I got the new Dave Campbell's Texas Football magazine late last week, like I imagine many others on the board did. Our own @Mike Craven contributed pretty heavily to it and did a great job, of course. For those who've read through much of it already, was there a particular feature or article that you especially liked?
Were there any predictions, previews, or preseason rankings that you especially dispute or take issue with?
I've only browsed so far, haven't had time to do a thorough reading of it yet, but a couple small things already stuck out to me.
* Weird omissions
One can often read a bit too much into the order in which players are mentioned under "players to watch" in each high school's respective capsule previews, but you can usually count on a team's most talented or most notable athlete being the first one listed. Occasionally a player will have a breakout season, and when one checks the previous summer's DCTF to see what his team's preview said about him, it will turn out he wasn't mentioned at all, for whatever reason. A few years back I was surprised to see the preview for Keller Fossil Ridge did not mention their senior WR Ryan Parker, who had blown me away with his performance at a 7-on-7 tournament a few weeks earlier, and who would go on to be one of DFW's leading receivers that fall and sign with TCU. He didn't qualify and had to spend a couple of years at Tyler JC before signing with TCU again (he had been committed to Oklahoma for several months but flipped to TCU on or just before signing day).
In Parker's case it was somewhat understandable that his coach didn't include his name when submitting his team's info to DCTF, as he was primarily a basketball guy and was a year or two removed from even playing football at the time and had never appeared in a varsity football game before his senior year. But a far less defensible omission is in this year's edition. Way down in Class 3A Division II, there's Harleton, a small east Texas school that was in 2A Division I up until this past school year. Harleton, a school without much tradition to speak of and a school not known for sending its football players to the college level, listed nine athletes as "players to watch". Not listed among the nine: senior running back Ted Fuller (who I've mentioned on this board before), one of the top small-school athletes in east Texas and owner of not one but two FBS offers (Louisiana-Monroe and Wyoming). How, just how, does a guy like that get left off his team's preview???
* 40 time madness
One DCTF game I'll sometimes engage in is counting the number of players in a district or area who are listed as having 4.5 or better forty speed. Not every team's preview lists measurements or speed figures for its players to watch, but many of them do. True, legit 4.5 guys are few and far between.
Of the hundreds of athletes who participate in the U.S. Army All-American Combine each January at the Alamodome, maybe a handful will record times as fast as 4.6, let alone 4.5 or better. A search of ESPN's recruit database finds 57 Texas athletes in the 2017 class listed with forty times of 4.59 or better (ESPN primarily gets their testing figures for athletes from the results of Nike The Opening testing events). This year's NFL Draft Combine - which featured many of the best young athletes in the sport, and a significant number of the participants in which had received not just 3-5 years of college S&C coaching but also months of expensive private training specifically tailored to improve their performance in combine-specific tests - saw a total of 79 athletes run the forty in 4.59 seconds or better.
I scanned the capsule previews for all the teams in Class 6A Region I and counted no fewer than 135 players who - readers are led to believe - have 4.5 speed or better. That's just in one region, and with somewhere between 1/4 and 1/5 of the schools in that region not even listing forty times for their athletes, and with 61 schools in 6A Region I, if we took coaches at their word and assumed that none of the schools that declined to share their top players' forty times had a 4.5 guy on their roster, that still adds up to an average of two 4.5-speed guys for every single school in that region. As inflated as reported 40 times typically are, the idea that one region of one state has 135 guys with legit 4.5 speed is patently ridiculous. Why can't we all be more honest about how fast players really are, or aren't? Have so many classes and generations of athletes falsely claimed to have 4.5 speed that it's somehow an insult to current ones if you honestly call them 4.6 or 4.7 guys instead of 4.4 or 4.5 guys? If everyone took reported forty times at face value, then a lot of coaches would be called to explain four months from now why their team got run off the field numerous times and missed the playoffs despite supposedly having 3-4 or more athletes on their roster with 4.5 speed.
Were there any predictions, previews, or preseason rankings that you especially dispute or take issue with?
I've only browsed so far, haven't had time to do a thorough reading of it yet, but a couple small things already stuck out to me.
* Weird omissions
One can often read a bit too much into the order in which players are mentioned under "players to watch" in each high school's respective capsule previews, but you can usually count on a team's most talented or most notable athlete being the first one listed. Occasionally a player will have a breakout season, and when one checks the previous summer's DCTF to see what his team's preview said about him, it will turn out he wasn't mentioned at all, for whatever reason. A few years back I was surprised to see the preview for Keller Fossil Ridge did not mention their senior WR Ryan Parker, who had blown me away with his performance at a 7-on-7 tournament a few weeks earlier, and who would go on to be one of DFW's leading receivers that fall and sign with TCU. He didn't qualify and had to spend a couple of years at Tyler JC before signing with TCU again (he had been committed to Oklahoma for several months but flipped to TCU on or just before signing day).
In Parker's case it was somewhat understandable that his coach didn't include his name when submitting his team's info to DCTF, as he was primarily a basketball guy and was a year or two removed from even playing football at the time and had never appeared in a varsity football game before his senior year. But a far less defensible omission is in this year's edition. Way down in Class 3A Division II, there's Harleton, a small east Texas school that was in 2A Division I up until this past school year. Harleton, a school without much tradition to speak of and a school not known for sending its football players to the college level, listed nine athletes as "players to watch". Not listed among the nine: senior running back Ted Fuller (who I've mentioned on this board before), one of the top small-school athletes in east Texas and owner of not one but two FBS offers (Louisiana-Monroe and Wyoming). How, just how, does a guy like that get left off his team's preview???
* 40 time madness
One DCTF game I'll sometimes engage in is counting the number of players in a district or area who are listed as having 4.5 or better forty speed. Not every team's preview lists measurements or speed figures for its players to watch, but many of them do. True, legit 4.5 guys are few and far between.
Of the hundreds of athletes who participate in the U.S. Army All-American Combine each January at the Alamodome, maybe a handful will record times as fast as 4.6, let alone 4.5 or better. A search of ESPN's recruit database finds 57 Texas athletes in the 2017 class listed with forty times of 4.59 or better (ESPN primarily gets their testing figures for athletes from the results of Nike The Opening testing events). This year's NFL Draft Combine - which featured many of the best young athletes in the sport, and a significant number of the participants in which had received not just 3-5 years of college S&C coaching but also months of expensive private training specifically tailored to improve their performance in combine-specific tests - saw a total of 79 athletes run the forty in 4.59 seconds or better.
I scanned the capsule previews for all the teams in Class 6A Region I and counted no fewer than 135 players who - readers are led to believe - have 4.5 speed or better. That's just in one region, and with somewhere between 1/4 and 1/5 of the schools in that region not even listing forty times for their athletes, and with 61 schools in 6A Region I, if we took coaches at their word and assumed that none of the schools that declined to share their top players' forty times had a 4.5 guy on their roster, that still adds up to an average of two 4.5-speed guys for every single school in that region. As inflated as reported 40 times typically are, the idea that one region of one state has 135 guys with legit 4.5 speed is patently ridiculous. Why can't we all be more honest about how fast players really are, or aren't? Have so many classes and generations of athletes falsely claimed to have 4.5 speed that it's somehow an insult to current ones if you honestly call them 4.6 or 4.7 guys instead of 4.4 or 4.5 guys? If everyone took reported forty times at face value, then a lot of coaches would be called to explain four months from now why their team got run off the field numerous times and missed the playoffs despite supposedly having 3-4 or more athletes on their roster with 4.5 speed.
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