Quote:Several years ago I would post a thread on here called "In the Trenches" where I went in depth breaking down the OL play. I did a pretty good job, and sure enough when anyone wanted to question me they'd go to the tape and come back saying I nailed it. But the trick involved a pain staking effort to get it right. I would literately re-watch every offensive play many times over in slo-mo. I'd watch it first in regular speed mainly to hear if the announcers were saying anything to direct my attention to, and then again overall in slo-mo to get a feel for the play. I'd take notes on the down and distance and what the alignment was. Then I'd re-watch the play at least a couple times in slo-mo for every lineman...pausing as needed...until I was sure what his responsibility was before moving onto the next lineman. After an offensive series I'd fast-forward through the defense to get to the next series, but it still took me like three hours to get through a game. I've never been trained to know what to judge, but you can get a pretty good feel for precisely who each lineman should have been responsible for by carefully accounting for all of them. I'm sure I'm still made mistakes due my lack of professional training, but rarely any that board amateurs were able to correct me on.


 

It was fun, but the time and effort involved I just don't have that anymore. The best part was on sack plays because everyone had to know who was responsible for the sacks, and those were typically the heavily debated plays until we had our culprit pegged. It was like a message board trial for that player.