Both Brook and Destiny laughed at me when I blushed. I’d gone and assumed and made an ass out of myself.
“I’m David A. Dawson. Actor, model, and future Bond. You can either call me David or Bond, Ian Bond,” I said dramatically.
“I’m Chrissy. We moved here a few weeks ago. My dad worked for the government, and we were posted in Korea until he got a job at State as a teacher.”
We decided to go to my usual table while the two rivals worked out their differences.
◊◊◊
Brit had skipped school to be with Precious when she had her kittens. She sent me pictures of mama and her five babies, which I forwarded to Halle and copied her mom. She needed to tell me which one she wanted since the stud fee was usually the pick of the litter or the price of a kitten. Personally, I was worried Halle might owe money if the kittens were anything like Precious. I won’t repeat what Rita wrote back. She was adamant that one pet was all Halle would get as long as she lived under Rita’s roof. The name-calling was unnecessary. Wasn’t there an unwritten rule about
Halle texted back that since I allowed it to happen, I had to take her kitten. Of course, I forwarded that to my parents. Dad wanted to know when I planned to move out. My mom was mysteriously silent on the matter, which scared me a little.
When Chrissy and I joined our table, everyone seemed to be divided. Those who’d met the ‘cat from hell’ recommended not to get a kitten. That was except for Wolf, who thought he needed a guard cat. To me, that was a great idea since Precious would freeze any would-be intruder when she yowled at them. For the uninitiated among my peers, I volunteered to make introductions to Precious. If you hadn’t experienced her displeasure, it was a little hard to describe.
Cassidy suggested that we needed to go to the dojo for the offer of the proposed introductions to Precious. I suspected she was upset I’d ruined her perfect record of taking down guys at our school—a fact I was freely sharing with anyone who would listen. With the dojo comment, I quickly reassessed my earlier comments concerning my little ninja’s takedown ability. I knew she could cause me way more pain than Precious ever could. Maybe I should reassess why I hung out with girls who caused me pain.
I still wasn’t happy with Cassidy and decided I would wait for her dad to talk to her before I agreed to hang out with her.
◊◊◊
At football practice, we did something new. On Mondays, we usually watched game film to do the postmortem of the previous game and then watched video of our upcoming opponent. Today, Coach Stevens, our special teams coach, ran the meeting.
“Part of my job is to do research on kickoffs. Kick it through the end zone or kick it short. The risk of a long kickoff is that they may pick up more yardage with a return. I was leaning towards the short kick because the New England Patriots started kicking the ball short so they could pin their opponents further back. I mean, seriously. If they’re doing it, there has to be a good reason for it.
“Then I ran across something interesting that changed my thinking completely. I’d been focused on the wrong thing. The Patriots were the key to my discovery. They brought in a high school coach from Arkansas whose team has won seven state championships in the past fifteen years, including the last four. He basically says that risk-averse football is all wrong, and he has the stats to back it up.
“His premise is that turnovers, not field position, win games,” Coach Stevens said.
I looked over at Coach Hope to see his reaction. His whole coaching philosophy when he came here was one of good defense and field position. I expected to see him shut this down. What I saw instead from his body language was that he was on board with what Coach Stevens proposed.
“When I first talked to the coaches about this fundamental change of philosophy, they were skeptical, so I proved it to them. Our football software makes it easy to research trends. While they were on board with the idea that turnovers win games, they were hesitant about the field-position argument. What we confirmed was that the reward of a turnover outweighed the risk of giving up field position.
“In my opinion, Coach Mason put it best: he said that they keep the turnover stat for a reason. I called Bo Harrington at Alabama and asked him if he had any stats on how turnovers correlate to wins. Bo pulled four years of college football data from across the country. Apparently, they have staff that can do that for them. Anyway, what they found supported what this Arkansas coach was saying. There is a direct correlation between turnover margin and wins. In a twelve-game season, if you can maintain a plus-1 margin, you will win eight to nine of your games. If you push it to plus 2, you’ll win all of your games.
“I want to remind everyone that while turnovers are important, they don’t guarantee victory. You still have to play football,” Coach Stevens warned.
