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wvParticipant“Trump won the nomination by being the cruelest, most balls-out build-a-wall hard-liner. Now he was talking like Jeb Bush on immigration and Bill Clinton on NAFTA. What was the point of all that craziness and rancor and destruction? Who needs Donald Trump playing Jeb Bush, especially since the actual Jeb Bush might have had a chance of beating Hillary Clinton?”
It seems like a bad idea to me. They may be trying to change his image in order to save seats in the senate, house, and so on, but it seems like a losing strategy to me. His supporters may have their enthusiasm dampened. I dunno, though.
—————Well, Taibbi kinda blames him for listening to his latest ‘handlers’ and he also blames the political-handlers for changing Trump’s message — but i think the truth is, it was a No-win situation for Trump.
If he stayed on his Trump-the-outlandish-outsider message — he’d lose.
If he ‘softened’ and listened to his handlers and became trump-lite — he’d still lose.His problem is non-solvable. He simply cannot win enuff ‘middle ground’ votes. Ya know. The ‘undecided types’. All he’s got is his hard-core angry-white-male block. Thats it. Neither strategy gains him any significant voters outside the hardcore block he already has.
If I were Trump, I’d go down being Trump. But thats just me 🙂
Barring an arrest, or a blow-job, its crooked-hillary.
I dont even think the debates will matter.w
vwvParticipantKeenum vs Gabbert — This will be the most anticipated, electrifying QB-matchup since…?
There will be no 7-9 Bullshit, Monday Night.
Los Angeles – 24
San Fran Cisco – 9w
vwvParticipantAnd this is why Trump is, quite simply, Toast:
“That he ended a week of “minority outreach” speeches pulling a crisp zero percent approval rating among black voters – zero percent! – speaks to the absurdity of taking his “outreach” campaign at face value…”
You cannot win a general election for Prez
in this here America, with numbers like that.
Cant be done.w
vwvParticipantMarshall listed Breez,
in the same category as Brady and Rogers.w
vwvParticipantPenn on Trump
wvParticipantStart at about the 17:30 mark. Maria is purty funny, i think:
wvParticipantI will give equal time here. Here’s a rightwing talker/comedian guy:
September 8, 2016 at 9:40 am in reply to: 'deep stories' and 'empathy walls': another book about rightwingers #52444wvParticipantCoupla books mentioned in the article above, fwiw:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0166ISAS8/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Hillbilly Eulogy
———————————-
https://www.amazon.com/White-Trash-400-Year-History-America-ebook/dp/B016JPTQ9U/ref=pd_sim_351_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=YB51AT7ABN665VKC9NHY#nav-subnav
he Hidden Aspects of Race and Class in American History
White TrashBook review…
By Herbert L Calhoun on July 26, 2016
Format: Hardcover Verified PurchaseThis book explains the unsavory fine points of our national identity by probing and then exposing the not so well hidden loose ends that tie the bottom half of America’s social hierarchy to the top half. It reveals that there is much much more to race and class than what we see at eye level. We learn here that the colonists who came to the Americas were very much a mixed bag.
Initially, the upper classes were investor friends of the British Crown, given concessions to search for gold and to find a non-existent water passage across North America to India. Later, they were made up of political and religious enemies of the beheaded King Charles I.
Jamestown was one of the many failures at finding gold or the non-existent passage to the East. And thus, only as an afterthought did the leaders decide to salvage their costly expeditions by killing two birds with one stone: England’s horrendous social problems of crime, poverty and street violence would be solved by shipping the poor off to America. Then tracts of Indian lands would be sold off to entice the many lost souls hoping to make a life in the New World. These lost souls thus mostly were tricked onto ships in large numbers under a number of unsavory land contract schemes, the most prominent of which was called the “head right system,” in which those who did the tricking were paid in 50-acre land parcels, and in which the contractees thought they would all end up as rich English gentlemen, with free land, slaves and tools, living a life of leisure. Of course, it was all a lie. Most of the founding fathers became rich by acquiring large parcels of land through land scams of the head right variation.
At the bottom of the heap were those of the poor and criminal classes, including children sold off by their parents, or shipped off for petty crimes, or just kidnapped off the streets. But they also included roguish highwaymen or pirates, vagrants, Irish rebels, whores, and convicts shipped to the colonies for a variety of crimes, such as refusing to be impressed into the army being in debt, etc. The progeny of these groups are today’s poor white trash.
The majority of those brought to America’s shores came as indentured servants, a British euphemism for “slaves.” And even the few that did later manage to either escape slavery, or win their freedom outright after long periods of indentureship, seldom owned more than just token amounts of the least productive and most remote land. Most ended up as “squatters” forced into Western territories to “squat” on Indian lands in violation of the Treaty of Paris.
The power of land, for most of American history, lay in being able to get married, “put down roots,” breed a large family of field hands, and then work the land with as many hands as possible. “Squatters,” despised by all sides, typically had none of these. Being the 17th through the 19th centuries’ version of transients, they were young, virile, aimless and restless single white men, ineligible for marriage and forced to keep moving West in search of better and freer land. These unattached single men, wanderers and squatters, were the “free radicals” of the American heartland.
In 1676, a petite English Gentleman, Nathaniel Bacon, in what was called the Bacon Rebellion, along with a contingent of a few dozen single white men, plus an assortment of an equal number of red, white and black slaves, rebelled against being pushed to the outer edges of the colonies, left in hostile Indian territories to fend for themselves. It was the only time in American history when the lower classes have combined to rebel against the upper class.
With lop-sided gender demographics favoring single white men (in the Caribbean, the male slave ratio alone was sometimes as much as 100-1), minimally marriageable women became a scarce resource. As the author notes, “women went to market with their virginity;” and marriage and fertility played a critical role in defining the shape of early American society. Any woman under 50, no matter how ugly, could find a husband in the top tier of colonial American society. “Breeding capacity became a calculable natural resource — commodified and exploited in the marriage exchange.” For slave women, the womb became an article of commerce; and slave children, like cattle, were transactional property.
James Cartwright has written a wonderfully important book, called “Violent Lands,” on the meaning of these lopsided gender demographics in which large numbers of virile young white men were unable to become stakeholders in frontier American society. He claims that this is why America became, and remains even today, one of the most “Violent Lands” in the world.
Thus, added to the staid and highly sensitive class hierarchy inherited from class conscious Britain, the reader can see why America became an incubator for deep race and class sensitivities, divisions and resentments. The “witches brew” of breeding, biology, race, backed up by Christian biblical text, seamlessly turned into an ideology of white supremacy, still the most enduring instrument on the palette used to shape colonial America’s social order.
Put more directly, America’s founding generations saw good breeding and race as God’s way of establishing white supremacy as nature’s “taken for granted” class hierarchy; and ever since the days of the Puritans, American elites have frowned upon both race-mixing and upward mobility for the poorer classes. Both were seen as threats, either to the menial labor force, which the plantation owning elite depended upon for their very existence; or, to the white supremacist social order, underwritten and mandated by the biblical story of ham, which meant that blacks would remain slaves at the bottom of the pecking order in perpetuity.
Imported slaves and immigrants, either through indentureship, apprenticeships, debtors prisons, or due to indictment on criminal charges, prison-work release programs, etc., have all been forced into long-term arrangements for free, or nearly free, and always grossly unfair wages. These discrepancies between “fair” and “grossly unfair” wages have always rebounded back to land owners, or to big businesses’ bottom line as obscene and unsavory profits.
Inequality, denial of the right to vote or to own land, all followed logically from assumptions of superior breeding and race superiority assumptions. Submission to those at the top of the societal hierarchy was regarded as a natural condition of humankind in early America. The Christian Bible was the final authority that reinforced these notions and poured them into the mainstream. By teaching that some were born to rule, while others were born to submit and obey, breeding, and the biblical story of ham, had placed poor whites, as well as those with black skin, at the very bottom of the racial hierarchy.
Arkansas White Trash: A True Story
At the age of nine, I learned about this bottom-most tier of our society first hand a block from the Arkansas River where I grew up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Just below us — both figuratively and literally — down the sloping banks that literally slid right into the water, lived poisoned snakes, eels, gar and cat fish, turtles, bullfrogs, and an odd assortment of white people, who, though it was never said so openly, frightfully were the true wretched of the earth: These were Pine Bluff’s “poor white trash:” authentic rednecks in the flesh.
The shanty town of jerry-rigged huts made of corrugated tin, cardboard and scrap wood, that they had fashioned as homes, had sprung up over night. It was a racially homogenous tribe of “bruised fruit” and “day old” bread peddling white folks. Daily, in push carts and horse drawn wagons, they sold to us, nearby blacks who lived just up the hill, food-stuffs that had been savaged from grocery store dump bins. These petite entrepreneurs were a curious and motley sort, having to defer to blacks — if for no more reason than to encourage us, their only customers, to buy their “rank” produce.
But here’s the catch: Whenever we bought it, they surely knew that we did so only out of pity for their dismal plight. Yet, curiously, other than interacting at their peddler’s stations, and playing ball with two brothers around my age who would occasionally come up the hill, we maintained a silent modus vivendi that served as an invisible shield between our two radically distinct subcultures. While most of my neighbors were working class blacks, sprinkled with a few college educated professionals, like my stepfather, Carl Redus, the white tribes that lived under the hill, were barely literate, and by anyone’s social reckoning, had fallen well off the deep end of America’s socio-economic grid.
…That is except for two things that I still vividly remember:
First, during the school year, a school bus headed down King, would disappear beneath the sloping hill stopping just short of sliding into the water to pick up a couple of handfuls of shanty town redneck kids. It would then proceed clear across town past several black schools to the nearest white school where they were then deposited.
Second, and this came as quite a shock to a nine-year old black kid, almost without fail on the weekends, noisy redneck parties would occur down under the hill. Rival redneck tribes living farther around the river bend, would come to party, and invariably before Sunday morning rolled around a humongous fight would break out, and things would turn very violent and ugly indeed.
Somewhere in the wee hours of Saturday night, I would be awaken with ear-shattering noises, when literally all hell broke loose in shanty town. The sky would light up like Roman candles on the Fourth of July. Bullets would be flying every which way. Shanty town huts would go up in flames, and residents would be running up the hill and screaming as they fanned-out in every direction. It was like a mini race riot, but involving only one race, the white race.
And then, over the flaming carnage and the war-like din, one could hear puffing up the hill, a loud desperate banging on our neighbor, Mr. Harris’ backdoor. In a blood-curling southern drawl, that is still unforgettable — literally a life-and-death scream — I could hear an older white man say: “Harris! Harris! Oooh Mr. Harris, please Harris call the law! Call the law Harris! Please call the law!
As multiple sirens howled in the distance, headed in our direction, soon everything would go completely silent, as the paddy wagons, fire trucks, ambulances and stretchers would arrive. Through my bedroom blinds, I could see parties alien to us, bleeding being carried away on stretchers or handcuffed, being hauled off to hospitals and jails. It was a sight to behold!
The only way we found out what happened in the dark down that hill, is the next day, Marshall and Leonard, the two brothers who occasionally played baseball with us, shamelessly would arrive at our backdoor, in search of food, clothing, bandages, medication, etc. And in exchange for a free breakfast, and a “care package,” we would invite them in to give us the low-down on the fighting that had just taken place.
They never came to our front door and never had enough racial pride to turn down our breakfast invitation, or the “care package” containing black hand-me-down clothes and assorted goods that we invariably gave them. And thus, the brothers, bruised and scraped, seemed to find it cathartic to be able to unload the gory details of the “redneck wars” of the previous night.
What they told us was unsurprising. Invariably the wars were about personal slights, turf encroachments, and men from the wrong side of the river banks “hitting on” women from the right side. Add to this, the occasional hell-raising redneck males, generally on edge and armed: disgusted with not having a secure and respected place in society, and having imbibed too much liqueur, and the tableau of causes of the redneck wars is complete.
This book, “White Trash,” is the first time I have ever seen in print the whole story of people like my river bank redneck friends, Marshall and Leonard, who I later learned both ended up in Reform School, which in Arkansas was the surest training-ground for ending up in adult prison.
The themes exposed here by this author, run true, and vector directly from the banks of the Arkansas River straight through American history like the jagged edges of the St. Andreas fault.
What this author has uncovered, is, that like race, class too is an unacknowledged independent variable that is also America’s most enduring fault line, one that when taken together with race, creates a reality coterminous with American culture itself. How she was able to skillfully separate race from class, and then put them back together again, when clearly they seem virtually inseparable, is part of the beauty of this fine treatment of both subjects.
In short, throughout American history, (including today’s race to the bottom of the global labor pool), America’s social pecking order has depended on maintaining in a steady-state, two racially separated poorer working classes at the very bottom rung of the social ladder. Since Bacon’s rebellion of 1676, rationalizing these two groups as inferior, and pitting them against each other, has proved quite sufficient to keep the ideology of white supremacy in place, and the price of labor at rock bottom. Ten stars
wvParticipantcheck out the 38 minute mark of this vid, and watch
the white folks trying to talk about black folks:
wvParticipantObviously, black people should not have been ethnically cleansed from
their family-lands.But the documentary raises broader issues about private property itself.
Is there a better way to live than the private-property-way ?w
vwvParticipantTrees are made of air, mostly, you know.
“…The world looks so different after learning science. For example, trees are made of air, primarily. When they are burned, they go back to air, and in the flaming heat is released the flaming heat of the sun which was bound in to convert the air into tree. [A]nd in the ash is the small remnant of the part which did not come from air, that came from the solid earth, instead. These are beautiful things, and the content of science is wonderfully full of them. They are very inspiring, and they can be used to inspire others…”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/good-thinking/201311/when-knowing-instills-sense-wonderw
vwvParticipantwvParticipantAnd another thing. Photo Synthesis — If mums and other screaming flowers, eat light, then why doesn’t it get darker and darker as more and more flowers eat more and more light?
Maybe its a good thing to run over mums. More light for the rest of us.
w
VScience tells us that as flowers consume the light the sun gets dimmer and dimmer until there is nothing but darkness. The technical term for this is “night” which is short for “no light”. Having consumed all of the sun’s light the flowers enter a state of dormancy in which their voracious appetite for light is temporarily abated. This allows the sun to recharge unmolested. As the sun grows brighter a phenomenon known as ‘day’ occurs and the cycle repeats itself as it has since the beginning of time 6000 years ago.
————–
lol
i cannot top that
u have won this round.
w
vwvParticipantI like the play a lot. Better than Macbeth which I think is overrated. I haven’t seen the movie, but I have seen in on stage 3 times. Is the movie any good?
I have almost finished the movie, and I thought it was quite good. Seemed to get better as it went along, too.
Course, i could watch Vanessa Redgrave read a phone book and I’d
be fascinated.And Ralph Fiennes, who i never would have cast in that part, was great. I had no idea he could create such…intensity/weight/presence. That guy can act.
w
v
wvParticipant..Ironic how your desperation to save the mums actually led to their demise. Poetic, huh?
Oh how they must have screamed in terror and pain as your 2 ton deathwagon slowly backed over them. I’m just glad flowers scream at decibel levels inaudible to the human ear. At least the neighborhood children were spared a lifetime of night terrors from the tortured shrieks you squeezed from the mums as you crushed them with your car.
—————-
And another thing. Photo Synthesis — If mums and other screaming flowers, eat light, then why doesn’t it get darker and darker as more and more flowers eat more and more light?
Maybe its a good thing to run over mums. More light for the rest of us.
w
v“….Last night, after a day in the garden, I asked Robin to explain (again) photosynthesis to me. I can’t take in this business of _eating light_ and turning it into stem and thorn and flower…
I would not call this meditation, sitting in the back garden. Maybe I would call it eating light. Mystical traditions recognize two kinds of practice: _apophatic mysticism_, which is the dark surrender of Zen, the Via Negativa of John of the Cross, and _kataphatic mysticism, less well defined: an openhearted surrender to the beauty of creation.
Maybe Francis of Assissi was, on the whole, a kataphatic mystic, as was Thérèse of Lisieux in her exuberant momemnts: but the fact is, kataphatic mysticism has low status in religious circles. Francis and Thérèse were made, really made, any mother superior will let you know, in the dark nights of their lives: no more of this throwing off your clothes and singing songs and babbling about the shelter of God’s arms.When I was twelve and had my first menstrual period, my grandmother took me aside and said, ‘Now your childhood is over. You will never really be happy again.’ That is pretty much how some spiritual directors treat the transition from kataphatic to apophatic mysticism.
But, I’m sorry, I’m going to sit here every day the sun shines and eat this light. Hung in the bell of desire.”
― Mary Rose O’Reilley, The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd
wvParticipantI burn stray cats, here. Its not as efficient as
wood, and there’s a lot of screetching,
but it gets me through the Winter.The chopping is the fun part.
I used to use an axe but I went to Lowes
and invested in a cat-saw.w
vwvParticipantYeah, a lot of heat in that analysis but very little light.
The jilted reporter syndrome.
————-
Yeah, Im tellin ya, these ‘jilted’ reporters are missing something, imho.I just bet there are a LOT of St.Louis fans who still like and follow
the TEAM. (maybe not the management/owner). I mean most St.Loo folks
just watched em on TV like the rest of us.I doubt if that big group of local pro-rams fans likes all this
bile being spewed by the jilted-reporters.The ‘business’ side of Sports sucks. The team/players/game does
not suck. Just my opinion.w
vwvParticipantThat one fell below, even Jeff Gordon standards.
I wish he wouldn’t pick on the mentally-ill Tre Mason, btw.
That’s a little low, even for a sports-pundit.w
vwvParticipanthttp://www.stltoday.com/sports/columns/jeff-gordon/gordo-rams-giving-haters-plenty-of-reasons-to-smile/article_860be581-6fcc-5e83-ac75-c7f0b7b6a826.html
Rams giving haters plenty of reasons to smile
Jeff Gordon
Since St. Louis stole the Rams from Los Angeles, you can’t really complain that LA stole them back.Because you welcomed Georgia Frontiere despite her many eccentricities, you shouldn’t begrudge the City of Angels the right to embrace land-hoarding recluse Stan Kroenke.
What goes around comes around, as Justin Timberlake would sing.
But as jilted fans you certainly can lash out against the sheer incompetence of Kroenke’s regime and his tactless departure. Cheering against the Rams is a healthy way to blow off steam and vent your spleen.
Fortunately they have looked like the Same Old Sorry (Act) Rams during their return to LA.
The problem starts at the top. Listen to Rams CEO Kevin Demoff rave about Kroenke to the Los Angeles Times:
“I’m fortunate to have the tutelage of Stan, who has really pioneered how you combine resources and sports in a way that has never been done before. I’m grateful for his mentorship. He pushes our team for greatness and challenges us to envision the impossible.”
Yes, well, Kroenke is quite the ground-breaker when it comes to converting billions in family wealth into steady sports failure. His Denver Nuggets and Colorado Avalanche can’t keep pace with their NBA and NHL rivals and his Rams set modern standards for futility.
It’s extremely difficult to remain irrelevant in the parity-minded NFL, but, like Kevin says, Stan challenges his people to envision the impossible.
That explains how coach Jeff Fisher could be in line for a contract extension after guiding the Rams to four losing seasons. That explains how tag-along general manager Les Snead could still be employed despite wasting precious draft picks and blowing millions on useless free agents.
Impossible? With the Rams it’s surely not.
This season they may outshine the San Francisco 49ers — who are banking on the unlikely Chip Kelly-Blaine Gabbert collaboration — but they won’t seriously challenge the Seattle Seahawks and Arizona Cardinals in the NFC West.
Recurring themes undermine this team. At quarterback the Rams pulled the reverse RGIII maneuver and spent multiple draft picks to select Jared Goff first overall in the draft.
Trouble was, Goff wasn’t a Robert Griffin III-caliber prospect and he certainly wasn’t another Andrew Luck. He was a middle to late first-round prospect who rose to the top during a down year at his position.
Like most young quarterbacks, he will need a few seasons to develop properly. Asking him to become the front man for a team moving back into the challenging LA market was absurd.
Look at the numbers Goff posted in the preseason: 55.8 passer rating with a 44.9 completion percentage, two interceptions, four sacks, three fumbles and an average gain of 4.7 yards per passing attempt.
If he serves as the face of the franchise, then the franchise wears a befuddled expression.
By default, pint-sized scrapper Case Keenum remained the starting quarterback. And after a messy preseason finale, Fisher suggested Goff could open the season at No. 3 behind Keenum and fringe prospect Sean Mannion.
Goff would become the first quarterback since, ahem, JaMarcus Russell to arrive as the first overall pick and not start in Week 1. That second overall pick Carson Wentz is the Philadelphia Eagles’ starting quarterback just adds to the disappointment.
Goff’s reserve role is probably for the best, because the Rams lack aerial firepower. Hapless Brian Quick dropped more passes this summer, leaving Kenny Britt, gadget player Tavon Austin and a bunch of rookies as the go-to targets.
The young offensive line remained unsteady, too, particularly with right tackle Rob Havenstein missing preseason time with an injury.
While elite running back Todd Gurley can move the chains, the Rams lack a change-of-pace back. Speedy Tre Mason, a former 75th overall draft pick, washed out of the NFL with some alarming mental health problems.
(After an offseason arrest, Mason told officers that “he was going to call the White House and we were all going to lose our jobs” and that “the police were responsible for teaching al-Qaida how to fly planes.”)
The Rams preseason included the usual special teams sloppiness and practice field chippiness Fisher-coached teams are known for. HBO’s “Hard Knocks” highlighted a brawl started by middle linebacker Alec Ogletree and escalated by Gurley.
Fisher lit into his players with a profanity-laced lecture. From the looks of things this summer, that won’t be the last time he addresses them in such coarse terms.
You should do the same if makes you feel better. Swear your lack of allegiance to the Rams again and again as their sacks, fumbles and interceptions mount.
Let go of it all, from Brian Quick to Jake Long to Jared Cook to the Kellen Shaun Austin Nick Clemens Hill Davis Foles mish-mash at quarterback. Yell loud enough and perhaps those blurred memories of one wobbly pass fading into the next incompletion will finally quit haunting you.
wvParticipantYes but what are the odds to finish 7-9?
Well–I don’t know, but does 8-8 get sprinkles?
————-
No. 8-8 does not get sprinkles.
Playoffs get sprinkles.
w
vwvParticipantJust read the whole article. Its got lots of great quotes about the seventies.
w
vwvParticipantI think this means less than it used to.
If you look at the avg. years of experience on the 2 starting units, O and D, the Rams STARTERS are not young.
Both average 4 years of experience (with different decimals after the 4).
That’s not young, that’s prime.
Whoa, whoa, whoa there Mr. Scientist.
I refuse to discuss prime numbers.
————–
…yeah right, Pa Ram — Mr Five letters in your name.
Go ahead. Pretend like you know nothing about Snisher’s new analytics — the
Prime theory of team building.w
v
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_numbers
The first 1000 prime numbersThe following table lists the first 1000 primes, with 20 columns of consecutive primes in each of the 50 rows.[1]
1–20 2 3 5 7 11 13 17 19 23 29 31 37 41 43 47 53 59 61 67 71
21–40 73 79 83 89 97 101 103 107 109 113 127 131 137 139 149 151 157 163 167 173
41–60 179 181 191 193 197 199 211 223 227 229 233 239 241 251 257 263 269 271 277 281
61–80 283 293 307 311 313 317 331 337 347 349 353 359 367 373 379 383 389 397 401 409
81–100 419 421 431 433 439 443 449 457 461 463 467 479 487 491 499 503 509 521 523 541
101–120 547 557 563 569 571 577 587 593 599 601 607 613 617 619 631 641 643 647 653 659
121–140 661 673 677 683 691 701 709 719 727 733 739 743 751 757 761 769 773 787 797 809
141–160 811 821 823 827 829 839 853 857 859 863 877 881 883 887 907 911 919 929……(sequence A000040 in the OEIS).
The Goldbach conjecture verification project reports that it has computed all primes below 4×1018.[2] That means 95,676,260,903,887,607 primes[3] (nearly 1017), but they were not stored. There are known formulae to evaluate the prime-counting function (the number of primes below a given value) faster than computing the primes. This has been used to compute that there are 1,925,320,391,606,803,968,923 primes (roughly 2×1021) below 1023. A different computation found that there are 18,435,599,767,349,200,867,866 primes (roughly 2×1022) below 1024, if the Riemann hypothesis is true.[4]
wvParticipanthttp://www.sacbee.com/sports/nfl/san-francisco-49ers/article99997087.html
49ers expect big things from the two towers, Armstead and BucknerBy Matt Barrows
mbarrows@sacbee.com
SANTA CLARALooking for a dominant defensive lineman? Try a basketball gym.
That’s where you could find Jerry Azzinaro, now the 49ers defensive-line coach, during the 2012 recruiting season.
Azzinaro, then the defensive-line coach at Oregon, first traveled to Sacramento, where he watched Arik Armstead muscle his way through the paint for Pleasant Grove High School in the Sacramento High Tournament.
Then he hopped on a plane to Hawaii and saw DeForest Buckner and his Punahou School teammates dominate a game in which Buckner had 12 points, 13 rebounds and a blocked shot.
“Oh, I remember the game,” Buckner said. “I had a couple of dunks in it, too.”
Azzinaro and then Ducks coach Chip Kelly weren’t seeking bulk that winter. They wanted athleticism, big guys who had stamina, players who used their hands well and understood leverage. Most of all, they longed for length.
“You can cover more space,” Kelly said in February about his preference for tall players. “That’s always been the philosophy I tried to recruit to in college.”
Kelly and Azzinaro landed what they were looking for in Armstead and Buckner, but the coaches had only a year to work with their prized recruits. After the 2012 season, Kelly and Azzinaro left for the Philadelphia Eagles. Two years later, Armstead entered the NFL draft, leaving behind Buckner at Oregon.
Now they’re back together in Santa Clara. The 49ers used the seventh pick in April to select Buckner, giving San Francisco a unique profile entering this season.
When struggling NFL teams reset, they usually look for a quarterback and surround him with an array of offensive weapons.
The 49ers have gone about it differently. Their top pick in the last four drafts has been a defensive player, and their two most recent, Armstead and Buckner, are near twins: 6-foot-7 defensive linemen who not only played together in college but became best friends there.
Linebacker NaVorro Bowman is the most accomplished and recognizable member of San Francisco’s defense. But the 49ers are betting everyone on defense – from Bowman to the edge pass rushers to the secondary – will flourish behind two skyscraping defensive linemen.
You can cover more space. That’s always been the philosophy I tried to recruit to in college.
49ers coach Chip Kelly, on his preference for tall players
GOING BIG IS OLD SCHOOLA two-tower line isn’t a new concept in the NFL.
In the 1960s, Ernie “Big Cat” Ladd and Buck Buchanan – 6-9 and 6-7 – played together for the Kansas City Chiefs. Ladd also had a career with the World Wide Wrestling Federation, in which he faced other giants, including Andre The Giant.
The Dallas Cowboys’ “Doomsday Defense” of the 1970s and ’80s featured 6-6 George Andrie, 6-9 Ed “Too Tall” Jones and 6-5 Harvey Martin.
Like Kelly and Azzinaro, the Cowboys looked for height, targeting guys such as Jones, who went to Tennessee State to play basketball, and Andrie, whose college, Marquette, dropped football before his senior year.
“We were essentially drafting a big, tall guy who was an athlete,” Gil Brandt, the Cowboys’ personnel director for three decades, said of Andrie. “We drafted him and gave him something like 250 bucks and said, ‘Here, go get a membership to a health club. Start working on getting bigger and stronger.’ That’s how we did things in the old days.”
Brandt said that in 1981 – when the Cowboys’ season ended at Candlestick Park thanks largely to a certain catch by 49ers wide receiver Dwight Clark – the Cowboys led the league with 37 interceptions, despite a secondary that included a 12th-round pick, two undrafted rookies and a former college wide receiver.
That ragtag group did so well because opposing quarterbacks must have felt they were throwing into an oak forest.
“I think the reason we had such good success with that group was because of the difficulty of throwing the ball over these big, tall guys,” Brandt said.
FRIENDS SINCE FRESHMAN DAYS
The 49ers are looking for a similar dynamic.
They want talented defensive lineman who can rattle opposing quarterbacks into turnovers. And they want a deep group that can handle the long minutes Kelly’s defenses often play because his rapid-fire offense is on and off the field so quickly.
Armstead and Buckner are accustomed to the pace.
When Azzinaro was recruiting Buckner and Armstead, he told them the Ducks like to rotate their defensive linemen. If they worked their way to the second string, he promised, they’d play as freshmen.
Buckner was sold.
All three of us – me, Alex (Balducci) and Arik (Armstead) – were roommates throughout college. To be here with our old coaching staff – it’s crazy.
Defensive lineman DeForest Buckner, on his Oregon reunion as a 49er
“He said if I got into a rotation with the twos, I’d be able to get at least 30-something snaps a game,” Buckner said. “And I said, ‘Oh, man, that’d be nice. Being able to play as a true freshman? It’s a great opportunity.’ ”
The duo got more than that in 2012.
After a slew of injuries on the defensive line, Oregon relied heavily on Armstead and Buckner in a game against Cal. A week later, Armstead, Buckner and fellow freshman defensive lineman Alex Balducci started for the top-ranked Ducks in a pivotal game against No. 14 Stanford.
“We were 10-0 getting ready to play Stanford,” Azzinaro said. “If we win that game, we’re going to the national championship. I think I lost five defensive linemen the week before. So we started three true freshmen: DeForest, Balducci and Arik.”
Oregon lost 17-14 in overtime, but the shared experience forged a friendship among the three defenders. After that season, they lived together in a house off campus until Armstead left for the NFL following the 2014 season.
Now the three are back together.
Balducci, a nose tackle at Oregon, wasn’t drafted in April, but the 49ers signed him as a free agent and moved him to center. He has a good shot to end up on the 49ers’ practice squad, where he would line up against his college buddies during the week.
“It’s nuts seeing how everything came full circle,” Buckner said. “Before my first NFL game (at Levi’s Stadium), I played here twice. I played against Cal, and I played in the Pac-12 championship here. All three of us – me, Alex and Arik – were roommates throughout college. To be here with our old coaching staff – it’s crazy.”
Matt Barrows: @mattbarrows, read more about the team at sacbee.com/sf49ers.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/sports/nfl/san-francisco-49ers/article99997087.html#storylink=cpy
September 4, 2016 at 9:48 am in reply to: informal poll: Goff not starting, being #3 – disaster? not concerned? #52216wvParticipantNot worried at all.
12 months from now, if Goff still looks this bad, then yes I’m worried.
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I gotta feeling 12 months from now, the Rams will have a
No.1 WR for him to throw to, which should help.One would think thats the no.1 need at this point,
anyway.w
vwvParticipantSo now Bradford has reached the point where he is switching offensive systems…in week 1. Used to be, he had to wait till the off-season to switch systems.
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So does that mean teams dont think he’s that good, coz they keep trading him…
or does that mean teams do think he’s good, coz they keep trading For him ??He’s an enigma. Or not. I dunno.
Goff or Bradford — which would yall take. Straight up.
I’d take Goff. I think he will turn out to be better.
w
vwvParticipantSo can someone list the Rookies and UDFA’s who MADE the team?
Who are the new guys?w
vLook at my roster. The drafted rookies are Blue, the undrafted rookies are Purple.
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So Spruce was the only UDFA who made it ?
w
vwvParticipantSo can someone list the Rookies and UDFA’s who MADE the team?
Who are the new guys?w
vSeptember 3, 2016 at 3:04 pm in reply to: informal poll: Rams record…predicti-guesses (barring injuries) #52156wvParticipantBarring injuries — Eleven wins.
Gurley, Donald, Quinn. Tavon make the all-pro team.
Keenum has a deadly efficient year. Very few INTs.
Fisher wins coach of the year.
Ram fans claim he is a figurehead
and Rob Boras is the true genius.Rams bounced in first playoff game
because they cannot stop the short pass.w
vwvParticipantA non issue.
Right. It’s nothing serious like, say, a pickle jar. THAT reflects character.
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Its an odd issue. Is it a big deal or not? A cop with a Nazi or Nazi-ish tattoo.
Lets say there is nothing ugly on his record and he’s been a cop for a while.
What, if anything, should be done?I know, in the future, they will make a new policy about tattoos.
But what to do about him?It raises all kinds of questions about what criteria should be ‘deal-breakers’ as far as getting to be a law-enforcement officer. Like, what if he was a holocaust-denier — should that matter? What if he thinks black people should move to Africa — does that matter? What if he had a confederate flag tattoo?
w
vHe gets assessed on his actions like anybody else. He can believe whatever he wants, but he can’t behave however he wants.
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Well but what if he is being interviewed for a Job as a cop. Can the fact he ‘believes’ in Nazi-like ideas, be a deal-breaker?w
vSeptember 3, 2016 at 10:13 am in reply to: informal poll: Goff not starting, being #3 – disaster? not concerned? #52114wvParticipantMildly disappointed, but not concerned yet. He showed the kind of flashes you want to see in a big-talent. Looks to be just mental-processing issues at this point.
Woulda been nice if he coulda had an RG3-type first year. Ah well.
We will rally behind Case Keenum — and Donald and Quinn — and the Rams will play
good football.w
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