Old Spice wins the award for best Super Bowl commercial this year, The Man Your Man Could Smell Like:

If Filmmakers Directed the Super Bowl. QT’s is the one I’d most want to watch.

Despite calling him a “minor genius,” Steven Pinker goes after Malcolm Gladwell pretty good. Gladwell responds. I still love Gladwell’s writing, but have grown weary (and wary) of his “tell two interesting stories and then make a huge leap of logic and/or cherry pick evidence to come up with a grand unifying theory” approach.

I can’t remember how this came up recently, but Terry Tate Office Linebacker is still the best series of sneaker commercials not made by Nike.

Dear Eli Manning Era Giants Fans:

First off, thank you for supporting my favorite team in sports for the past eleven months. It’s been a pleasure having your company since last year’s NFC Championship game – which, coincidentally, is when you first realized that “your” team actually had a chance to play in the Super Bowl.

Just the first two sentences as a teaser. Some harsh language, understandably.

I've been enjoying Frostillicus' blog lately. His current post is a good example, on Troy Palamalu's work with Marv Marinovich. Check the crazy (as a fox?) videos. Lots of the sites I read hate stability balls and their ilk so this is certainly a departure. Here's all the SportsLab videos.

I continue to mull over Turning It, which I linked to a couple days ago. If you blew it off then, go read it now. I particularly like the "Strength Before Speed" section, but there's all kinds of gems in there:

One of the fastest ways to increase a football player's speed and running efficiency is to get him to run with his eyes. The head acts as an anchor if the eyes aren't first looking at the target. This forces a runner to get out of position when he changes direction, causing the shoulders to line up improperly and affecting body orientation. So we stress that when players set a foot to turn, their eyes should immediately find the target. This simple cue can fix some of the most complex problems in running mechanics.

That leapt out at me, having just been advised the day before that I should work on "finding the back cone." I used to know how to do that, before 15 years of handling took over my game. Should be a fun skill to rediscover. Anyway, this is what really got me thinking over the past couple days:

There are far too many good drills out there to cover them all. They can be as simple as the pro-shuttle that the NFL Combine uses, where athletes sprint back and forth over a specified distance (typically 20 yards), or as complex as a cone drill with five or more turns. The key is to remember that football speed is the ability to change direction and accelerate quickly, not how quickly someone can run a 40-yard sprint. We focus on the drills that will develop fast-twitch lateral movement over straight-line speed.

So what are these drills? I e-mailed the guy for a list, but haven't gotten a response. Oh well. I did find a couple interesting things in Googling around, though.

First up is this YouTube video of Jackie Battle's performance in the NFL Combine. The three-cone drill (which Battle demonstrates at 2:02 of that video, and which is described here) is one I'm definitely going to add to the mix.

Second is this Michael Boyle article on NFL Combine training (PDF), specifically focusing on the 40. Great article, too much good stuff to excerpt any one paragraph, but the key observation here is that the 40 is a test of acceleration, not speed. You should take that into consideration, along with the size of your playing field and how you move on it, before deciding how you want to strike the balance between acceleration, speed, and endurance in your training.