Friday, October 26, 2018

5 Things on a Friday: As For Football

Happy Friday, folks!  Let’s get it on.

Via Pinterest
1. As For Football
After years and years of turning down small press opportunities from a wide variety of outlets, I finally signed on with the guys at As For Football, giving myself the title of Senior Writer, though my responsibilities are really more along the lines of Senior Writer & Researcher.
As For Football
I made the jump for a few reasons.  First, I felt very much like I’d taken the Army Football part of this blog as far as it was gonna go.  Some of my stuff has been very successful over the years, and we actually had a month recently in which the blog made more than $30 in ad revenue.  That's an outstanding total for a non-celebrity one-man show that’s basically not about anything.  But it’s not immediately obvious that Casa Cabeza is THE resource for Army Football, and indeed, that was never my intent.  I like Army Football, and I like writing about Army Football, but this blog is not and never was intended to be even half this focused on West Point.  It's too much.  So I’d been actively looking for a way to bifurcate my interests at exactly the same time that the AFF crew was looking for a way to add more content to their fast-growing site.
Plus, the stuff they do on social media is excellent, and perhaps more importantly, we’re nowhere near the same ages, so we don’t know the same people or bring the same core readerships to the project.  A lot of what they’re hoping I can bring is interest from some older Old Grads, and the reverse is true as well.  On top of which, these guys are better web designers than me, and they want to do podcasts and video shows…  It’s exciting stuff, and there’s no reason in the world why we can’t bring it off.  But there’s no way that I was ever gonna do half that stuff on my own.  I don't have the time, the resources, or the expertise.
So.  I’m asking for your support.  If you followed me here, please also follow me over there.  I’m gonna be writing the same content, it’s just gonna be hosted at AFF.  You might also hear us on audio at some point fairly soon.  Check that out if you’re interested.
This is true.  I've been ignoring the world in its entirety this past week save for college football, and my mood has improved noticeably.  The change has made me a better husband and father.
2. Scientists find what they say is oldest intact shipweck ever discovered (Boston Globe)
A team of maritime archaeologists, scientists and surveyors has discovered what it believes to be the world’s oldest intact shipwreck — a Greek trading vessel whose design had previously been seen only on ancient pottery…
[T]he vessel has been carbon dated to more than 2,400 years ago.
The Siren Vase via the British Museum.
This depiction is probably too modern, but it's the best I could find.
Cool, right?
3. Winter is coming!


They've already got snow out in Colorado, and my local ski shop has its big Fall Sale this weekend!

4. Dungeons & Dragons Art Is Finally Getting the Respect It Deserves (Wired)
MANY PEOPLE WOULD describe the Dungeons & Dragons art of painters like Jeff Easley and Keith Parkinson as ‘magical.’ But Michael Witwer—who grew up during the so-called “satanic panic“—used to worry that the art was literally magic.
“I remember being afraid to look into the eyes of the wizard from Unearthed Arcana, or the dungeon master that has the big doors open on the Dungeon Master’s Guide,” Witwer says in Episode 331 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I was afraid that because these books were somehow tied in with Satanism, I might become possessed or immersed within this unholy world.”
My parents indulged my interest in D&D, and I think it’s D&D that initially got me interested in statistics and probability, though I didn’t truly understand why until I retook Statistics at Fordham as an MBA course.  
It’s the mathematical nature of the storytelling that led me to teach my own kids and which has helped them, I think, understand the basic logic of mathematics in their own studies.  Whenever I have to explain something to them that’s math related--which is rare, but it happens--I always start by phrasing the idea in terms of dice rolls.  
For example, when the girls asked about the last election, I told them that the current president had about a 15% chance of winning, or, “about the same probability of rolling a ‘1’ on an 8-sided die.”  As Nate Silver has been at pains to explain in the months since, a 15% chance makes the event somewhat unlikely but far from impossible.  If more folks played D&D, they’d get that a lot more intuitively than they currently do.
Alas, we still see echoes of the Satanic Panic in popular society.  Because most people don’t tell fantasy stories to their kids?  
I’m at a loss to explain it otherwise.
5. Army Sports Update
Sal Interdonato had a few of notes early in the week.  First, it looks like Kelvin Hopkins is gonna play tomorrow.  If you read my preview, you already know that this was not what I was expecting.  I’m also expecting S James Gibson to play, but I've not seen an actual announcement about that, nor do I know how badly he was hurt.
Plebe Jabari Laws has moved from quarterback to slotback.  That’s interesting because Laws is supposed to be a really good player, but he’s absolutely buried on the depth chart at quarterback.  Army brought in a good-looking class of quarterbacks this year, and of course, Hopkins is himself playing very well as a cow while Cam Thomas looks more than capable of starting, too, either in relief or after Hopkins graduates.  But there are still several young guys behind those two, including fellow yearling Christian Anderson along with plebes Clay Czyzynski and Mike Mbony.  Anderson has yet to contribute on the field at West Point, but he had crazy good stats as a high school standout from the Bronx while Czyzynski and Mbony both played very well at the Prep School.  Coach Monken has been high on both of them.  So, bottom line, if the staff wants to get Laws on the field, they've got to manufacture a way to make that happen, and here we are.  With the team’s current injuries at slotback, the move looks like a win-win.
While standing firmly in the realm of irresponsible speculation, I’m expecting Czyzynski or perhaps Mbony to challenge Thomas for the backup role during the spring, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Czyzynski in particular wins the battle.  At 6’0”, 200 lbs, Czyzynski is both a bit bigger and--based on what little I’ve seen of the Prep School footage--a little more accurate throwing the football.
But we’ll see.  It looked like Hopkins was buried on the depth chart a few years ago behind Ahmad Bradshaw and Chris Carter, and now he's about to make his seventh start.
* * *
We'll talk about the 2019 schedule in a couple of weeks over on AFF, probably while Army is on one of its bye weeks ahead of the Army-Navy Game.

Have a good weekend!
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