Coach Carrerra’s mechanical dummy shuffles back and forth, wheezing with rugged authenticity. The coach stuffs a football into the gut pocket of his sweat shirt. “I call it my crab around. Coming straight at the defender, you hook into him with a cross body block, thusly.” He demonstrates on the dummy, taking care to first turn it down to less than one quarter power. He coaches football, he doesn’t play it. “Then you slide off the man’s hip, crabwise like this, keeping him turned to the outside. You spin around him across the line.” He crosses the line and straightens up. “What do you think?” He is obviously proud of his new movement.

“I’ll have to think about it,” says Halloran, who plays his football the same way he does his life, as noncommittally as possible.

“I think its great,” says Tross, who doesn’t really understand it but figures he might as well get in some brownie points whenever he can.

“It’s shitty,” says T.K., advancing toward the dummy. The dummy takes a menacing stance, so T.K. shuts it off. “Try it with me,” he tells Coach Carrerra.

The coach comes at him, throws the cross body, and starts his crab around. In that instant, T.K. grabs his coach under the chin and jerks Carrerra’s head back, using Carrerra’s own motion against him. T.K. lets up short of doing any real damage. “Your theory is good, but a sharp defender will take a guy’s head off, helmet and all, on a move like that. I still prefer either a two-on-one if you can get it, or a running butt.” In the first technique, one offensive man battles the goalyard’s defender while the ball carrier crosses the line. It works more often than it doesn’t, but it’s hard to set up, necessitating that two offensive players shake their defensive coverage. The second, the running butt, is a straight-on, head-down run at the defender, a strategy that may carry the ball carrier and the defender across the goalyard together, or may break the ball carrier’s neck. In street football, there are pros and cons to everything.

Coach Carrerra’s not really disappointed with his theory’s washout. In fact, he knew it would fail. He had to see which of his quarterbacks knew it too, and which would be ballsy enough to tell him so. While the quarterback picks the team, the coach picks the quarterback. It’s one of the few controls he has. The head office has been after Carrerra for months to start someone younger, to start Tross. From time to time Coach Carrerra pulls a stunt like this, to reassure himself that, head office opinions to the contrary, the youngest man isn’t necessarily the best man.