Gawd, the rookies!

Well, it's bunk. It's not statistically possible. There are only so many plays in a game and yards in a season, there are only so many opportunities, and no single player or coach is capable of producing sea change overnight. Sam Bradford? Puh-leeze. No one to throw to, no line to protect him, and the game is going to look faster to him than Michael Phelps in a cheat suit. Mike Martz in Chicago? Martz has Johnny Knox, who does not equal Isaac Bruce, a couple of possession receivers who together don't add up to Ricky Proehl, a decent tight end that in the Martz scheme of things is as useful as a backup long snapper, and Jay Cutler, who resembles Kurt Warner the same way that Brett Favre resembles Bart Starr. There is no Torry Holt and no Marshall Faulk, and Soldier Field in December does not offer the same cushy consistency of the TWA Dome.

The way this game works is that players are slotted into roles, and it's those roles, not the players in them, that matter. The No. 1 receiver lines up here and does this, and ultimately it matters little whether it's Greg Jennings or Donald Driver.

The fantasy disconnect is that when you draft Greg Jennings you're not really drafting Greg Jennings. You're drafting the Packers' No. 1 receiver. And while roles don't change much over the course of the season, the players in those roles can, either through injury or performance. The Jets' No. 1 running back will be good for a ton of fantasy points this year, but at what point does that position gravitate from Ladanian Tomlinson to Shonn Greene?

All right, so here’s the first rule of drafting fantasy football players: Draft roles, not players. If the St. Louis Rams are going to be primarily a running team in 2010 – which they will – and you draft Steven Jackson, it’s not a bad idea to draft his backup as well. If you draft Tomlinson, save room to grab Greene. If things are really in a state of flux – read Buffalo – either save room for three RBs from one team or move on to a more settled situation. Besides, if you’re a fantasy-footballer who feels his team will not be complete without a Buffalo running back you’re beyond this column’s ability to help.

Second, realize that every gain has to be matched with a loss somewhere. Okay, so Jay Cutler throws for 10 percent more yards in 2010. He throws on more downs, which means fewer rushing opportunities for Matt Forte and Garrett Wolfe, and fewer rushing yards, more than likely. Since the Bears defense is projected to be worse than last year, the Bears will probably not gain any offensive opportunities. Therefore, it is extremely unlikely that Jay Cutler will pass for 10 percent more yards and Bears running backs will rush for 10 percent more yards.

Here’s another way of approaching the same question. Was Adrian Peterson a worse running back after Brett Favre’s arrival than he was before? Of course not, that fumbling thing aside. However, there were fewer situations in which handing the ball to Adrian Peterson was the No. 1 option. And what of all those pundits who figured that Brett Favre’s arrival would make Peterson even better, because it would keep the defenses honest? They forgot three immutable facts: 1) there are only so many plays to go around, 2) keeping the defenses honest also means keeping the offenses honest, and 3) Brett Favre is an incorrigible ball-hog.

Saying that Favre and Peterson could both bump their numbers proportionally by playing together would be like saying that Dwayne Wade, Chris Bosh and LeBron James will all increase their scoring averages now that they’re Heats, and no one is saying that. Instead, they’re laying bets on whose average will suffer most. Anyone with a milligram of hoops sense knows that there can be only so many trips down the court in a basketball game, and there’s only one ball. Football thinkers would be wise to pay attention.

This is the long way ‘round to the key question: Which roles will produce the most points in 2010? Here are my calculations, based on a specially weighted average of past years and a projection of trends and performances this year. The league gives six points for each touchdown scored, three for each TD pass, and half a point for each reception.

I can tell you this: I ran these same numbers last year and scored the most points of anyone in my league. This is the way football works. Ignore it at your peril.

1 Green Bay QB
2 San Diego QB
3 New Orleans QB
4 Indianapolis QB
5 New England QB
6 Tennessee RB 1
7 Dallas QB
8 Jacksonville RB 1
9 Minnesota QB
10 Houston QB
11 Minnesota RB 1
12 New York J RB 1
13 Miami RB 1
14 Pittsburgh QB
15 Baltimore RB 1
16 New York G QB
17 Philadelphia QB
18 Baltimore QB
19 Arizona QB
20 Carolina RB 1
21 Washington QB
22 San Francisco QB
23 Atlanta QB
24 Denver QB
25 St. Louis RB 1
26 Cincinnati QB
27 Dallas RB 1
28 Indianapolis WR 1
29 San Francisco RB 1
30 Atlanta RB 1
31 Chicago QB
32 Houston WR 1
33 Seattle QB
34 Philadelphia RB 1
35 Jacksonville QB
36 Green Bay RB 1
37 Arizona WR 1
38 Green Bay WR 1
39 Houston RB 1
40 Washington RB 1
41 Kansas City RB 1
42 Seattle RB 1
43 Chicago RB 1
44 Carolina RB 2
45 Philadelphia WR 1
46 Cleveland RB 1
47 San Diego RB 1
48 New England WR 1
49 New England RB 1
50 Detroit RB 1
51 Miami QB
52 Pittsburgh RB 1
53 Kansas City QB
54 New Orleans RB 1
55 Tennessee QB
56 Arizona RB 1
57 Dallas WR 1
58 Detroit WR 1
59 New Orleans WR 1
60 Minnesota WR 1
61 Oakland RB 1
62 Indianapolis WR 2
63 New York G RB 1
64 San Diego WR 1
65 Pittsburgh WR 1
66 Denver RB 1
67 New York J RB 2
68 New York G WR 1
69 New England WR 2
70 Green Bay WR 2
71 Cincinnati RB 1
72 New Orleans WR 2
73 Buffalo RB 1
74 Atlanta WR 1
75 Indianapolis RB 1
76 Tampa Bay RB 2
77 Houston WR 2
78 Cincinnati WR 1
79 San Diego WR 2
80 Detroit QB
81 Pittsburgh WR 2
82 Minnesota WR 2
83 Washington WR 1
84 Baltimore WR 1
85 Kansas City WR 1
86 Carolina QB
87 New Orleans K
88 Buffalo RB 2
89 Oakland QB
90 Dallas WR 2
91 New York G WR 2
92 New York J QB
93 Tampa Bay RB 1
94 Chicago WR 1
95 Detroit RB 2
96 Miami WR 1
97 Denver WR 1
98 Jacksonville WR 1
99 Miami RB 2
100 San Diego K

Why Bart Starr is Better Than Brett Favre, Ch. 1

Starr: 9-1 record in the playoffs, five NFL championships, two Super Bowl wins, 94-57-6 record as a starter.

Favre: One Super Bowl win, one Super Bowl loss, 2-3 record in NFC championship games, 160-93 record as a starter.

Any questions? Good. On to Chapter 2.

Why Bart Starr is Better Than Brett Favre, Ch. 2

I work for a place that insists everything can and should be measured in numbers. Happy? There’s a number for that. Successful? A number for that. Depressed, choleric, pregnant, bloated, fast, slow, hard-working, lazy, fond of beets? Numbers for all of those.

Kinda like Chapter One above. Everything measured in numbers.

But in this great process to numberize everything, things that can’t be measured in numbers are being measured in numbers. How sweet and bracing the first Diet Mountain Dew of the morning tastes, for instance. It’s part of our ongoing effort as a species to explain everything around us, even Jillian Michaels Yelling At Fat People, in stark contrast to Van Morrison’s First Universal Truth, which is: It ain’t why, it just is. And nothing beats a good saxophone break.

Who’s a better football player falls right in on that list of Sisyphean challenges. You can come up with numbers that show that Ruben Brown is better than Chad Clifton, but you can also come up with numbers that show Clifton is better than Brown, and numbers that show that neither one is as good as, oh, I don't know, Anthony Clement. And unless you run them up against each other in a big mud wallow you won’t know – and once that’s done, all you’ll really know is who’s better in a mud wallow.

So seeing as we can’t pit the real Bart Starr against the real Brett Favre in any meaningful fashion, and we don’t want to play the Misleading Numbers game, let’s talk about the way they go about quarterbacking.

First, let me say that I know Brett Favre personally a little, and I consider him the most competitive man I have ever met. When he signed autographs for my client, he wanted to sign them faster and better than Drew Bledsoe. When he had lines to speak, he wanted to speak them more clearly than Troy Aikman.

Being competitive is an admirable quality in a quarterback. It’s certainly better than not being competitive. Which is why Matt Flynn still has an NFL career and JaMarcus Russell doesn’t.

However, I have never known Brett Favre to be the most competitive person ever when it comes to contests of intelligence. In words, actions, choices, and family situations (he’s a bloody grandfather! I’m 10 years older than Favre and have an eight-year-old!) Favre has never shown any reason why the stereotype of the tractor-driving southern hick should not apply in his case. When he opens his mouth to speak you’re almost surprised to hear words and not .38 Special songs. If he would ever stop agonizing over retirement long enough to take on the kids in Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader, I would pay hard money to watch. The apocryphal story is that Aaron Rodgers in his rookie season had digested more of the playbook than Favre had in year 13 – but they don’t give prizes for memorizing the playbook.

In so many ways Brett Favre ought to be every creative person’s wet dream of a QB – always willing to go off-script, to yield to the wildest flights of imagination, to extemporate, to do things his way – but to this creative person at least Favre’s freelancing comes off as wholly self-serving and doltish.

The reason for that is when Favre’s competitiveness mingles with Favre’s creativity the result is an overpowering belief in his ability to make something spectacular out of any situation. In other words, when life gives you lemons, make lobster Newburg. Or a nuclear-powered sub. Or the Crab Nebula.

As a result, Brett Favre does not so much run an offense as he allows certain plays to be called from the sidelines and run on the field until he decides it’s time for him to play his game, which involves high-risk passes often improvised in the huddle or at the line of scrimmage. It’s the football equivalent of traveling to Africa for the expressed purpose of sleeping around. Yeah, you might be able to get away with it, but there are more prudent things, if you catch the drift.

Watching Favre is like watching Evel Knievel. You know it will end badly, but you’re not exactly sure when – and the greater the fan, the more they secretly hope for the largest mushroom cloud, the most pretzelized pileup, the longest fall off the highest cliff, with the deepest, most satisfying BOOM! at the end.

Contrast this with Bart Starr. It’s not hard. In a world of shadows Favre is starless and Bible-black, and Starr is the color of the moon on a cold night.

Favre will say whatever springs to mind. Granted, it’s not much content-wise, but it’s definitely off-the-cuff. Nobody who was that bad in There’s Something About Mary is a good enough actor to summon tears at will.

Starr always gives the impression of someone who carefully chews his thoughts 32 times before speaking. As a head coach, he enjoyed calling out someone in public as much as BP executives enjoy gulf shrimp packed in oil. His life outside of football has been devoted to his church, his charities, and an enlightened brand of capitalism. He has rarely scrawled an autograph.

That class extends to his family. When his wife, Cherry, shilled furniture, she was absolutely as classy a furniture-shiller as someone in a beehive hairdo and a bullet bra could be.

Fine. So Bart Starr does not encourage 14-year-olds to marry or advocate deer hunting off the back of an International Harvester. That alone doesn’t make him even as good a quarterback as Steve Walsh (who for sheer inability to perform every significant task required of a modern professional QB had no peer). What made Starr great?

First, his ability to completely subsume personal goals for the good of the team. Starr was not a great quarterback as far as physical tools go; he wasn’t a 17th-round draft pick, either, but football teams in the 1950s had absolutely no clue when it came to drafting QBs . You may as well have been asking them to choose BlackBerry or iPhone. (Consider the QBs drafted ahead of Starr in 1956: Earl Morrall, John Roach, Fred Wyant, Em Lindbeck, John Polzer, Tom Spiers, George Herring, and George Welsh. Only Morrall was a legitimate NFL starter. And no, I have no idea what an “Em Lindbeck” is.)

Starr often expressed his disregard for personal accomplishments, and the sport took that to heart. He was first-team All-NFL once and a Pro Bowler four times. Randall Cunningham has done as much.

Starr’s willingness to do whatever was asked of him made the players around him better. That’s not to say Jim Taylor would not have been a HOFer with a different QB. Jim Taylor was enough of a Marine that he would have been a HOFer if John Tesh had been the QB. On the other hand, without Bart Starr Paul Hornung would have been a drunk French soccer player taking a dive after having been breathed on by another player. And as he stands up, grimacing more profoundly than a gutshot Samuel L. Jackson, there’s … Bob Lilly. Sort of takes your breath away, doesn’t it?

Right along with that, Starr was smart enough to know that not doing it his way does not make him any less of a leader. Think about the QB position for a minute. Even the most ornery, bull-headed, independent Texan cuss of a QB is the tool of a head coach. If he doesn’t do enough of what the coach wants he’s more gone than Blind Melon. This is immutable; even Brett Favre is bound to follow the offense to an extent, under threat of a trade to the Saskatchewan Roughriders for the rights to Don Trull (who, experts agree, is a fine backup who will one day be the number-one quarterback, and one of the top-notch passers in the league). However, the test of a QB is whether he can make his teammates in the huddle believe that a 47 Cross Trap on third-and-34 is his idea, and absolutely the play that needs to be run to its utmost in this particular situation.

The trouble starts when the willing suspension of disbelief breaks down, when the QB starts thinking he’s a better coach than the coach, that instead of a 47 Cross Trap what needs to be run is a skinny post, to a slow receiver with poor hands, against an All-Pro corner. Convincing a bunch of football players in a huddle that this is the thing to do is not like winning over the Supreme Court; there’s a lot of gullibility amidst the avoirdupois. Besides, at $3.72 million a season going for broke is relative.

Starr escaped all that by running the offense persuasively and authoritatively. He didn’t do just what Lombardi asked; sometimes he did things that out-Lombardied Lombardi. It would just have been ineptitude in synergy if the coach had been Rich Kotite, but with Starr and Lombardi it was gorgeous. Even so, there was never any question in the huddle of who was in charge and who was going to make this play work. It was going to start with Bart Starr and everyone was going to do their job, and if not, they were going to hear about it from Starr and Lombardi – and some players genuinely feared Starr’s wrath, gentle and Christian as it was, more than Lombardi’s.

In the end Starr proved out a winner, which is different than performing acts that win games. In the 2009 season Brett Favre performed at least three acts that you could definitively say won games for the Vikings – oh, but he also performed an act that definitively lost the NFC Championship and cost his team a trip to the Super Bowl. The 2010 NFC Championship (and for that matter, the 2008 NFC Championship) will be remembered long after the pass that beat the ‘Niners has been forgotten.

In Bart Starr’s career only one dumb play and one truly bad game come to mind: the ball he fumbled away to George Andrie that was returned for a touchdown in the 1967 Ice Bowl, and a 1962 Thanksgiving Day game against the Lions where Starr was sacked what seems like 31 times. The Packers won the Ice Bowl, and the Turkey Day game? The only game the Packers lost all year. And the wins are games that will never die.

Quarterbacking is way more like advertising than either the quarterbacks or the ad guys would like to admit. Brett Favre is the hyperproduced ad that leaves the world breathless but doesn’t sell a crumb more cake. Bart Starr is the simple ad that simply sells and sells and sells.

Selling is winning. Winning is selling. Bart Starr sold, the Packers bought, and together they created a dynasty.

The Thing You Have To Understand About Football Teams, Vol. 1

The thing you have to understand about football teams is they are all creatures of habit. You can, with only as much thinking as it takes to dial up the Apples in Stereo on your iPod, figure out what a given pro football team will do. Not on the very next play, of course. (Well, maybe: 47 cross-trap. Correll Buckhalter loses three. There.) But over time, teams have tendencies, and they tend not to get away from those tendencies unless something cataclysmic happens, like Ahmad Rashad figuring out what those appendages on the ends of his arms are for.

Proof of this is everywhere. The Chicago Bears have been around for more than 90 years, and in only four seasons have they led the league in passing yards. Three of those seasons were Sid Luckman’s (and he had a bunch of second-place finishes in there, too); one was Billy Wade, when the Bears were hydrophobic and pass-happy and in the process of stinking up the joint so they could draft Gale Sayers – draft Gale Sayers so they could run the ball better, which is the lesson here. The Bears have been the league’s top running team 17 seasons, ranging from 1934 to their most recent title, in 1986. In the first NFL draft the Bears drafted seven linemen, so they could run the ball better and keep the other team from running. The Bears have nine linemen in the Hall of Fame, and five running backs. The Bears had the all-time career rushing leader. They had the league’s first 1,000-yard rusher. They had the first player to score seven TDs in a game. They had Bronko and the Galloping Ghost. Only once did they spend a really high draft pick on a throw-it-around guy, and then they didn’t know what they were in for with Sid Luckman. The reason why no one in the Bears’ war room has ever said, “Hey, why not that Jeff George guy?” (except when George was so far gone that he was throwing 40-yard out patterns to the Chicago Tribune billboard) is because he doesn’t fit into the offense, and it would take too much to change the offense to fit him. And if it was that way last year it would be that way this year, and next year, and it just keeps rolling.

The Bears are a running team. On the other hand, the Colts have always thrown it around, even when Kelly Holcomb was doing the throwing. The Rams have thrown it around excepting for two times: during the Ground Chuck days, when they ran the ball in the most excruciatingly direct way possible so that to the casual football fan it looked like God was punishing Los Angelinos for being so wanton, and now, when there is truly nothing else they can do. The Cards throw it around. The 49ers throw it around, which makes Alex Smith so painful for them. The Lions run it. At his best Herman Moore was a Barry Sanders’ beard, a decoy who caught 100 balls a year. (Given that, the Millions’ decision to fritter away draft picks on the Williams boys and Charles Rogers ranks higher on The Dumb List than even The Men Who Stare At Goats.) The Eagles run it. The Bills run it. The Bengals run it. The Vikings … eeesh. The Vikings have mostly always run it, but they have these spells. If you’re a Viking fan you understand.

This stuff can change, but it takes an exceptionally talented player who sticks around a long time to make it change. Earl Campbell changed the Oilers from a Blanda/Dickey/Pastorini throw-it-around team to a running team. Even Brett Favre at his gunslinging worst couldn’t not hand the ball to Earl Campbell. Speaking of Favre, he made running far more optional in Green Bay, in part because he outlasted all the running backs. When Brett Favre is your constant you throw the ball. And when an orderly transition is made to Aaron Rodgers you keep throwing, because you have Donald Driver and Greg Jennings out wide and Ryan Grant in the backfield, and guys like Mark Tauscher in the line whose idea of downfield blocking is falling forward.

The same thing works on defense, and the reasons why are more inscrutable. You’d think that since defense is largely reactive that teams’ defensive tendencies would be based on the teams they play, but that happens less often than you’d think. What happens is this: When the Buffalo Bills had Bruce Smith they drafted personnel complementary to Bruce Smith and created their schemes around the fact that they had Bruce Smith. The D-backs played tight and the safeties played for wounded-duck interceptions; linebackers who could cover were chosen over linebackers who could rush the passer; interior D-linemen who could occupy blockers were tabbed over penetrating D-tackles. And once Buffalo got all these pieces together to complement Bruce Smith … Bruce Smith split the blanket.

What do you do? You can’t dump everyone because you dumped Bruce Smith, though sending Gabe Northern packing would be a bit of lagniappe. The shining path is to take Phil Hansen, Ted Washington, John Holecek, Sam Cowart, et. al. and give them another pass rusher to play with. So the Bills did exactly that and inserted Marcellus Wiley, who did a fine Bruce Smith impersonation, and the defense rolled on. When Washington vacated his half-acre lot in 2000 the Bills plugged the hole with Pat Williams and Shawn Price – two people, in part because of Washington’s extreme avoirdupois but also because new coach Gregg Williams installed a 4-3 though the Bills’ personnel was still mostly the Bruce Smith 3-4 gang. The result smelled like chicken ranch. The team that was 13-3 in Smith’s last year and 8-8 with Marcellus Wiley went 3-13. That’s nothing against Pat Williams and Shawn Price. That’s a team being taken against its essential defensive tendencies too soon. And Rob Johnson playing like an idiot.

If teams could turn over all their offensive or defensive personnel at once it would be easy for them to change tendencies. But swapping out players one at a time is like changing a string of Christmas lights from red to green by replacing only the lights that burn out. It takes a long time, and it looks like compost in the process. It’s totally reasonable to get a third of the way in and decide, “What the heck. I like red lights better anyhow,” and never make the change.

If you want more you'll have to wait for Vol. 2.