An AP story on possible successors to Brown grad Bill O'Brien had all the usual suspects of course. But it concluded with an "Extra points" note that tossed out a familiar name in these parts (and no, not Tim Murphy this time). The note read:Other possibilities include Ball State coach Pete Lembo and BYU coach Bronco Mendenhall.I hadn't given Pete Lembo any thought with regard to the Penn State job but the onetime Dartmouth assistant is an interesting prospect given his track record at Lehigh, Elon and now Ball State. I suspect Nittany Nation would howl if he were one of the finalists but knowing Pete pretty well and having followed his career, I can absolutely understand why the AP writer tossed his name into the ring as an outside possibility.
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The New York Times has an interesting story on the Stanford football training program which it describes as "among the most distinct in college sports." Strength coach Shannon Turley refers to his program as developing "real-world applicable man strength."From the story:
From 2006, the year before Turley arrived on the Farm, as Stanford’s campus is known, through last season, the number of games missed because of injury on the two-deep roster dropped by 87 percent. In 2012, only two Cardinal players required season-ending or postseason surgical repair; this year, only one.More from the story:
His approach is grounded in physics, on the premise that low man wins on contact, that to get low requires mobility and stability and the ability to apply force in the opposite direction. His players bench press, but he cares more about how they lift — with hands closer together, without bouncing the bar off their chests — than how much. He wants them to bend all the way down when they squat.
Freshmen in Turley’s program do not lift weights upon arrival. Instead, for the first few weeks, they do “body work,” or push-ups and pull-ups and squats or lunges without weights; basically old-school, military calisthenics.
