Super Bowl Pre-Game

• Footblog's iTunes Super Bowl Contest Winner is...
  Feaverish! Congrats, you'll be receiving an email from Footblog shortly with your Gift Certificate. Thanks to everybody for playing along.
• Final Footblog thoughts right before kickoff...
  If Fox's Pre-Game Show is indicative of the kind of quality we can expect from the Super Bowl game, we're all going to be severely pissed off. Super Bowl Pre-Game shows have never been good television, but Fox and the NFL have just set a new bar for 'shit'. Good luck to all, and enjoy the game.
• ESPN.com: Page 2 - Interview: Malcolm Gladwell
  Best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell has set the business world abuzz with his recent books The Tipping Point (read it, loved it) and Blink (haven't read it yet). Although my favorite Gladwell works can be found in his article archive. ESPN sat down with MG and got his take on the Super Bowl, training quarterbacks in hospital trauma units and various other football-related topics. If you like Gladwell and football you'll really enjoy reading his unique perspectives. Here's a taste;

  ESPN: You provide some compelling examples of how too much data can undermine decision-making. Can you talk a little about how this might apply to sports? Is there a point, during Super Bowl prep, for example, when the info spigot should be turned off?
  
  MG: "Oh, absolutely. I think that the worst thing about the Super Bowl is the two-week layoff. I think teams get over-coached in the second week. In "Blink," I talk about how we can turn ER doctors from terrible decision-makers when it comes to diagnosing chest pain into great decision makers simply by limiting the amount of information they are given about a patient. Load them down with every conceivable piece of data, and they have real difficulty distinguishing patients with heartburn from patients who are experiencing a real heart attack. Limit them to three or four crucial pieces of data, though, and they do a great job. How can that not be true of football players as well? It's quite possible right now that Tom Brady or Donovan McNabb simply know too much about each other."
  
  on training quarterbacks...
  
  MG: "I'd run quarterbacks who don't do well under pressure through deBecker's gauntlet -- or any other kind of similar exercise so they have a sense of what REAL life-threatening stress feels like. I'd run them through a live-fire exercise at Quantico. I'd have them spend the offseason working with a trauma team in south-central L.A. It is only through repeated exposures to genuine stress that our body learns how to function effectively under that kind of pressure. I think its time we realized that a quarterback needs the same kind of exhaustive preparation for combat that we give bodyguards and soldiers"

  Hat-tip: Thank-you, Kottke

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