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Odds & Ends & A Big Announcement About Future Content

By Richard Pittman

Garrett_chris_3_medium

via www.tigerrag.com

First, we have a big announcement.  I happened to encounter David Garrett a couple weeks ago.  Who is David Garrett?  He is the proud father of Chris Garrett, incoming freshman and quarterback for the LSU Tigers.  He enrolled at LSU this Spring and took part in Spring Practice.  I asked Mr. Garrett if he would be so kind as to do a Q&A for us.  Despite his reluctance to be in the spotlight, Mr. Garrett ultimately agreed to answer a few questions for us, after I convinced him that I would not twist his words and that I was not out to hurt him or Chris.  We will publish this early next week, probably in two parts.  Also, I'm flattered that he considers this little corner of the internet to the "the limelight".

 

Second, let me just apologize for not getting more into the comments to yesterday's post.  I had really given a lot of thought to the leadership post and was hopeful it would be well received.  It was, but unfortunately my work situation made it absolutely impossible for me to keep up with what was going on, so I had to just sort of "post it and forget it" until pretty late in the evening yesterday.  I have responded to a few of the comments, but not in nearly so much depth as I had hoped.

Third, I wanted to make another point clear about what I was saying of "leadership".  In its true meaning, leadership is a natural quality of people and an inevitable function of people living and working together.  If you take 10 groups of 10 people and force them to spend all their time together, they will eventually sort themselves out into leaders and followers.  If an observer were to pick the "leader" of each group and separate that group of 10 into another group forced to live spend all its time together, that "team of leaders" would eventually sort itself out into its own leadership structure.  The odd thing is that if you took those same ten groups of 10 people, and formed a new group out of the biggest "followers" of each group, that group too would form a leadership structure centered around a small number of "leaders".  It is a natural and probably inevitable function of just being human.

 

Human group interaction is a complex science, and I have simplified it greatly.  There are other roles that large groups will also sort themselves into.  There will be rebels and outcasts, for example.  If you have a big enough collection of people, the rebels and outcasts from the big group will probably come together and form their own group with their own leaders.  Heck, the group of outcasts may have its own outcasts.  ("We may be crack addicts, but that crack addict gives crack to children, and we just can't have that.")   It's a fascinating subject, and if you have never thought of it, one interesting starting point is the Stanford Prison Experiment, which will give a good idea of natural and inevitable human grouping.  It's not exactly about leadership, but it is  about the natural sorting of groups, and how it can be arbitrary and manipulatable.  

Anyway, that's only tenuously related to college athletics, but even a rudimentary understanding of the science of group interactions will illuminate a lot of things for a lot of people regardless of what sort of thing really interests you.

Now that we've really brained it up for a bit, let's just have a cheer.  "Hot boudin....!"

Finally, for those of you who, understandably, only look at the first article, please don't miss Poseur's post on Paul Mainieri.  It's good stuff and many of you may have missed it.