Coffee & Cigarettes: The Football Educator reads, part II

More from former NFL GM Ted Sundquist's blog on all things NFL team management.

Scouting Football Talent - Building a better O-Line (Wall) | TheFootballEducator.com
Continuing the series on where to look for the best incoming talent through the annual NFL Draft, TheFootballEducator.com addresses the all important yet oft-overlooked offensive line.

Scouting Football Talent - Breaking down WR trends | TheFootballEducator.com
Utter the position “Wide Receiver” and you might get a dozen different definitions and a myriad of all-time great examples. Perhaps no other position on the field allows for such a varied makeup within a club and across the League. Wide Receivers tend to trend more than the Dow Jones Industrials. Remember “The Smurfs” or “The Three Amigos”? They’ve now been replaced with the likes of “Megatron” and “The Natural”.

Professional Football Player Evaluations - Who's to judge? | TheFootballEducator.com
While spending some time with my mother-in-law over Christmas, I ran into one of our former players in Denver. At first glance I saw him only from behind, a mammoth of a man dressed unassumingly and holding the hand of this tiny little girl in pink cowboy boots. I didn’t really think twice figuring it was possibly a current player, added since my departure and probably someone who wouldn’t recognize me anyway.

NFL Draft Preparation - 5 Points for GM's & Head Coaches | TheFootballEducator.com
I recently received a great question via Twitter asking how to handle the Head Coach – General Manager dynamic in the War Room during the annual NFL Draft. It’s important to note that inherently built into this relationship is a dichotomy of thought from a short versus long term perspective.

Professional Football Player Personnel - The Ties That Bind | TheFootballEducator.com
Another professional football season has come to an end and focus now transfers towards retooling and rebuilding for the 2013 NFL Regular Season. All 32 Clubs will shift their efforts to the start of the new League Year, the beginning of Free Agency, and the preparations for the annual College Draft.

Scouting Football Talent - Poise & Confidence in QB's | TheFootballEducator.com
Remember in the movie “Top Gun” where COUGAR gets shaken by a near miss “lock-on” from an enemy bogey set on blowing his F-14 out of the sky? COUGAR enters the office of his commanding officer to turn in his wings; “I’m holding on too tight, I’ve lost the edge, I’m sorry sir”.

NFL Draft “risers & fallers” – 5 reasons not to buy it | TheFootballEducator.com
As Pro Days wind down and the clock towards the NFL Draft continues to tick there’s not much else for the pundits to do but tweak their positional rankings and adjust their 1st round mocks. The analogy often used is a player’s stock “rising or falling” as if the current economic crisis in Cyprus is going to have much effect on the commodity of tight ends taken.

NFL General Managers - The difficulty of cutting veteran players | TheFootballEducator.com
This past week I was asked on air, “When do you know that an established veteran no longer has it?” No longer has it? Hmmm. That was about as good a question that’s been thrown out at me in years. From a NFL General Manager’s perspective it’s the “million dollar question”. Sometimes it can be a multi-million dollar question.

Pro Football Management - Numbers tell a different story | TheFootballEducator.com
The National Football League seems a dichotomy of an amalgamation of risk avoidance and putting almost no forethought into multimillion dollar decisions. Somewhere between are the daily operations of thirty-two clubs vying for a Super Bowl Championship. A fine line is teetered to maintain the status quo. Too much conservative thought can leave you in the wake of competitors, constantly shooting from the hip can cost your club both money and victories.

NFL Front Office Management - Elements of team building | TheFootballEducator.com
The NFL in 2012 has rapidly evolved on the field and off. Offensive game plans seem to have swayed towards a so called “passing league” with the running game, in most cases, taking a back seat. Defensive coordinators are developing new schemes in an effort to stop these aerial attacks. But while the on-field play has dramatically changed in the last five to ten years, front office executives also have to change their own ways of building a team off the field. The goal is to find players that will mesh well with the coaches’ plans in the present, while also keeping an eye on the future.

Defining Economics in Pro Football Front Office Management | TheFootballEducator.com
Economics is the science and analysis of the network in which goods and services are produced, exchanged, and consumed. Some economists have taken to analyzing alternative “markets” with the same economic principles in order to evaluate the system as a whole, in a new brand of study called “freakonomics”. I believe the National Football League can be considered one of these alternative markets.

Defining Economics in Pro Football Front Office Management 2 | TheFootballEducator.com
While macroeconomics focuses on the economy as a whole, microeconomics looks at the impact trends have on individual firms that combine to make the overall economy. In the NFL, each team can be considered a firm in the same sector, as each team competes for the same “profits” (on field success) while utilizing the same input materials.