“He was merciless; he flung rocks and crab apples and punches with equal accuracy, and at one point, in the midst of a fight over a Ping-Pong paddle, he hit one of his female cousins with a baseball bat and said he would have hit her again if his siblings hadn’t stepped in. He’d steal a bike, strip it, toss it into a fire to burn the paint off, spray-paint it, and that same afternoon, ride down the street past the house he’d stolen it from.”

“Because of his ability to withstand punches to his chest from his older brothers and sisters, because he wrestled children twice his age and ducked no fight and reveled in his own stubbornness, he had been given a nickname, truncated from Southern shorthand for a wild boar. In time, Bo-Hog became Bo.”

What a waste. Four wideouts and Barry. Give him a fullback like Moose Johnston, put him behind a Dallas-caliber All-Pro line, and he’d get his double G-note in yardage every season.

But in more traditional settings, what slows things down is the impulse of coaches to stop the action and be heard. To instruct and correct. Coaches­, after all, get into the business because they love a sport and want to see it played right. They have limited control during a game. Practice is when they can stop time and choreograph perfection. (…) It doesn’t happen at Oregon. Coaches sometimes pull players from the field for quick talks, but first they send in substitutes, and the plays keep on rolling. They look back at the films from each practice — identify mistakes — and then point them out in early-evening players’ meetings, which are also short.

I’m the only person outside of Cincinnati who realizes that Carson Palmer hasn’t been good in four years. My favorite thing about Palmer: His conventional statistics keep throwing everyone off his rancid scent — 1,855 yards (seventh overall), 12 TDs, seven picks, 83 QB rating. Not terrible, right?

So you have to dig a little … and that’s when you find out that he’s last in third-down passing (49 percent completion rate, 431 yards, 62 rating), or that defenders have dropped 215 possible Palmer interceptions (approximate), or that his receivers unofficially lead the league in walking off the field shaking their heads at one another (which, by the way, really should be a stat). If the Bengals were smart, they’d start pounding the ball with Cedric Benson and reducing Palmer’s effect on the game, but they aren’t, and that’s why I will keep picking against them.

Here’s to drafting Ryan Mallet.

Now, while Ohio University’s (my alma mater) football program has had some success with Frank Solich, I would LOVE to hire Leach to the program. I think it could add the needed boost and spark to our program.