damn COD!
http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/b ... aaf-wp9871
Charlie Strong has seen the enemy of Louisville’s focus, and its name is ‘Call of Duty’
By Matt Hinton
Typically, when coaches talk about the distractions consuming their players, they mean the Big Stuff: School, family, money, relationships. Times are hard. Earning a degree is hard. Kids come from some pretty hard places.
That's true at Louisville as well as anywhere else, and Charlie Strong is as accustomed as any coach to dealing with the diversions that follow his players into the locker room. As Strong admitted Monday, though, less than 48 hours after the Cardinals came out looking flat and unprepared in a 21-14 loss to Pittsburgh, his powers of motivation weren't able to overcome the release of an addictive new video game:
"Young people are dealing with so much," Strong said when talking about his team's lack of focus and preparation for the Pittsburgh game. "I told them Tuesday. I get them off the practice field and we weren't sharp, so you're thinking you come back on Wednesday and we weren't sharp then. There's a new video game that came out and those guys are so... I said, how can you allow a video game to take control of what you have in your hand and what's ahead of you[?]"
[…]
Strong said he told the team Wednesday, "This video game is that important? We'll see how important it is on Saturday. I said, in about a week or so, you're going to be throwing that video game away. But we let a video game take control of us. […]"
The video game in question is "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3," a hugely popular title released last week in which players are tasked with executing complex missions around the globe, preferably involving maximum carnage from their vantage point as a first-person shooter. Many thousands of potentially productive man-hours — quite possibly even a few by football players at Pitt — have been sunk into playing alongside other gamers in the game's highly popular online mode.
"Our guys talk about it. What's the buzz? You hear it all the time, what is it, 'Call to Duty,' the new video game out?" Strong said, slightly mangling the title. "So it was a call to duty [against Pitt] and they got called to duty Saturday."
Indeed: With Cincinnati's loss to West Virginia, Louisville had an opening to move into a tie with the Bearcats atop the Big East standings. Instead, it squandered the momentum of last week's upset over West Virginia with a home flop that left Cincy in sole possession of first place and the Cardinals caught up with four other teams — Pittsburgh, Rutgers, UConn and West Virginia — in a hopeless tangle with two conference losses apiece.
Whether he knows it or not, Strong may be on the cutting edge of neuroscience: Despite a strong push by engineers and other gamer-friendly types to spread the word that video games may actually improve cognitive abilities, a more recent study released in September says that's a lot of hogwash. So your parents were probably right about putting down the controller and going outside, after all. Now, reading football blogs, on the other hand...
