[OaktownBear]

Oh, brother. I guess I should have realized that they would go all fanatical and pick a part what was meant to be a quick post on the subject. After all, no point that could possibly be seen as negative about Longshore could go unanswered. Hey guys! Just to let you know since you obviously don't know any of the posters here, I spent all last year taking grief for defending Tedford's decision to keep playing Longshore. I'm not a Longshore hater. I'm just not obsessed with defending everything he does even to the extent of making illogical arguments about just about every interception being the other guy's fault or arguing that somehow he was not drastically outplayed in the AF Bowl. Putting arrows and green dots and yellow dots on screen shots doesn't make your dumb arguments smarter.

Their rebuttal to my post was stupid simply because I didn't argue he did it. My point was that THEIR arguments were not convincing. It would be idiotic for me to argue that tight ends behaving as they would on a kick means that it wasn't a kick. I didn't say that. I said there could have been many reasons why they wouldn't behave differently even if it wasn't a kick, and I pulled a couple out of my ass. Here's another. If you were going to pull a stupid stunt and fake a PAT when the coach didn't call that, what would you do? A) Call a fake in the huddle and run what is obvious to the entire coaching staff the fake field goal play. or B) Run the regular kick play and pretend that their was a botched placement, pick it up and try and throw so that the coach may think you didn't do it on purpose? I guarantee you Nate didn't do A.

Further, I don't care where the hell they put the green dot and the yellow dot. The ball was down in a place where it could be kicked. This was an extra point. Kickers can stop dead and kick it from a standstill and still make it 95% of the time. Part of the kicker's job is to adjust to the placement. Nate could have placed that ball anywhere within 5 feet of the placement spot and we still make it almost every time. Certainly the kicker could adjust 6 inches and still make the kick. It was bizare that Nate picked it up. It was either really stupid or intentional. Could have been either as far as I'm concerned, but them trying to make it seem like it was drastically misplaced is not a good argument that he didn't fake it on purpose.

I have trouble with someone who claims to be a Cal expert not remembering Robertson's swan song drive a mere four years ago, but their argument on that point is even dumber. Rodgers didn't need reps, but Riley does. Well, yeah, that is true. And I'm sure that turning around and handing the ball off over an over was a great value to him. So much so that a coach who has in the past shown great appreciation to senior qb's in the past would not do the same in this situation.

Their main point seems to be "Nate wouldn't do that". Well, I don't know Nate and its clear they don't either. And I don't think it makes him a bad guy. It makes him a young man who made a stupid decision. Could I see that? Yeah.


But the main point is that they have painted with a broad brush basically characterizing WIAF as any Cyberbear crank who is on a Nate hunt. WIAF has been around for a while and one thing I know is that if WIAF is saying he knows something it is because he believes he has been given good information from solid sources. And when that has been the case, the info has almost always been true. Frankly, if he says it, the way he says it here, I tend to believe it.