Who is the Oracle?

Some level of introduction is needed.

Likely anyone reading this already knows exactly who I am. For that reason I was originally thinking about titling this one “Why?” or “Ok but what is this?” - which are both legitimate questions. I think I can tie a neat little loop around the whole situation with this post and then we can proceed with business as usual.

The Oracle is doing this because it’s what the Oracle wants to do and for no other reason than that. I don’t expect this to go beyond (at best) the fingertips of my social network, but I suppose anything is technically possible. Great. I still don’t know really how to work this over-priced Wix app enough to make a subscribe feature yet, or any sort of way for me to “capture” “an audience,” but some sort of email feature is probably next on my list. Ya know, in case people want to find out about my posts if and when they happen. Sure.

In time this site will improve. I can always just use the AI agent that they keep pushing on me that I apparently have already paid for access to, but I like the idea that this will be whatever I’m - me, monkey - capable of making it. And I like that it's crudely built and that you can’t really find it unless you already know what you’re looking for.

My buddies told me I should have made a substack(?) which is allegedly free, or some sort of Twitter/X feature that is also free? Idk but I’m way past the obvious choice. Did you guys see that I found out how to make a gradient color background? Lots of fun bells and whistles to play with....

But to get to the point - why should you be reading this and who am I to bother you with it? Why should I feed you takes on my beloved New York Football Giants?

My Credentials:

First off, and as we have previously established in what is now an official real blog post that exists on the internet for all of time, I am a massive Giants fan - none of this makes sense or materializes into this venture without that fact.

Beyond that, I am someone who loves the sport of football down to its smallest details, which I have studied extensively. We are about to dive into a little bit of history here - it’s relevant and important. Stay with me.

I played organized ball from 2nd or 3rd grade (do not remember) through my senior year of high school - call it a 10 year career. My mom was concerned that I was “too small” for college ball, even at a D3 level (thanks Ma), but I went to a couple of college camps anyways for whatever it was worth. I still think I could’ve at least gotten in on special teams. But my Dad agreed with with my Mom's assessment, and on some level so did I, so my last snap was in a losing effort in the second round of a Non-Public B state championship playoff run my senior year of high school (I’ll blog that story some day but first need to figure out how to make my high school football career interesting to anyone ever).

My first snap was with the local rec league program which was for a pretty large and above-average-affluent town in northern NJ, let’s call them the “Mountain Climbers.”

The Mountain Climbers were an absolute wagon of a 10-and-under program. We legitimately had back-to-back, perfect, undefeated championship seasons culminating in epic “26-0” sweatshirts given out to each kid. We would regularly hang 40-burgers on the surrounding town programs that we played. Our opponents were similarly-well-funded as Northeast NJ rec football programs, but were crucially lacking when it came to numbers.

I mean that literally. We showed up to games with two full football teams, including a dedicated offense and defense, with backups for each. Probably 60 kids in total. This was a legitimate operation. The ‘Climbers really knew how to develop the youth. These kids, my teammates - went on to win a big boy state championship years later in their high school years for 'Climbers High School, approximately 10 years later. I would end up watching from afar.

But anyways, me being the type of guy who takes it upon himself to start a sports blog website, I naturally put my hand up to volunteer for quarterback on day one of my first year for the Mountain Climbers rec football program, and that was simply how I would become a quarterback for my entire football career thereafter (I also got to play outside linebacker and safety as a general defensive backup - in the future, I would not be permitted to play defense in high school because of risk of injury and offensive roster depth issues).

After practice one day several years into it, the Climbers’ coaches huddled up me and a couple of other kids on my team and told us that if we weren’t going into the “City of Mountain Climbers” public school system, we weren’t going to be allowed back to play next year. Nothing nefarious, it was just that from then on it was all switching from rec program funding to the middle school and high school programs. It was a good ~3-4 year stint with the 'Climbers, one of the kids I played with in those days actually went on to play in the NFL (as a kicker, but count the bucket anyways).

There are about a billion private schools in northern NJ, but the one I went to was primarily known more for academics and *not* for sports, let’s call them “The Grizzlies.” They had a full athletic program and some of our sports teams were competitive in state championship conversations, but by-and-large (and particularly in football) we would get waxed by the more sports-known high schools, some of whom could even go toe-to-toe with the bigger public school programs - Mountain Climbers included.

That's about where the quarterback position changed for me. We weren't exactly running a complicated offense in the 10-and-under program (hand the ball off to the left or to the right, maybe a tight end pop pass), but in middle school and certainly in high school with the Grizzlies - we would. We would eventually come to change entire offensive systems, annually or mid-season, and also update concepts, flip formations, add plays, change snap counts, add wrinkles, pre-snap formation shift, keep old things that worked, motion an eligible lineman into a jumbo package and run then full back belly off of that formation, or (worse yet) full back belly reverse, and all manner of atrocities. Also, our entire passing offense was based of the fact that I could not see over the offensive line due to my height, but we bootlegged out of it or cut blocked and one-step-dropped the obstructions. Drew Brees figured it out.

We tried a lot of bullshit because we were trying to find ways to win games by some means other than our physical ability / size / skill / numbers. Have you ever heard of the veer offense?? Do you wanna learn split back veer??? Yeah?? You wanna talk triple option?? We can talk about it all but we can't talk it about it now, they’ll kill me for it. Remind me for a future post though. I never said it was pretty, but some of it actually worked and got us the school’s first playoff win in 25 years, and I dare say some of it works (conceptually) in the NFL.

The point of the history lesson here is that Quarterback (I believe) has to know what every moving piece's responsibility is on every single play. I had to memorize dozens of playbooks over my 6-year middle school and high school career with the Grizzlies and understand it from multiple perspectives. So when I tell you that THE GIANTS ARE ABOUT TO RUN THE BALL TO THE LEFT BECAUSE DANIEL JONES JUST SENT A MAN IN MOTION TO SEE WHAT THE COVERAGE WAS AND DOESN'T LIKE THE ROUTE TREE AGAINST IT SO HE MADE SOME SORT OF "CHECK CHECK" TO THE LINE AND WE HAVE NUMBERS TO THE LEFT SIDE AGAINST THIS ALIGNMENT AND then hey yea look at that it turns out they ran it left...sometimes - double finger guns. (Sorry for yelling, I'm still scarred about Daniel Jones for some reason. It went away and then it came back worse and different because it turned out he was somehow good for the Colts last year and idk....but things are better now, for us and for him).

"How did you know that, Giants Oracle?" - people to me at Giants games

The next post is going to be about the Giants but probably also about me too. This is fun to write about but I can't wait for actual football.

For now I think anonymous comments are the best form of feedback if you’re here and you’re into it. I’m mailable and I welcome suggestions. Someone said I should add a bio to the website but I’m thinking “quote of the day” instead. I like that there's a button that just doesn't do anything. Maybe it will some day.

-Giants Oracle