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Mandel’s Final Thoughts: Kirby Smart’s Georgia defense unleashes havoc on Texas offense

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Mandel’s Final Thoughts: Kirby Smart’s Georgia defense unleashes havoc on Texas offense

And now, 20 Final Thoughts from a college football weekend filled with wild comebacks, big-time performances and one heck of a mess to clean up off the field in Austin.

1. All the gentlemen who made picks on ESPN’s “College GameDay” set Saturday morning said No. 1 Texas would beat No. 5 Georgia that night. It was a perfectly reasonable prediction based on how both teams had looked in the weeks leading up to their showdown.

Unfortunately for them, past performance does not guarantee future results, especially when college players are involved.

2. In front of a stadium-record 105,215 fans, Kirby Smart’s Bulldogs (6-1, 4-1 SEC) unleashed the most havoc-wreaking defensive performance of the season in a 30-15 win. It got so bad, so fast for Texas (6-1, 2-1 SEC), trailing 20-0 in the second quarter, that Steve Sarkisian briefly benched starting quarterback Quinn Ewers for Arch Manning, only to go back to Ewers after two series. Neither had a chance, given the Horns offensive line had no answers for Georgia pass rushers Jalon Walker (three sacks, four QB hurries), Mykel Williams (two sacks) and Damon Wilson II (one strip-sack).

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This was precisely the Georgia juggernaut many envisioned when it was designated the preseason No. 1 team and again when it blitzed Clemson 34-3 in the season opener. That makes it a mystery where that team went in between. It was only three weeks ago that the Dawgs fell behind Alabama 30-7 at halftime and only a week ago that they allowed 31 points to Mississippi State. But it doesn’t matter now, does it?

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3. Had Texas come back and won, we might have had a ferocious officiating scandal. Late in the third quarter, with Georgia up 23-8, Horns cornerback Jahdae Barron picked off Carson Beck near the sideline and ran it back to the Georgia 9-yard line. Officials initially negated it with a horrendous pass-interference call, at which point Texas students began pelting the field with objects. After a five-minute delay, the officials huddled and eventually, picked up the flag, eliciting much confusion, because defensive pass interference is not reviewable by replay. But this was decided on the field, not in the booth. Ewers threw a touchdown two plays later, only for Beck and Georgia to answer immediately.


Trevor Etienne scored three rushing touchdowns to lead Carson Beck, right, and the Georgia Bulldogs past No. 1 Texas on Saturday. (Tim Warner / Getty Images)

This did not comfort Smart, who said after the game, “Now, we’ve set a precedent that (if) you throw a bunch of stuff on the field and endanger athletes, you can get your call reversed.” To be clear: The final call was the correct one. But the SEC had better act decisively before this becomes a thing.

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4. Georgia may well turn around and lay an egg against Florida in a couple of weeks, but it can afford it. With two wins over current top-10 teams, Georgia has ample margin of error between now and the College Football Playoff. That said, Beck remains cause for concern. He threw three interceptions (two in the first quarter) and finished 23 of 41 for just 175 yards. Beck, who has thrown eight picks in his past four games, is not as comfortable as he was last season when he had ever-reliable targets Brock Bowers and Ladd McConkey.

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5. That Alabama first-half explosion against Georgia on Sept. 28 now looks like an aberration for both sides. No. 11 Tennessee (6-1, 3-1 SEC) salvaged its season and put No. 7 Alabama’s (5-2, 2-2 SEC) season on the brink of disaster with a 24-17 win at Neyland Stadium. Tennessee’s defense has been stellar all season, but this was its masterpiece. Tide star Jalen Milroe completed a season-low 55.6 percent of his passes, threw two interceptions and ran for just 11 yards. Meanwhile, previously struggling Vols quarterback Nico Iamaleava had his signature performance to date, setting up one go-ahead touchdown with a 55-yard pass to Dont’e Thornton Jr. and throwing a 16-yard score to Chris Brazzell II after Alabama reclaimed the lead.

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And, of course, no Tennessee win would be complete without a big Dylan Sampson day. The Vols’ star running back carried 26 times for 139 yards and two TDs.

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6. This is quickly becoming a nightmare first season for Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer. First, he lost to Vanderbilt. Now he’s on the wrong end of the Tide’s earliest second loss since Nick Saban’s first season, in 2007. And goodness, was his team undisciplined. Alabama committed 15 penalties, including a personal foul on receiver Kendrick Law that turned a late fourth-and-7 into a fourth-and-22. The Tide still got the ball back with 1:28 left and a chance to send it to overtime, but Milroe, whose decision-making lately has been shaky, threw a ball into coverage that Will Brooks picked off.

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Milroe, like his coach, has had better days.

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7. While Alabama falters, rival LSU continues to surge. The eighth-ranked Tigers (6-1, 3-0 SEC) went on the road and hammered Arkansas (4-3, 2-2 SEC) 34-10. Freshman Caden Durham (21 carries, 101 yards, three TDs) had his second 100-yard output in three games. But the face of the Tigers this season is remarkable linebacker Whit Weeks. The sophomore had 18 tackles against Ole Miss last week. This week, he turned the entire game with LSU leading 16-10 when he rushed the passer, tipped Taylen Green’s pass into the air, caught the ball and returned it to the 2.

There’s no top-five showdown in the SEC next week, but the stakes are no lower. LSU visits No. 14 Texas A&M (6-1, 4-0 SEC), which beat Mississippi State 34-24. The LSU-A&M winner will be alone in first place in the 16-team conference.

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8. Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione said he gave third-year coach Brent Venables a raise and extension last summer as a sign of “stability and strength” entering the SEC. All it did was make it harder to get out of a problematic situation.

South Carolina (4-3, 2-3 SEC) went to Norman and raced to a 32-3 halftime lead — the largest of any OU opponent in that stadium in 27 years — in handing the Sooners (4-3, 1-3 SEC) a humiliating 35-9 defeat. Oklahoma has scored five offensive touchdowns during its past four games. Venables’ surprise decision during a Sept. 21 loss to Tennessee to bench decorated quarterback Jackson Arnold for true freshman Michael Hawkins Jr. initially provided some hope, but OU went back to Arnold on Saturday after Hawkins committed turnovers on his first three series.

Injuries have decimated the Sooners’ receiving corps, but that’s not the only problem. Venables, who went 6-7 and 10-3 in his first two seasons, is now 11-11 in conference games.

9. Illinois honored the 100th anniversary of Red Grange’s famous six-TD game against Michigan by wearing 1924-style uniforms. Michigan played its part by showcasing a 1924-caliber passing game. The Wolverines’ third attempt at a starting quarterback in Jack Tuttle did little to reverse their fortunes. The No. 22 Illini (6-1, 3-1 Big Ten) won 21-7, marking the second time in three seasons Bret Bielema’s team has won six of its first seven games, and its fan base seems galvanized. A sold-out Memorial Stadium got to see Illinois’ first win over the Wolverines since 2009.

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Meanwhile, Michigan (4-3, 2-2 Big Ten) scored its fewest points in a decade. That’s the best it could muster following an off week.

10. As impressive as Indiana looked during its 6-0 start, I was reticent to use “Indiana” and “Playoff” in the same sentence. Not anymore. The 16th-ranked Hoosiers (7-0, 4-0 Big Ten) smacked Nebraska 56-7, despite star quarterback Kurtis Rourke leaving with a thumb injury. The Huskers (5-2, 2-2 Big Ten) aren’t Oregon, but they did enter the game at 5-1 with a top-10 defense. That didn’t stop IU from averaging nearly 8 yards per play. The Indiana defense produced five turnovers, including three interceptions from Nebraska quarterback Dylan Raiola.

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Rourke’s injury seemed minor, and Indiana now plays two more middling opponents, Washington and Michigan State, before a Nov. 9 home date with Michigan. It could be the biggest game in Bloomington in more than a half-century. According to The Athletic’s model, the Hoosiers now have a 61 percent chance to make the Playoff.

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11. Lincoln Riley forever will get credit for developing Baker Mayfield, Kyler Murray, Jalen Hurts and Caleb Williams. But it now seems those quarterbacks helped mask Riley’s head-coaching shortcomings.

USC’s coach has lost nine of his past 14 games, and somehow, Saturday’s 29-28 defeat at Maryland (4-3, 1-3 Big Ten) was the worst one yet. The Terps were winless in the Big Ten, having lost 37-10 at home to Northwestern eight days earlier. And the Trojans (3-4, 1-4 Big Ten) led 28-22 with two minutes left, facing a fourth-and-1 at the Maryland 24, but rather than trying to get 1 yard, Riley opted to attempt a 41-yard field goal, which the Terps blocked. They then drove for the go-ahead touchdown and stopped USC’s last-ditch drive.

Riley admittedly has suffered some tough luck. All four of USC’s losses came down to the final possession. But this one should have never been a close game to begin with.

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12. Sixth-ranked Miami (7-0, 3-0 ACC) is doing its best to make every week an adventure. The Canes did not need another last-second escape this week at Louisville (4-3, 2-2 ACC). But Cardinals quarterback Tyler Shough (31 of 51 for 342 yards, four TDs, zero INTs) kept pace with Miami star Cam Ward (21 of 32, 319 yards, four TDs, zero INTs) for much of the day until the Canes wrapped up a 52-45 victory. Miami’s defense has been an issue for three straight games, but Ward, who should remain near the top of Heisman Watch lists, is the kind of big-time QB who can help mask deficiencies. The question is, can he do it all the way to an ACC championship?

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13. No. 9 Iowa State (7-0, 4-0 Big 12) and No. 13 BYU (7-0, 4-0 Big 12) are defying the prevailing theory that the Big 12 is wide open. Both remain perfect, thanks to game-winning drives by their quarterbacks and wins by identical scores.

Trailing 35-31 to visiting Oklahoma State (3-4, 0-4 Big Ten) and with his team stuck at its own 38 with fewer than 30 seconds left, BYU’s Jake Retzlaff scrambled 27 yards and two plays later, hit receiver Darius Lassiter for a 35-yard touchdown to prevail 38-35 late Friday night. Retzlaff is hardly a “wow” passer, but he’s a gamer. And BYU’s offense is more explosive now that running backs LJ Martin (20 carries, 120 yards, two TDs) and Hinckley Ropati (six carries, 47 yards) are both healthy.

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And Iowa State found itself in a dogfight at home against visitor UCF (3-4, 1-3 Big 12), which ran for 354 yards against the Cyclones. Trailing 35-30 with 1:47 left, Rocco Becht led his team 80 yards in 11 plays, then converted a two-point conversion for the win. Iowa State is 7-0 for the second time in program history.

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14. Much to the chagrin of its many haters, Colorado (5-2, 3-1 Big 12) is off to just its second 5-2 start since 2005 following a 34-7 rout at Arizona (3-4, 1-3). The Buffs rebounded from last week’s heartbreaking home loss to Kansas State with the best defensive performance of the two-year Deion Sanders era, notching six sacks and three turnovers. Arizona quarterback Noah Fifita threw for just 138 yards.

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CU will play for a bowl berth next week against Cincinnati, which was always the primary goal for Sanders in Year 2. But at this point, he should aim higher than that.

15. In its first game away from home since Sept. 14, No. 12 Notre Dame (6-1) held Georgia Tech’s top-25 rushing offense to 64 yards on 29 attempts in an easy 31-13 win at Mercedes Benz Stadium. Marcus Freeman even pulled out a fake punt and a fake field goal (and both worked).

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Before the season, it seemed possible the Irish might not face many ranked opponents, but they’re 2-0 in those games so far (at Texas A&M and against Louisville) and another Top 25 foe awaits next week at another NFL venue: undefeated Navy at Met-Life Stadium.

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16. Embattled Florida coach Billy Napier refuses to go quietly into the night. In the Gators’ first game since losing veteran quarterback Graham Mertz for the season with an ACL injury, they rode a pair of true freshmen to a 48-20 rout of Kentucky (3-4, 1-4 SEC). Five-star quarterback DJ Lagway completed seven passes, but five of them went for 40-plus yards, and running back Jadan Baugh, making his first career start, ran for 106 yards and a program record-tying five touchdowns.

After an off week, Florida (4-3, 2-2 SEC) begins its long-awaited gauntlet of Georgia, Texas and LSU back-to-back-to-back. So it’s good for Napier he won this one.

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17. Auburn (2-5, 0-4 SEC) is so beatable these days that Missouri quarterback Brady Cook had time to leave in the first quarter, go to the hospital, get an MRI on his ankle, come back and lead 19th-ranked Mizzou (6-1, 2-1 SEC) to two fourth-quarter touchdowns and win 21-17. Cook hit Mookie Cooper for a 78-yard pass to set up a touchdown that cut Auburn’s lead to 17-14, then drove his team 95 yards for the go-ahead score. Cook threw for more yards in a quarter-plus (194) than Auburn quarterback Payton Thorne did the entire game (176). Looking to keep its CFP hopes alive, Mizzou visits Tuscaloosa next week to face a desperate and vulnerable Alabama team.

18. Cincinnati (5-2, 3-1 Big 12) quietly has won three of its first four conference games, with an overtime loss in the other, after shutting down visiting Arizona State 24-14. Second-year coach Scott Satterfield did not engender confidence with his 3-9 debut last season, but the program, which won at least nine games five straight years under the departed Luke Fickell, seems to have stabilized. The Sun Devils (5-2, 2-2 Big 12) missed quarterback Sam Leavitt due to a rib injury. Former Georgia Tech and Nebraska quarterback Jeff Sims was ineffective. Also: Coach Kenny Dillingham was so peeved about missing two field-goal attempts that he vowed to hold an open kicker tryout on Monday.

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19. Michigan State coach Jonathan Smith’s first season has been expectedly rocky, but one of the sport’s most respected offensive coaches showed what he’s all about in the Spartans’ 32-20 home win over Iowa (4-3, 2-2 Big Ten). Smith’s team ran for 212 yards against the Hawkeyes’ normally stingy defense. Talented quarterback Aidan Chiles, who followed Smith from Oregon State, was a big part of the Michigan State (4-3, 2-2 Big Ten) attack with 11 carries for 51 yards. It may be too little, too late for this season, but Chiles may be part of bigger wins down the line.

20. Finally, congrats to FCS No. 2 North Dakota State for ending a five-game losing streak to No. 1 South Dakota State (5-2, 2-1 MVC) in dramatic fashion. The Bison (7-1, 4-0 MVC) trailed 9-7 for the entire second half until Cam Miller drove them 92 yards, culminating in a 20-yard touchdown to RaJa Nelson with 1:49 left. A Logan Kopp interception on the Jackrabbits’ next drive sealed a 13-9 win. The Dakota Marker returns to Fargo for the first time since 2019.

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While impossible to confirm, it’s believed not one single person there suggested the game was meaningless because the FCS has a 24-team playoff.

(Top photo of Julian Humphrey: Tim Warner / Getty Images)

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Why Manchester United signing a running coach makes sense – even if it wasn’t Amorim’s call

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Why Manchester United signing a running coach makes sense – even if it wasn’t Amorim’s call

As January transfer window signings go, a 78-year-old American track and field coach is unconventional. For Manchester United and Ruben Amorim, even if it wasn’t the head coach’s call, it actually makes a lot of sense. The appointment of Harry Marra, on a consultancy basis for a few weeks, is designed to improve United individually and collectively at covering ground efficiently and repeatedly.

Marra, who graduated from Syracuse University in 1974 with a master’s degree in physical education and exercise science, is best known for coaching USA decathlete Ashton Eaton to gold at the Olympics (London 2012, Rio 2016) and World Championships (Moscow 2013, Beijing in 2015, where he also got the world record, since beaten). Eaton still holds the world decathlon best over 400 metres (45.00 seconds), and in the top 25 decathlon performances of all time, his 10.23s 100m ranks second.

Marra’s relationship with Eaton dated back to the early 2010s when they worked together at the University of Oregon, where Marra also coached Brianne Theisen to NCAA titles and collegiate records. As a heptathlete, she went on to win an Olympic bronze (Rio 2016) and world silvers (Moscow 2013, Beijing 2015).

Marra also spent over 10 years working simultaneously with the San Francisco Giants baseball team and as USA Track & Field’s decathlon coach.

In 2018, Marra coached Indonesian sprinter Lalu Muhammad Zohri to gold at the World Athletics U20 Championships. With a personal best down to 10.03, Zohri is on the cusp of becoming only the 11th Asian man to break the 10-second barrier in the 100m.

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What’s this got to do with Manchester United? Quite a lot. It’s a sign of Marra’s coaching quality that, over 40 years he has had success with teams, groups and individuals of varying ages, backgrounds, starting levels and resources. If the critique is that his age makes him out of touch, consider the open-mindedness and adaptability he has needed to work with top athletes and teams for longer than Amorim has been alive.


Marra with Eaton in 2016 (Andy Lyons/Getty Images)

More importantly, running more and better is something Amorim wants United to do. “If you want to win the Premier League, you have to run like mad dogs,” he said in December, before a 3-2 defeat against Nottingham Forest, his fifth match in charge. “If not, we are not going to do it (win), that is clear. It’s impossible to win the Premier League without a team that, every moment, runs back, runs forward. Even with the best starting XI, without running, they will not win anything”.

The sports science-led revolution of the late 2000s catalysed a transformation of the Premier League into Europe’s most athletic league, and it’s still increasing in intensity. One study of Premier League games between 2006 and 2013 showed 30 and 35 per cent increases in high-intensity and sprint distances. Another paper found rises of 12 and 15 per cent in the same metrics from 2014-15 to 2018-19. Data from SkillCorner shows the rise has continued. This season, high-intensity distance match averages are 16 per cent up on the 2018-19 campaign. Sprint frequencies have risen by a fifth and sprint distance over 23 per cent.

“It was not me, it was the club,” said Amorim of the appointment of Marra. “We are always trying to bring experienced people to share knowledge with the staff, to understand the body, to understand how you can improve our players. It was not me, it was not something new. He’s not there to coach the team, he’s there to coach the staff about everything about the running, et cetera. It’s a simple thing that we are used to doing to improve as a club.”

Amorim wanting to build a team on intensity and physicality is not new. Tottenham Hotspur, Liverpool and Bournemouth all had or have identities underpinned by pressing and aggressive running. His predecessor, Erik ten Hag, wanted United to be “the best transition team in the world”. He also turned to specialist coaching, appointing Benni McCarthy as a striker coach before Marcus Rashford produced his most prolific season in 2022-23 (30 goals in all competitions).

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Importantly, any specialist sprinting coach is not going to make players significantly faster. Acceleration, power and top speed can be refined but not taught. Those attributes owe so much to a player’s physiological predisposition. That is shown by the career trajectory of elite sprinters, whose talent is obvious in childhood and before deliberate training, and they reach world-class or peak status much earlier than other sports.

Instead, a specialist coach should help identify and minimise issues in mechanics that might lead to injury. Last season, United had the most time-loss injuries in the league and struggled to name a consistent back four. Harry Maguire and Mason Mount, who were injured multiple times, are examples of “problem cases” and “repeat rehabbers”, terms used by Jonas Dodoo, a performance consultant with Brighton & Hove Albion and Newcastle United who specialises in movement and sprint coaching and analysis.

Dodoo, whose background in sprint coaching came in rugby and then athletics, first worked as a performance consultant in football in 2016 with Derby County. He cites Theo Walcott and Tariq Lamptey — two players with notable pace — among the players he has helped rehabilitate. He describes the coaching model he uses as: “Brake, plant, separate. That’s what they need to be able to do.”


Marra coaching Eaton and Theisen in Eugene, Oregon in 2013 (Doug Pensinger/Getty Images)

“They need to be able to brake aggressively and efficiently so that they can plant effectively and separate from their opponents, and run fast,” says Dodoo. “You need to be conditioned to create the types of forces needed, but also need efficiency, and to do that repeatedly — 40, 60 times in the game you might have to accelerate, and the forces are even more stressful in a body in a deceleration.”

Completely altering a player’s mechanics would take the kind of time, training and resources that football rarely offers, but there are still gains to be had when coaching sprinting. “You want to make sure that they can get into the positions and postures needed to decelerate, accelerate and to change direction well,” says Dodoo. “That’s the premise you start (coaching) around. In terms of sprint ability, you can make very quick and effective changes to the first three steps that make sure that they know how to create the forces in the right direction.

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“If you can accelerate very well on your first three steps and if you know how to stop aggressively in your first three steps of deceleration, then that can have a fundamental effect on your physical qualities and performance.”

The nature of football and its game phases (with so much settled possession, set pieces and 22 players on a 105m x 68m pitch) means players very rarely hit their actual top speeds in matches. It is the reason, at PSV’s academy, their benchmark for first-team level performance in a 30m sprint test also includes a threshold for how fast players need to cover the first 10m.

Faster and more efficient accelerations and decelerations buy players time and space (or reduce it for opponents). “If your gear one is really aggressive, then actually the rest of it can be done scanning and preparing for the next action,” says Dodoo.

United’s academy — in Rashford, Alejandro Garnacho, Amad and Anthony Elanga (sold to Nottingham Forest in July 2023) — has developed some of the best straight-line runners and accelerators in the division. “Elanga is the model,” says Dodoo, who co-owns Speedworks Training, a sprint coaching business that developed a database of athletes “across football, NFL, elite and international rugby. We’ve got 5,000 runs for 3,000 players. What we consider as being very efficient and effective is what he (Elanga) produces in his running”.

In the first two months of this season, Rashford, Garnacho and Elanga all made the list for the top 10 highest speeds in a Premier League game — because players rarely hit top speed, calling them the ‘fastest’ would be a misnomer. That Amad did not might be because of his gait. He stands out for taking a lot of short steps with low heel lift (and has a choppy arm style reminiscent of fellow Ivorian and 100m sprinter Marie-Josee Ta Lou) whereas Garnacho takes big strides.

That difference in mechanics may explain their difference as dribblers too. As senior United players, Amad has completed 46.7 per cent of his Premier League dribbles, compared to just 32.5 per cent for Garnacho. “He’s (Amad) closer to the ground and having a high stride rate means he can make adjustments very quickly,” says Dodoo.

Amad (22 years old) and Garnacho (20) are two members of a relatively young United squad. Midfielders Toby Collyer (20), Manuel Ugarte (23), and Kobbie Mainoo (19), plus centre-back Leny Yoro (19) and striker Rasmus Hojlund (21) were either playing academy football in England or have made moves to United from other European leagues in the past two seasons.

Those inside the club feel that the hardest part of stepping up to the senior, Premier League level is the physical demands (more than the technical/tactical ones) and subsequent injury risks.

Dodoo says teams need “a smart rotation system with those young players. Especially, the more of a forward and the more of a speed merchant that player is, even more reason to have some way of keeping them loaded but not overloaded”.

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Sprinting coaches are not new within football. Former Team GB sprinter Darren Campbell worked at MK Dons and with Andriy Shevchenko when he was at Chelsea. Similarly, Leon Reid, another former international sprinter, has worked on the running technique of Brighton players. Three NFL sides — the Jacksonville Jaguars, Tennessee Titans and Houston Texans — have all employed ‘directors of speed development’, though there is a more natural fit for a mechanics/sprinting coach there, given the NFL’s combine and 40-yard dash.


Garnacho has demonstrated his sprint ability this season (Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images)

The Premier League is into its era of specialist coaches: hybrid coach-analysts, set-piece coaches and position-specific coaches. The return on investment of a coach who can keep players fitter (and possibly make them move better) has the potential to be huge.

Internally, Amorim has been critical of fitness levels, and United’s high-intensity numbers have dropped off compared to last season.

Running more (and harder) is not automatically a good thing, and requires the context of tactics, game state, opposition style and quality, but as Dodoo points out, “the manager’s model is real high intensity, and the players need to be conditioned for that. If you get conditioned to that way of training with one manager, the next manager bringing a more intensive model (means) the conditioning of the team needs to go up”.

It is not quite the same approach that Ten Hag took when he had his players running many kilometres after an away defeat to Brentford in August 2023 (to show them how much they were ‘outran’ by). Availability, though, is the best ability, and United must improve there if they are to implement the style Amorim wants, let alone turn their season around.

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(Top photo: Manchester United training this month; by Zohaib Alam/MUFC/Manchester United via Getty Images)

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‘Dean of American Historians’: Ken Burns on William E. Leuchtenburg

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‘Dean of American Historians’: Ken Burns on William E. Leuchtenburg

Ken Burns was in his studio working on the final edits of a forthcoming documentary film series on the American Revolution when he learned on Tuesday that the historian William E. Leuchtenburg had died at 102.

“I had to get up and go be by myself for a while,” Mr. Burns said in an interview. “Everything just crashed to a halt.”

In his view, Mr. Leuchtenburg was “one of the great historians, if not the dean of American historians in the United States, for his work on the presidency.”

For more than 40 years, Mr. Leuchtenburg was a close adviser and friend to Mr. Burns, appearing in three of his documentaries — “Prohibition” (2011), “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History” (2014) and “Benjamin Franklin” (2022) — and consulting on many more.

The Times spoke to Mr. Burns on Wednesday about Mr. Leuchtenburg’s career. His observations, lightly edited and condensed for clarity, are below.

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He would send me notes all the time. My files are filled with these notes with little schoolboy handwriting. It reminded me of the way I wrote cursive when I was in the eighth grade. I just want to imagine that he had a filing system that looked like the cavernous place at the end of “Citizen Kane” or “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” because he could not have had so many references at his hand. He would just bring them up. It might be baseball, which he and I both passionately loved. It might be jazz. It might be World War II. Obviously the presidency. Vietnam. Really all of the kinds of things that we’ve done. He had an interest in what we were doing and how we were doing it that made him an extraordinarily helpful contributor.

He made particularly important contributions to our history of baseball, to the Second World War, to our Prohibition film — in which we learned personally from him the very, very complicated internal dynamics, not just about what took place in Prohibition, but his own personal family life in which both his parents were alcoholics. And so the repeal for him was not a good thing. He also understood, hilariously and intimately, the sexual revolution that was going on in the 1920s among women, and just flat-out said that people discovered the clitoris. And that was, like, whoa!

He was a storyteller. All you need to do is go into the fifth episode of the Roosevelt series and look at his concise way of explaining what it was. He first talks about filling up a stadium with people and then emptying it and then filling it up again. And if you did this over and over again, you would get the number of people who had gone out of work. It was just such a vivid description.

I’m going to cry talking about it, but it’s just this gigantic and unfillable hole. He taught us well, though. He’s imparted not just facts, but attitudes and relationships and methodologies that we’ll save. We’ll be poorer for not having Bill to come and look at a rough cut of something that he shouldn’t know anything about but then inevitably knows a ton. We’ll muddle through.

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Ahead of 2025 debut, Scottie Scheffler details how he hurt hand in ‘stupid’ kitchen accident making ravioli

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Ahead of 2025 debut, Scottie Scheffler details how he hurt hand in ‘stupid’ kitchen accident making ravioli

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — Scottie Scheffler was attempting to make homemade ravioli on Christmas Day — with limited equipment in a rental home — when he realized he’d made a serious mistake. He decided to use an empty wine glass to shape and slice his pasta dough.

“I had my hand on top of it and it broke, which, side note, I’ve heard nothing but horror stories since this happened about wine glasses, so be careful,” Scheffler said Tuesday. “Even if you’re like me and you don’t drink wine, you’ve got to be real careful with wine glasses.”

The stem of a wine glass stabbed Scheffler in the upper palm of his right hand. That’s the crux of the incident that led to a surgical procedure and took the 2024 PGA Tour Player of the Year out of his first two tournaments of the season, The Sentry in Maui and the American Express in Palm Springs.

The No. 1 player in the world is making his first tournament start of 2025 this week at the Pebble Beach Pro-Am, which begins on Thursday. It comes after a two-week long hiatus from golf and physical activity, as well as a steady process of easing back into training and playing. That period was frustrating for a player who thrives in competition. Scheffler doesn’t like to sit back and watch.

“It’s one of those deals where immediately after it happened, I was mad at myself because I was like gosh, that’s so stupid, but you just don’t think about it when you’re in the moment,” he continued. “Yeah, definitely been a little more careful doing stuff at home.”

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Immediately after the incident, a friend of Scheffler’s who happens to be a surgeon came to the rescue and helped stop the bleeding. The next day rolled around and the wound was no longer open, but the pain remained, and Scheffler felt a general lack of range of motion. He decided to reach out to a hand doctor he’d worked with on a thumb injury while in college. They opted for surgery. Scheffler said that he does not expect his right hand to incur any long-term damage.

Scheffler spent his recovery time reflecting and analyzing an historic season that included seven wins on the PGA Tour — the most since Tiger Woods won seven in 2007 — plus an Olympic gold medal and the Hero World Challenge. He re-watched film of his tournament rounds and took his mind back to those cruise-control moments in competition, taking note of both his swing positions and demeanor.

“There’s a few tournaments I looked back at where the thing that stuck out the most was that I never really overreacted to stuff, I kind of stayed in it and kind of waited for my moment to get hot,” Scheffler said.

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(Photo: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images for The Showdown)

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