The NFL draft is always an exciting time of the year. After the Super Bowl there is a lag in the action and then the draft gets people thinking about the season again. This year is no different as there are some really good players coming out of college. There are also some really bad teams that will have the chance to improve themselves.
The Rams have the number one pick and they were just awful in 2009. The Raiders, Bucs, Chiefs are amongst some of the other teams will good picks. Drafting a bad player early in the draft can really set back your franchise a few years. The Lions had that problem in the past and are working on improving still to the day.
Some of the best players in college often do not turn out to be good pros. I think this years class all could be good. Many think Suh will be the first pick of the draft since he was so dominating at Nebraska. I think the first quarterback taken will be either Jimmy Clausen or Sam Bradford. Each is very talented and should be able to be productive in their rookie year.
While Cornell basketball is only one of the 36 varsity sports at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York it is the one sport that most Americans think of when their minds wander to Cornell athletics (which is not very often).
Cornell basketball made history during the 2009-2010 season by cracking into the top 25 in the ESPN/USA Today coaches poll for the first time in decades. In fact, the last time the Cornell Big Red hoops team was ranked in the top 25 Harry Truman was in office and the date was January 3, 1951. That date marks over 59 years between appearances in the top 25 polls.
Cornell University is no stranger to top 25 rankings, however up until this season their specialty was the annual US News and World Report publication that ranks the top universities in America (Cornell finished number 15 in the 2010 edition). The very fact that Cornell has had such a long absence from the upper echelon of college basketball has many devout hard court fans scratching their heads and wondering if the ranking is deserved or merely the result of victories against weak opponents in an unusually weak year for dynasty college hoops programs. Uninformed skeptics need not look further than the resume Cornell has built up through the first two thirds of the season to realize that the program has in fact been turned around under head coach Steve Donahue. Through January, 2010 the team already has victories over Alabama, St. John's, Drexel, and a Harvard team touting a NBA prospect (Jeremy Lin). Despite a resume with impressive victories it was probably a narrow loss that really put Cornell back on the map. On January 6, 2010 Cornell lost on the road to the number one ranked Kansas Jayhawks in a game where Cornell led until the last minute of play.
The history of football and Yale football are more correlated than even the most devout football fans realize. Yale football has been around since the beginning of football and in many respects the Yale football program is responsible for the current game that is played on high school fields on Friday nights and in NFL stadiums on Sundays. While many people are aware that football is a modern adaptation of the game rugby (which is interestingly an adaptation of a similar game played by the ancient Greeks) few people realize how the European centric game of the nineteenth century commuted across the pond to eventually become what is by many measures the most popular sport in America.
In the mid-1800s rugby became a popular pastime on many of the New England area based college campuses that would later become known as members of the Ivy League (a distinction created only as recently as 1954). Chief amongst the rugby enthusiasts were students at Yale, Harvard, and Princeton whose taste for the game was a direct result of the English schooling many pupils had received before enrolling at these American institutions with strong ties to the United Kingdom.
The man widely credited with being the revolutionary of modern American football is Walter Camp, a Connecticut born Yale alum who by the age of only thirty-three had already acquired the title of the "Father of American Football." Camp was an 1880 graduate of Yale University and would go on to serve as the head coach at Yale from 1888-1891 before moving to the west coast to serve as the first coach at Stanford University. Camp took over the head coaching position at Stanford in the school's second season after Stanford played their inaugural 1891 season without a head coach.
While fair-weather sports viewers might get all wound up for Super Bowl Sunday, true sports fans know that there's a lot more to watching the game than simply tuning in once a year. After all, anyone can watch the big game, but it's the road to that stadium that's really interesting.
However, it can be pretty tough to watch your favorite team, especially if you live in a different city than where the games are on. And there's nothing quite as embarrassing as putting on your jersey and walking into the local sports bar, only to find out that the bartender has no intention of switching the game over and the half-drunk crowd is disinterested in your pleas to watch your favorite team. There's also something to be said about watching games with friends, as it is a much more enjoyable experience than sitting somewhere alone.
But a lot of sports fans think that living outside of a given sports team's city means that it's impossible to catch the progression of the season, except with day-after newspaper articles and online updates. Thankfully, this isn't true. If you want to root for your home team from just about anywhere, it's definitely possible--and without the use of speakerphone or the internet, too. For those who need the score the day-of, no ifs ands or buts, there is only one solution that will do: NFL Sunday Ticket.
Half way through the season, the football team that you welcomed to your first training session should hopefully have evolved before your very eyes. As the season progresses the players should now be starting to look like a unit. This mid way point through the season means your training will have to be adapted as you go along.
How you adjust to the ever changing dynamics of your teams exercises will identify if you still keep the training as exciting and fun with their skill development or if the training session development just grinds to a halt. You will have to adjust your training plans, review each players progress with the parents are all essential mid season responsibilities that have to be looked at as the time goes on. After watching your team playing for half a season you will start to identify which players are catching on to the skills that are taught, and the players that are struggling a bit or are lagging behind.
I know that there are some basketball fans out there saying to themselves, "how dare he even think of writing an article with a title like that!" But truth be told, I am not the only person who has asked themselves this question. Lebron James has everything going for himself right now. He is young and he is in charge. Like it or not he is one of the best to ever play the game and that is all there is to it.
I would have to say that aside from Kobe their is no other player who's name can even be mentioned in the same sentence as his right now. Of course Dwayne Wade is a great player but he has yet to show the same charisma on the court that Lebron has. Then we have Paul Pierce, which is also an excellent player in his own right but he is just not as good as Lebron.
If you've looked online for exercises to increase vertical jump, you've probably realized that the advice is plentiful and varied. From my years of experience working with athletes, I have realized there are 3 critical exercises you must do to increase your vertical leap:
- Squats, More specifically free weight squats. You want to do free weight squats as opposed to squats on a leg press or other machine because free weight squats, when done correctly, will also strengthen your core. This is extremely important as the core is a key area you need to strengthen if you want to increase your vertical leap. Free weight squats are one of the key exercises to increase vertical jump because they will strengthen your quads, hamstrings and glutes, which are all essential for vertical explosion off of the ground.
- Calf raises are another one of the critical exercises to increase vertical jump because your calves are a key muscle group that give you both power and explosiveness. There are a multitude of ways to do calf raises to increase your calf strength, but you want to make sure you pick a calf raise exercise that is both comfortable as well as challenging.
- Leg raises, What I mean by leg raises are the kind where you hang from a chin-up bar and lift your knees to your chest. This is a critical exercise to increase vertical leap because it not only strengthens your abs (part of your core), but it also strengthens your hip flexors, which provide additional explosiveness. There are additional exercises to increase vertical jump, but these 3 are the primary ones I like to target. These should get you on the right path to increasing your vertical jump.
