Tennessee Helmet Decals?

*Credit to Reed Carringer at Football Time Magazine for re-bringing this to my attention. Somewhere in the midst of transcribing the 1,500 words Butch spoke, this got lost on me. But I was in the room as it unfolded.

Tonight in a meeting with 60 student leaders from SGA and Greek Life, UT coach Butch Jones dropped a secret about an upcoming addition to UT’s helmets.

In regards to a question about a poster on the wall in the football team meeting room that reads “Lead country ‘63’ strain and swarm,” Jones launched into an explanation of what ‘63’ means within the football program.

Essentially, it means that players are expected to give three efforts over the span of each six second play.

To remind his team of this, Jones puts subliminal messages everywhere.

But here’s what he had to say about a not so subliminal way that players will be reminded of “63.”

“We’ll start something new,” Jones said. “I haven’t told this to anybody, so now you guys have it. From here on out, the person that plays with ’63 effort’ will wear a little ’63 decal’ on the back of their helmet signifying they played the hardest in the previous game.”

In regards to how common they would be on UT helmets - based on the Austin Peay game -Jones said there were a lot of players who gave one or two good efforts over a four second span.

“In order for us to play in our football program, each individual has to play hard for six seconds and give three great efforts,” Jones said. “So we’ll actually count out the efforts when we watch the film.”

The strain and swarm refer to straining as in giving effort and swarming as in swarming to the football on defense.

---- Not sure how newsworthy this truly is. But someone else reported it, so it would have been lazy just to sit here and do homework when I had the info and direct quote. Anyway, I'm sports editor at The Daily Beacon, UT's student newspaper. Follow my work on Twitter @DavidWCobb and @UTBeacon_Sports

 

 

 

A photo of a helmet with the number 63 on the side with the poster above. Sorry it's blurry, I shot this with my I-phone then zoomed in way farther than is reasonable for a weak camera.
Jones said the helmet was an old UT helmet that they put the number on to remind the team to make three efforts for a total of six seconds each play.

Enterprise journalism?

Daily Beacon design editor Katrina Roberts did a fantastic job on the football preview section. The social media story especially looks a lot better on the print page than it does on our website. Pick up a print copy or go read the print version online here! ----> http://issuu.com/utstudentpubs/docs/2013_football_preview


In the past 12 months I have bylined approximately 230 articles,. That time span includes a three month stretch spent at a radio station in Memphis when I wrote basically none. It's what I do every day. Hopefully when I graduate - and have the weight of being a full-time student off my back - I'll be doing it even more than I do now.

But what my infant journalism career has lacked is foresight. My writing is always done for the next day's paper. I'll occasionally start working on an article two days before it's due, but even that is rare.

So in some of my free time this summer, I got to thinking about what would make a good "enterprise" piece that I could realistically do.

Enterprise journalism, as I understand it, is essentially like ESPN's "Outside The Lines" except in print. This variation of reporting goes beyond the stats and relates something in sports to something more relevant to real life, and usually in more words than the 475-750 I typically get for a story.

Now, I'm fully convinced that I'll never be capable of writing anything half as riveting as the stories Outside The Lines, but I did finally get to TRY an enterprise journalism with my piece on social media in college football. It's not great. I wish I had gotten more on the use of direct messaging in recruiting. But I enjoyed mixing local and national sources to localize a national story.

And for the record, I was at SEC Media Days.

I went with the Peyton Manning/Johnny Manziel lead, because, why not? My audience is UT fans, and even though it doesn't work great, it sort of works because of the time frames and because of how crazed people are for Manning around here. Because of that I feel like it can help readers see the magnitude of Manziel's abuse of Twitter.

Yellin expressed immediate acknowledgement of the bit on coaches celebrating verbal commitments when I asked him about it. But he had to be careful with his words and I appreciate his time in helping a silly student journalist.

I legitimately think this is the first article I've ever written that's over 1,000 words. It's more of  a perspective piece than some hard-hitting thing that will make your jaw drop.

Anyway, hope it kept your attention, and hopefully I can do some more things like it once football season slows down.

Here's the link to just the online version of the story: http://utdailybeacon.com/sports/2013/aug/30/sociallyshackled/