More Mandel, Steltz' helmet hit, LSU recruiting

by GeauxTigers on Oct 24, 2007 11:37 PM CDT in Football Comment 1 comment

SI's Stewart Mandel weighs in further on the Miles play call. Snippet:

While the whole sequence could easily have blown up in Miles' face, personally, I dug the call. Much more so than the fifth fourth-down attempt against Florida, which really would have lost the game if it failed (whereas if this pass fell incomplete, assuming it didn't take too long, they still get to kick the game-winning field goal). I've said it before and I'll say it again: The best college coaches play to win, not play-not-to-lose like they do in the pros. That's a characteristic Miles obviously shares with Spurrier and Carroll.

Of course, the way our first halves have gone the past four weeks, we're seem to frequently be in a position of needing to play to win.

Thanks to reader MW for the heads up.

There was some discussion on here the other day about the Craig Steltz personal foul helmet-to-helmet hit. I'd forgotten about it and needed to rewatch it. Well, God bless You Tube:

I guess it looks fairly clear to me that Steltz hit him with his helmet, whether or not it was intentional. So it has to be called. Doesn't remotely compare to Mr. Chaz Ramsey's dirty play on Dorsey which didn't get flagged, but so be it. Thoughts?

I don't pay for a Rivals subscription, but recruiting has been going fairly well lately in the aftermath of two of the better LSU home games in memory over the past three weeks. Richard Pittman at the blog Geaux Tuscaloosa gives his rundown of our recent success there. Also, if you're heading to Tuscaloosa, he's posted a rundown of the good spots to hit up while you're in enemy territory.

If you enjoyed the movie "We Are Marshall," or actually happened to read the book "The Marshall Story" - on which the movie was based - head over to our fellow SBN blog Corn Nation as he's got an interview up today with one of the book's authors. If you haven't watched the movie but want to, be warned there is some spoiler material involved.

Lastly, in case you guys are curious, note that USC is actually an underdog this week at Oregon, the first time in 57 games they haven't been favored. I read that latter stat elsewhere today and can't recall the link. There's a drift of it here, so you can do the manual counting back to 2003 to get to 57.

We'll call that second-to-lastly. This is my "lastly..." point. Do you realize that with BC an underdog at Va Tech, and Ohio State only favored by 4 at Penn State (again, odds here), there's a nontrivial chance we could get bumped up to #1 again during our BYE WEEK? Lordy, that would make for an interesting 'Bama week. I kinda don't want that to happen. I mean, I'm rooting like hell for Va Tech, but I'm ok with it if Ohio State wins this week. Am I blaspheming?

0 recs | Comment 1 comment

Story-email Email Printer Print

Comments

Helmet to helmet

Thanks for the youtube link. I'm still mystified about the call. It seems like there must be a very fine line there that I'm just not seeing. Steltz's whole upper body hits him at pretty much the same time. Compare that to the often replayed hit that Dickie Lyons Jr. put on Steltz in the Kentucky game, where he drove his helmet into Steltz's chin strap and lifted him a good two feet off of the ground. That one has been shown many times on ESPN without a single mention about it possibly being illegal. The only youtube link I can find for it is this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MhoCu28Uys

The shot isn't the best but the clearest view is at 5:32. Can anyone point out the distintion that I'm just not seeing? Cause right now I'm of the opinion that the refs could call a helmet to helmet hit on any number of normal looking plays. I can see why this rule exists and I've seen several instances where I wouldn't dispute the call. But the Steltz hit just doesn't rise to that level in my eyes.

by crepuscular on Oct 25, 2007 7:59 AM CDT reply actions 0 recs