Highly paid teaching position available in Nashville!

The Tennessee Titans fired their wide receivers and assistant wide receivers coaches today. 

I find this interesting and not just because I follow the Titans to a degree that would surprise even most people who know me. 

Anyway, NFL position coaches are one of the rare places in high profile sports where the job is mostly about teaching. While most folks don't know who these guys are (sadly and unfairly, most of them are guys), they are likely some of the most highly paid and heavily scrutinized teachers in the country.

(How much of an impact can they have? One of the reasons given for the New England Patriots' successful season is the return of their offensive line coach from retirement. The Patriots offensive line, with pretty much the same players, went from being one of the worst in the league last year to one of the best.) 

Their job is mostly focused on people development. There's an aspect of evaluation, too, though actual decisions about which players make up the team more heavily influenced by the scouting staff and general manager (and head coach in some cases). Unlike college coaches, NFL position coaches don't recruit players to a program. Their job is take the players they have and develop their skill set according to the larger vision of the head coach or coordinator. 

So, they teach. 

This firing raises those questions because the Titans' head coach has been friends with the more senior coach he fired today. The guy actually came out of retirement to coach the wide receivers. It doesn't seem personal. This seems like the head coach had an issue with how he was teaching.

I'm curious as to what actual instruction looks like at an NFL level. How do coaches develop their craft? How do they teach complicated game plans that can change significantly even in-game? How are position coaches evaluated at the end of the year?

I'm pretty sure "Hard Knocks" or any number of "NFL Insider" segments aren't representative of the teaching position coaches do. I would also bet that the people who coach at this level conduct themselves differently from the stereotypical screaming high school football coach. 

A few weeks ago, San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich hinted at the approach one takes with adult, professional athletes.

Gregg Popovich with a great response when asked it was his fault his players weren't motivated to play tonight pic.twitter.com/jdIUHB34Eh

— gifdsports (@gifdsports) December 9, 2016

"No Knute Rockne speeches." (Since I read more sports media than is healthy, I take special pleasure when future Hall of Fame coaches knock down sports cliches.)

While I really don't have an idea what teaching looks like at an NFL or NBA level, it's worth noting that U.S. Soccer hired Teach Like a Champion author Doug Lemov to consult. He's been working high-level coaches across the country to improve how advanced soccer players practice. He reflected in a recent post:

Had a pretty amazing day in Chicago on Wednesday, talking teaching with a group of (mostly) MLS professional soccer coaches who are enrolled in US Soccer’s new Pro License course. The group includes guys who I admire as coaches and who I followed as players. I was a little bit starstruck… but I got over that fast because the conversation was so rich. 

Interestingly, we didn’t watch any footage of soccer training. We watched classroom footage and applied the principles to teaching during training.The closest we got to watching “practice” was an amazing video of music teacher John Burmeister (who I’ve written about before) wokring with an upstate New York youth orchestra. His session is a master class on having a clear and specific goal and breaking the session up into rounds of progressive challenge, each with a single piece of feedback to focus on and execute.

The rest of the post is worth reading for its discussion of how to actually run a highly successful practice. One of the things I appreciate about Lemov is how he's evolved his focus to the intricacies of practice, then looked across disciplines -- teaching, music, soccer -- to apply it. (Hell, he wrote a book about it.)

Great teachers run great practices. I wish I could observe more high-level coaches when they're planning and running practice. I bet I'd find quite a few things to apply in my classroom.

What happens when entertainment is no longer entertaining?

This week, researchers reported that they can now image brains to diagnose CTE while people are alive. Previously, the only way to know if CTE caused a person depression, dementia, or suicidal tendencies was through an autopsy. Repeated concussions have been linked CTE. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates puts together a damning timeline on the NFL actions regarding concussions. Essentially, league executives have had a reason to suspect for quite some time that players were playing Russian roulette with their post-football lives, yet they told players differently. An excerpt:

2007 - An NFL safety pamphlet notifies players, "Current research with professional athletes has not shown that having more than one or two concussions leads to permanent problems if each injury is managed properly. 

2009 - NFL spokesman Greg Aiello acknowledges, "It's quite obvious from the medical research that's been done that concussions can lead to long-term problems, 

2009 - The NFL begins to put up posters in locker rooms that state, in part, "Concussions and conditions resulting from repeated brain injury can change your life and your family's life forever."
"This is about Roger Goodell, that fraud, covering his own ass," says former defensive lineman Dave Pear.

In 2007, the NFL was still arguing that concussions wouldn't lead to serious problem? Surely they heard of what happened to these former players two years earlier:

2005 - In June, former Pittsburgh Steelers guard Terry Long commits suicide by drinking antifreeze. Neuropathologist Bennet Omalu later examines Long's brain and concludes he suffered from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.
"People with chronic encephalopathy suffer from depression. The major depressive disorder may manifest as suicide attempts. Terry Long committed suicide due to the chronic traumatic encephalopathy due to his long-term play," Dr. Omalu tells the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "The NFL has been in denial."Steelers neurosurgeon Joseph Maroon says Omalu is employing "fallacious reasoning" saying "I don't think it's plausible at all ... to go back and say that he was depressed from playing in the NFL and that led to his death 14 years later, I think is purely speculative. 

2005 - In July the peer-reviewed journal Neurosurgery prints Omalu's autopsy and brain analysis of "Iron" Mike Webster. Omalu concludes that Webster suffered from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.

I've enjoyed watching football for a long time, but now every time I see even a highlight on "SportsCenter" I just think about how guys are destroying their brains. Sure, they get glory, celebrity, and big paychecks, but ask the widow and children of Junior Seau if that's a tradeoff they'd make again. Even researchers find that it's only a relatively small number of former players affected, say 10 or 20 percent, it's still too much of a sacrifice for something driven primarily by people wanting something to watch on Sunday afternoons.

And I'm a guy who grew up immersed in Southern football culture. I live a mile away from where the Titans play. 

I wonder how many other people are going to start feeling the same way? I mean, with the NFL, we're talking about a $9 billion business and that's without taking into account the massive media industry built around. For that matter, what about the cultural and financial impact of college football?  

When I read Seabiscuit, I learned that the major American spectator sports during the Depression were horse racing and boxing. History shows there's nothing guarantees that football will continue to dominate the modern sports landscape. 

Given all this, it looks like a Major League Soccer franchise would be a bargain investment.