In July, I posted Sound Ideas from Crazy Frank, about our old friend Billy Berrou. I met Frank during our debacle at Santa Cruz, then played goaltimate with him afterwards, as described on his web page.
Now, I'm a little hurt that he developed a man-crush on Wiggins but I'm just a single threat like all of ultimate, but I want to give him his airtime. He still gets it wrong in insisting that it's not at all about yardage, but here he is:
"You've missed a lot Jim but I'll just chime in here on what you've written.
1) West Coast teams travel too much. Yes and no. West coast teams travel more than east coast teams but you all travel WAY too much.
I think you're all missing the point here though. The reason I'm determined to fix this flaw in the game is that traveling is a symptom of poor balance. If you're not balanced on your snowboard, you're going to land on your ass and crack your head. If you learn how to play ultimate without any consequences for traveling (being off balance), you're not going to learn very well.
2) Some people hold on to the disc too long.
Wrong.
Everybody holds on to the disc too long. You've played Goalty with me and seen me play. I throw a lot of throws in the 50-100ms range and my target range is to average holding on to the disc around 1000ms. In general, not that I have statistics to back it up, but I would say that the general communitie's average is closer to 4000-5000ms. That's 4-5 times longer than what I think it should be. Playing with a 3 count is a superb idea and something I've also done (except I only make the rule for specific players who don't seem to 'get it').
3) Elite teams cheat on the mark. Hmmm. Elite teams cheat and yes they foul a lot. This has a huge impact on me personally since my stance/game is predicated on balance. Imagine trying to snowboard and having some oaf 'foul' you all the time. It's disgusting. Not fun.
4) You can be a triple threat by throwing the disc for yards, dishing it to someone who then makes a throw for yards, or doing the give and go for yards.
WRONG!
First, take yardage completely out of the equation. It does not belong. Yardage is irrelevent
You can be a triple threat by UNDERSTANDING that your ability to simultaneously be able to penetrate, or dish, or throw for a scrore has a profound effect on how a defense plays you.
5) Sometimes its about position and not yards.
Wrong.
It's always about position.
6) The Swimmy move is the move of the future.
Hardly.
The move of the future is a backhand lift give and go. I didn't get a chance to watch Idris' team at Labor day where I heard they were running some dominator but I didn't see any one with ANY penetration moves and you're talking about the swimmy as the move of the future? You guys need to learn an array of reliable give and go moves. That's the future.
7) Become more ambidextorous. Yes, thank you Idris. This is probably number 1 and Jim left it off his list entirely. As far as your 3 point analogy, hmmm, I hear what you're saying but I wouldn't take it that far. I don't huck much left handed but I do FAKE a lot with it and I find that useful. I'm not sure a left fake on a 3 pointer would be credible my my lefty huck fake sure is.
8) Negative space. Again, right on. This really should be number 1 now that I think about it. Thank you. I only take it 'too far' because of over compensation for an already skewed situation. In a nice balanced attack, I wouldn't be so extreme.
___________________
Other comments:
" Right now, there is a hierarchy in throwing options. You look to throw for yards, then if that's not there, you look to get the disc into better position, and then after that maybe you cut for the give and go. Perhaps it would make for a more efficient offense if throwers looked to dish it as a primary option."
This is entirely upside down. Usually the first thing I do when I catch the disc (and motion hasn't been established) is to establish my balance squarely over my pivot foot and begin to identify where I can break down the defense with a penetration move. I can't understand why nobody else plays this way. To always look first for an upfield throw for yardage is an egotistical, self-centered, selfish, narcisistic style of play. It is unwatchable, borish and dull. This is an easy game, don't make it harder than it needs to be.
"And I don't think you can give Frank and credit for the idea that "elite teams cheat on the mark". People have been complaining about this for at least five years."
I don't want credit for anything. I'd like someday to go watch some ultimate and be intellectually stimulated, which is something that does not happen now.
People have been complaining about elite teams cheating for at least 20 years.
Some of the conceptst that I've borrowed from basketball are over 80 years old. Nothing new.
As for your play at Purdue, Adam, that sounds like a simple back door play if I understand you correctly. It is a good play, don't get me wrong but I take it quite a bit further than that. I run an offense where some players on offense, depending on their roles/positions, are actually cutting, throwing, etc. as if they were attacking the opposite endzone. Nobody does that. Not even my PlinkO boys.
"Does anyone not horrible besides Studarus routinely throw passes with both hands?"
Not anybody I saw at Labor Day (except wiggins but only when he was playing Goalty). What do you mean by routinely? Oh, and by the way, I do take back what I said about wiggings. He is NOT a triple threat. Not only does he lack the understanding of the effect he is having on defense, but he doesn't have much in the way of penetration moves. He is, however, with his upright stance, very good at dictating tempo to the D but seemingly at a loss to know what to do with that edge.
"So, getting back to Frank, he would like throwers and cutters to consider their throws and cuts in terms of offensive flow (the motion offense) rather than as strictly a yardage battle."
sort of. But...there aren't throwers and cutters. There is the thrower (who is THE cutter) and an offensive structure that allows him to cut into spaces, not throw into spaces. Make sense? It's not quite that rigid but the point is in the motion offense that the thrower is also the primary cutter but then this ties in with your remark above about first look down field, then look to disc and then look to penetrate.
"...push passes.."
For 25 years, I rarely threw push passes until very recently. My girlfriend wanted me to teach her how to throw (1 day in GG park) and so I came up with Hippy Hill, a simple drill that's on my website (it's similar to what Idris said about the PlinkO line drill, looks easy but it's harder than you'd think--try throwing 100 throws with a friend at short range, as fast as you reasonably can, always throwing with your catching grip). In any event, the push pass over the past 12 months has become a complete staple in my diet. It's the most compact throw, makes for a great fake and can be outrageous in Goalty with the power skyhook!!
Push passes rule.
"Daryl (KAOS, Jam, Rhino) throws a ton of lefty break mark backhands... and unlike _most_ people, doesn't travel."
WHATTTTTT????? Daryl travels like a MOFO!!! Are we talking about the same guy? Seriously, I like Daryl and everything but he cheats massively. Like I told Daryl directly, he's such a good thrower and hard enough to get a foot/hand block on when he doesn't travel so please give me a fighting chance to make a play by playing fairly by the rules.
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7 comments:
Well, we never called it a backdoor play, although I guess I see that analogy - the Bulls used to run a backdoor our of the high post and this is somewhat analogous that.
We called the play the "hook and ladder", a football term that seems more appropriate to me.
Jim,
You had to know I'd post on this one. Hmmm.
So Crazy Frank likes
1) the clam
2) the high release backhand
3) and argues the game is more about position than yardage.
He is an effin' genius!
To Crazy Frank:
Jim is much more amenable to these ideas than most. He was after all a seminal part of the Earth/DoG led strategic revolution in ultimate -- that moved ultimate from gamblin' O and conservative D to conservative O and gamblin' D. In brief, we made people realize that in ultimate possession was more important than yardage -- and that if every team was going to try to play Stanford O, well, then we'll just flare guys out wide.
I also agree with C.F. about the pace of ultimate -- in which the most important thing for O is to get it out of your hands quickly, keep the disc movin', and that essentially everyone holds onto it too long. We have to be more Flutie than Bledsoe. But it was hard enough for me to get Earth to play clam and the dump, I knew I had no chance for creating a switch to quick, short O. Moreover, with Alex as a major part of the team, I was just happy he at least began to dump it to me on stall-9 when every imaginable option was covered and he didn't even have a shot at a 50-50 blade.
But Jim and I also have had many debates on this issue -- particularly when trying to determine value and significance of certain ultimate statistics. Jim, for one brief moment when he had a high fever, developed a system for ultimate-stat analyses that valued long, deep turnovers more than a no-yardage completion. I stayed up with him for a few days and nights – and after a lot of cold-compresses, chicken soup, and some slaps across the face, the fever finally sweated out of him.;-)
Keep up the revolution, Frank.
The cost of a turnover and the value of a completion are not fixed, but depend on the environment. In a really high-wind situation with one team on its own goal line going upwind, the defense is probably more likely to get the next goal. On the other extreme, if teams are flawless, then a huck is of no more benefit than a swing pass.
You're never going to get close to flawless on a consistent basis, even if you clone the revolutionaries and let them play their perfect games. If a team can score much more than half the time when starting from their own goal line against the best defenses, I think that would put them among the top offenses of all time. (Reference point for Dennis: 1994 DoG scored 58% when receiving (includes bricks and other short pulls); followed by Cojones and Double at 52%, an average of 39%, and a worst of 22%. This is for all pool play games. So, maybe we’d set the bar at 60%.)
So, you need to consider that your team (and the other team) is going to turn it over more than a negligible percentage of the time, and a lot more in some circumstances. (Of course, you don’t want to fall into the Turnover Compact/“just get it back” mentality. It’s difficult to balance reality and the goal you want to shoot for.) You need to move the disc 70 yards to score, and the defense contests each of those yards (albeit not equally; the deep threat in the first half of the field means that the shorter passes are easier there). It’s not like (most) basketball games (or goaltimate, but less so), where in the absence of a press (i.e., contested defense), there is virtually no difference in scoring percentage versus position on the court, until you get to shooting range (say, 23 feet max). So you CANNOT ignore yardage.
Having said all that, you are correct that yardage isn’t everything (but Frank is wrong when he says that yardage is nothing). Yardage, position, and possession are all important. Ultimate teams are too reluctant to trade yardage for possession (especially near the goal line), to their detriment. But the optimum balance depends on the environment.
"Having said all that, you are correct that yardage isn’t everything (but Frank is wrong when he says that yardage is nothing). Yardage, position, and possession are all important. Ultimate teams are too reluctant to trade yardage for possession (especially near the goal line), to their detriment. But the optimum balance depends on the environment."
Amen.
Interestingly, football (as opposed to ultimate) is a game where yardage is often more important than possession. Usually when a team is on their half of the field and facing a 4th and 1, they will punt -- despite the fact that the odds are in their favor to get the 1 yard and maintain possession. They feel they would rather give away possession and gain 40 yards than gamble to keep possession.
Interesting notion: If the football is on the one yard line (with 99 yards to go), would you rather have your team be on offense or defense?
(At the 20 yard line, the answer is clearly offense. But what about the 1 yard line? I wonder if they did stats on that sort of thing, who is usually the next team to score?)
--D
They do have stats on this for football, and it came up in the discussion of sudden death and the flip previously on this blog. The break-even point, on average, for which team scores next is somewhere between the 20 and 30 yard lines. Here, lots of great stuff on this page: http://www.footballoutsiders.com/ramblings.php?p=48
(At the 20 yard line, the answer is clearly offense. But what about the 1 yard line? I wonder if they did stats on that sort of thing, who is usually the next team to score?)
In NFL overtime games before 1994, teams that started out on O had a very slight advantage over teams that started out on D (48-47, or something like that). Since 1994, when kickoffs were pushed back 5 yards and kicking tees were required to be shorter, offenses have won about 59% of the time.
Before 1994, average starting position off a kickoff was around the 20-25 yard line. Since 1994, it's been somewhere around the 30. So the break-even point is somewhere in the low 20s.
1. What IS the different between the lift and the high release, and do you have a video of the differences on your web site?
2. You claim that the motion offense is the greatest offense ever etc., so I've got a question. Assume you have a team full of players with the talent and skill of Jam or DoG or whatever, and they all know how to run the motion offense, and run the motion offense the way you think it should be ran. Then say you have another team of just as skillfull players on defnese and they know about the motion offense as well. How does this defensive team stop the motion offense.
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