Please stop. Just stop. The Kansas City Chiefs are not a truly great team and I like them and Mahomes. What is ridiculous is listening to guys like you pretend to have some insight into the game that you don't have. Your argument is utterly absurd. The idea that the best teams from the following franchises Dallas Cowboys, San Francisco 49ers, Denver Broncos, New England Patriots, Pittsburgh Steelers, NY Giants, Bills, Packers, Ravens with Ray Lewis. Tampa from 2003 or even the Oilers with Moon and that Group would not have success today is just a comical assertion. Looing at one elite athlete today, Alvin Kamara, (and I am a former FSU athlete) is a guy I like a lot and he is not one of the top 75 backs in the history of the NFL.
The game began to change in 1993, I believe it was 93 when Murdoch bet 400 million on getting Fox into the NFL sports game. That 400 million, outrageous expenditure I believe eventually became a 70 billion sell. Not a bad return on 400 million.
But this moved sport really to the sport is entertainment view point. And the sport as entertainment mindset necessitated alterations and this biased things moving forward in favor of offenses in regard to structure to make the game more lively and entertaining. Even with these alterations when teams have had really elite defenses, go back and watch the Ravens and Patriots games or the Broncos and Patriots games or Seattle vs New England you did not see the same offensive out puts as you otherwise did/ do a vast majority of the time..
And from a societal standpoint there have been other factors influencing development with many of them having adverse consequences on people. Lets look at just one way alterations in society have impacted basic strength levels for example for the average population.
Here is a 2016 Article Headline from The Sun
Grip strength" of the modern man said to be 12kg LESS than it was in the 1980s
The article starts with the following "Men aged between 20 and 34 have lower "grip and pinch strength" than their counterparts three decades ago, which shows they have weaker arms and hands, a study by the Journal of Hand Therapy has found." The article continues "Dr. Fain, an assistant professor at Winston-Salem University in the US, has said men used to have stronger hands because of their repetitive tasks in manual labor." She added that this kind of day-to-day activity is more beneficial for hand grip than weight training. Dr Fain also pointed to how people tend to complete smaller hand movements more often by texting and typing."
Now that is not linked specifically to athletic performance but it does reflect something you have never considered before and I would bet that your answer would have contradicted the reality that Dr. Fain's study brings to light. Now lets look at the Dallas roster for a moment. Erik Williams, Larry Allen, Nate Newton, Tuinei, Stepnoski (the one smaller guy but great technique), Lett, Maryland, Haley, Woodson, Darrin Smith, Sanders, Novacek, Smith, Irvin, Moose, Harper, Aikman (to name a few) and we can go on and on. The idea that they are not better than Kansas City is an assertion that is laughable.
Lets look at sports like tennis for minute, and before you laugh lets look at who dominates tennis, It is not the young guys like Thiem or Zerev or Medvedev though they are all having nice careers it is Federer, Djokovic and Nadal and they have been doing it for over 15 years. Why do they do it beyond just talent??t its mindset. Its old school but never is old school really defined.. So let me define it for you in the following way.
Mindset = singular focus but this focus is developed. And here we need to look at development and I would like to shed some light on this for you. In essence skill classifications can be broken down into two basic categories with several subsets in each area. Let me give you a broad overview as to how I was trained ( I was a Harry Hopman kid and my other coaches were Sima Nikolic a Yugoslavian Davis Cup player and David Farmer who had 2 wins over Bob Lutz, Stan Smiths doubles partner (#1 in Doubles on the ATP Tour and #20 in singles on the tour) and how that shaped the systems that I am aligned to as I develop an athlete.
As you read this you may come to realize that coaching was far more sophisticated 20 years ago and 30 years ago and 40 years ago than you realize. You need to learn about coaches like Verhonasky, Tudor Bompa, Michael Yessiss and Charlie Francis. What you see sport coaches doing today is directly traceable to guys like this but then who did they learn from ?? These guys were geniuses and light years ahead of their time. And I Have been fortunate to have 3 1 on 1 conversations with Dr. Yessis.
Also my brother played on the defensive line with Billy Ray Smith and Tony Cherico at Arkansas, three cousins that played for the Univ. of Missouri, a cousin Mike Mock that played with Texas Tech and then the Jets and is Chance Mocks father #9 0n the Fab 55 as a 5 star recruit who played behind Vince Young and a cousin that played at Houston when Houston had two of Mikes Longview teammates, Hosea Taylor and Randy Swisher and lost in the Cotton Bowl to Montana and Notre Dame after being up I think by 17 points in the 4th quarter.
So here is Principle 4 of my developmental framework and again a lot of this comes from my adaptations of Verhoshansky, Bompa, Yessis and Francis's work. So I give you a glimpse into the systems I utilize in developing athletes..
- Principle #4 is systems. If you have a common language and well thought out player goals but not meaningful systems, you cannot create autonomy in players. The goal is to have talented capable players able to execute the system but who are autonomous and have the capacity to move into a necessary go to loop when plays/ matches break down. The response is instantaneous, and everyone is on the same page under pressure. I want players to be good compensators and at ease if they must move into an alternative game style in order to have success. I do not want players responses to be fear based. We work on helping our athletes move, in the midst of competition, from Sympathetic Nervous System Dominance (Fight or Flight Responses) to Parasympathetic Nervous System Dominance (where the mind controls the body….we are also assessing and teaching elements such as breathing strategies e.g. it is important for the axial skeleton to achieve full excursion of inhalation and exhalation. If you do not get these, you will have a limitation in the athlete’s ability to position the hip and shoulder socket which will limit extremity motion. Joel Jamieson (and Joel's work is the most recent addition to my training modalities) who was George St Pierre’s and Anderson Silva’s conditioning coach addresses these type elements in his HRV (Heart Rate Variability) Conditioning Certification which I have obtained. Joel breaks conditioning into 3 essential types of days based on the loading level of the conditioning method employed on a given day. They are as follows A) - Development, B) - Stimulation and C) - Regeneration and I have adopted his framework with my programming. Additionally, if you are interested in how to sequence conditioning work and strength work there is a great article on Peak Performance (PPonline), that addresses the role of AMPK and MTORC1 in this determination. In my programming we categorize skills into 5 basic areas that can be broken down into 2 essential key subsets. Area 1 = strength and conditioning skills, in this area as players become more advanced I utilize not only HRV (Heart Rate Variability) training but also utilize Max Aerobic Speed and Anaerobic speed reserve calculations to structure HIIT running programs for athletes and we combine these with a variety of metabolic protocols and linear and lateral training methods to address conditioning and endurance and Area 2 which is what we call exploitation skills (I was fortunate to come across a German sport scientist work several years ago who provided this breakdown). In area 2 we have 3 essential skills which can be further broken down as we begin to do more specialized work with a given athlete beyond the general preparation/ foundational period of their development. In category 2 we are initially dealing with speed, coordination, and flexibility. I have come to believe over the last 15-20 years that the key skill in area two that others are dependent on is coordination. Skill acquisition, I have found, is dependent on movement quality and coordination is what supports all skill development in area 2.
If you read this you see that movement is an information processing based skill and that all skills then feed into this loop. Doesn't matter how strong or fast you are if you are failing to process information in the right way or if your mind is not aligned to the process in the right way continually on every rep (every rep not 98% or 89% but on 100 % of them) you take in a game or match. Old school players have a singular way of being in competition and Champions know how to win. If we align ourselves to your assertions Feder, Djokovic and Nadal would have no prayer against the New Superior athlete that you herald and yet they beat them up on a daily basis.. Your absolutely incorrect in your assertions... I really like Kansas City but you and I are viewing the game through 2 very different lenses...!!
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