For Jared Goff, throwing a football was always easy. He was so good at it that he became the first true freshman starting quarterback in University of California Berkeley history. But when he became a pro football player in 2016, it suddenly wasnt as easy. In his first year with the Los Angeles Rams, the team lost all seven games he started. Jared didnt give up. He didnt blame others. He just worked harder while never forgetting how to have fun. It all paid off as the Rams had a winning record in his second season. The future looks very bright for this gifted young quarterback.
The best quarterbacks take charge on the field, make amazing throws and thrilling runs, and lead their teams to victory. Learn more about Jared Goff of the Los Angeles Rams, one of the most exciting quarterbacks in the NFL today. Fascinating stories of reliable veterans and promising newcomers alike are sure to be a hit with young readers.
Although Bonaventurian scholarship has seen a great expansion in the past forty years, there remains no English volume that provides a general yet detailed study of Bonaventure for scholars. The Companion to Bonaventure provides an invaluable guide to understanding him. Together the essays deliver a critical overview of the current research, the major themes in Bonaventure’s life and writings, and how they are being reinterpreted at the start of the twenty-first century. As a great 13th century scholastic luminary, Bonaventure exists as a vital contributor to the early Franciscan movement that swept across the theological and spiritual landscape of the High Middle Ages. The paradoxical simplicity and complexity of Bonaventure’s synthesis has made, and will continue to provide, a profound contributions to Franciscan and Christian reflection. This Companion will help in understanding why this is the case. Contributors include: Joshua Benson, Jacques Bougerol, Ilia Delio, Christopher Cullen, Jared Goff, Jay M. Hammond, Zachary Hayes, J. A. Wayne Hellmann, Kevin L. Hughes, Timothy J. Johnson, David Keck, Gregory LaNave, Pietro Maranesi, Dominic V. Monti, and Marianne Schlosser.
From an award-winning journalist, the inside story of the brilliant, hypercompetitive young coaches who threw out decades of received wisdom to fundamentally remake America’s most popular sport. When Kyle Shanahan became the NFL’s youngest offensive coordinator in 2008, he had one prevailing rule: Tell me the why. If a colleague couldn’t justify his position by providing the unassailable reasoning behind it, he was told to get the hell out of Shanahan’s office. Shanahan and the members of his coaching tree—including Sean McVay, Mike McDaniel, Raheem Morris, and Matt LaFleur—came up in a sport where innovation was the exception, not the rule. There had been brilliant football minds before, from Paul Brown to Bill Walsh to Bill Belichick. But for the most part, coaches learned a particular system and stuck to it no matter what—no matter the players on their team, no matter what the opponent might do. This group of young coaches would change all that. The Why Is Everything is the story of old dogmas falling before astonishingly creative new strategies and game plans. Drawing on unmatched access across the league, longtime NFL reporter Mike Silver takes us into the key moments in this still-unfolding revolution, from the education of Mike Shanahan, Kyle’s father and a two-time Super Bowl champion, in the 1980s; to the Washington Redskins’ football laboratory in the early 2010s, where the coaches first worked together, shocking the league with their cutting-edge scheme for rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III; to McVay’s Super Bowl victory in 2022 and Kyle Shanahan’s Super Bowl agony in 2019 and 2024. Less than a decade after their emergence, these men are the stars of their profession and have helped propel the NFL to new heights of viewership and drama. With The Why Is Everything, Silver reveals how it all happened, and in the process gives us a timeless account of friendship, rivalry, and the never-ending pursuit of perfection.
In today’s NFL, every team has a “win now” mentality. There’s no time for rebuilding or down years. You need to compete each and every day, or else you’re out; and that goes for the players, coaches, and front office. You either win today or you’re gone tomorrow. Because of this trend, struggling teams have forgone the training of old and slowly building from the ground up for the immediate payoff. And when it comes to gaining the interest of the fans and media, there’s one go-to decision for every struggling team: the rookie quarterback. Blitzed is an in-depth study as to the reason why teams choose to hand the keys of their franchise over to an unproven rookie. But there are multiple layers as to the odds of success for these athletes. While much has to do with their mental and physical toughness, the coaching, front office, and state of an organization all play a crucial role. In the last two NFL drafts, quarterbacks have been taken as the first two picks (Jameis Winston and Marcus Mariota in 2015; Jared Goff and Carson Wentz in 2016). The face of the franchise can’t grow a beard, but is expected to lead his team on the gridiron. Covering the history of this trend with a running timeline of the 2016 NFL season and top draft picks Goff and Wentz, as well as interviews with numerous current and former quarterbacks, coaches, and executives, distinguished journalist Thomas George breaks down how teams decide on starting a rookie quarterback and why the chances of an immediate payoff are such a mixed bag.
The inspiring story of Nate Ebner's bond with his unconventional father and its remarkable consequences Nate Ebner and his father were inseparable. From an early age, they worked side-by-side in the family junkyard, where part of the job was dispensing citizen's justice to aspiring robbers, and they worked out side-by-side in their grungy homemade gym. Even though Nate was a great peewee football player in football-mad Ohio, he followed his father's passion for rugby and started playing for the same club as his father when he was only thirteen years old. But Nate had to face the fact that there was no way to make a living as a professional rugby player in this country. So Nate gave his dad the news that he planned to quit rugby and go out for the football team at Ohio State University, with an eye toward making the NFL. As a goal for someone who hadn't even played high school football, this was completely ridiculous. Without blinking, his father told him that if he gave up what he had built in rugby, he had to see it through. It was the last conversation they ever had--the next day, his father was brutally murdered at work by a would-be robber. Nate went on to make the Ohio State team and when NFL Draft Day came, he was selected by the New England Patriots. Three Super Bowl rings later, his legacy in the sport is secure. But he got another unexpected chance to honor his father's memory when the Olympics admitted rugby as a sport for the 2016 Games. Against long odds, he made the team and competed in Rio in the sport he and his father loved above all others. An astonishing story of what a father will do for a son and what a son will do for a father, Finish Strong is a powerful reminder that the lessons parents embody for their children continue to bear fruit long after they are gone.
This guidebook presents historical and new material to assist the reader to understand NFL game strategies and provides a winning betting strategy. The authors, William Ziemba and Leonard MacLean are professors, traders, financial analysts and sports enthusiasts. They covered ideas like the game's strategies, and shared their wealth of personal experience analyzing the regular season, the playoffs and the Super Bowls in the years 2010-2017. The results of their actual betting for the 2009-10 to the 2017-18 seasons are provided. The authors concluded the book with a forecast for the 2018-2019 season. They determine the players most valuable to win the games, discuss crucial decisions and provide prediction methodology. The authors concluded with a forecast of the top teams, players and odds to win the 53rd Super Bowl.
This volume is a collection of essays written in honor of David Burr, emeritus professor at the Polytechnic University of Virginia (Blacksburg): a scholar who has spent a career researching and publishing on the multi-faceted phenomenon of the Spiritual Franciscans (late 13th-early 14th century) and, in particular, on the life and writings of Peter of John Olivi in southern France. Representing some of the finest scholars in the field these eighteen scholarly essays touch on aspects of both phenomena. Three essays are devoted to the historiography of David Burr; three are dedicated to medieval Apocalypticism; another seven deal specifically with Peter of John Olivi; and five final essays explore aspects of the Spiritual Franciscans, their precursors and adherents. Contributors are C. Colt Anderson, Marco Bartoli, Michael F. Cusato, Gilbert Dahan, Alberto Forni, Fortunato Iozzelli, Philip D. Krey, Robert E. Lerner, Warren Lewis, Michele Lodone, Kevin Madigan, Antonio Montefusco, Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel, Dabney G. Park, Sylvain Piron, Gian Luca Potestà, Marco Rainini, and Paolo Vian.
This volume, Ordo et Sanctitas: The Franciscan Spiritual Journey in Theology and Hagiography, which celebrates the life and legacy of J. A. Wayne Hellmann, is comprised of articles written by colleagues, former students, and associates. The authors were invited to contribute their own articles within three broad categories corresponding with the areas in which Wayne has made a longstanding scholarly contribution: Franciscan hagiographical texts (especially Thomas of Celano); medieval theology and the Bonaventurian theological tradition; and the retrieval of the Franciscan tradition in a contemporary context. All of the essays in the volume build upon and expand in new directions the contributions of our honoree in these areas. Contributors are Regis J. Armstrong , Joshua C. Benson, Michael Blastic, Joseph Chinnici, Michael F. Cusato, Jacques Dalarun, J. Isaac Goff, Jay M. Hammond, Timothy J. Johnson, John Kruse, Steven J. McMichael, Juliet Mousseau, William Short, Laura Smit, and Katherine Wrisley Shelby.
It has become difficult to ignore the analytics movement within the NFL. An increasing number of coaches openly integrate advanced numbers into their game plans, and commentators, throughout broadcasts, regularly use terms such as air yards, CPOE, and EPA on a casual basis. This rapid growth, combined with an increasing accessibility to NFL data, has helped create a burgeoning amateur analytics movement, highlighted by the NFL’s annual Big Data Bowl. Because learning a coding language can be a difficult enough endeavor, Introduction to NFL Analytics with R is purposefully written in a more informal format than readers of similar books may be accustomed to, opting to provide step-by-step instructions in a structured, jargon-free manner. Key Coverage: Installing R, RStudio, and necessary packages Working and becoming fluent in the tidyverse Finding meaning in NFL data with examples from all the functions in the nflverse family of packages Using NFL data to create eye-catching data visualizations Building statistical models starting with simple regressions and progressing to advanced machine learning models using tidymodels and eXtreme Gradient Boosting The book is written for novices of R programming all the way to more experienced coders, as well as audiences with differing expected outcomes. Professors can use Introduction to NFL Analytics with R to provide data science lessons through the lens of the NFL, while students can use it as an educational tool to create robust visualizations and machine learning models for assignments. Journalists, bloggers, and arm-chair quarterbacks alike will find the book helpful to underpin their arguments by providing hard data and visualizations to back up their claims.
