Who are these five women? Answer at the bottom of the post.

Listens: Fishbone Live from San Francisco 1992 (NSFW)

What’s the Deal With This Post?

If you’re new to the Rookie Scouting Portfolio blog, welcome.  Until last December, I used Fridays to post links to pieces that I’ve found personally compelling or to content I haven’t read yet. I moved in spring of 2014 and I had a lot of logistical adjustments, including finding an adequate way to build and maintain a growing library of college game games. I had to drop something from my schedule and it mean Reads Listens Views was the first to go.

I had a false start with returning RLV to the rotation in April, but I’m hoping I can make it stick. As I’ve long said about this Friday feature, you may not like everything listed here, but you’re bound to like something.

Football Reads

• 5 Plays: CB Vernon Hargreaves III, Florida – Fine work from Charles McDonald on a player we’ll be profiling together in the coming weeks.
• What’s the Best Play for 2nd & 23? It Depends – From Alex Kirby’s site Profootballstrategy.com
• How Former San Francisco 49ers Chris Borland’s Retirement Changed the NFL Forever
• The NFL’s Trench Therapist: LeCharles Bentley Hated Football After Injury Ended His Bright NFL Career and Nearly Killed Him. – Feature by Pete Prisco.
• Football: A Love Story & What Did Football Teach Me 
• Rex Ryan Welcoming Infamous Brawlers to Buffalo
• Take Me Out to The Brain Game – Can Two Entrepreneurs Turn Neuroscience Into MoneyBall?

Views: Richard Turere: My Invention That Made Peace With Lions

In the Masai community where 13-year-old Richard Turere lives, cattle are all-important. But lion attacks were growing more frequent. In this short, inspiring talk, the young inventor shares the solar-powered solution he designed to safely scare the lions away.

Download the 2015 Rookie Scouting Portfolio + Post-Draft Update!

Friday’s are also my chance to thank you for reading my work, encourage you to follow the RSP blog, and download the Rookie Scouting Portfolio publication.

If you’re in a dynasty league, the combination of the 2015 RSP and the RSP Post-Draft will have you prepared for this year and beyond.

Here’s just a sample of what my readers–new and old–are saying about the 2015 RSP.  (Get ready for “Squee!” “Dammit” and jaws dropping)

Take a video tour of the 2015 pre-draft to see what I mean:

Seriously, this analysis is worth the price of the 2015 RSP package alone, but you also get the post-draft addendum with your purchase of the RSP. Remember 10 percent of each sale is donated to Darkness to Light to prevent sexual abuse in communities across the United States. While that alone should get you to download the RSP package, do it because you will be blown away with the detail and insight of the analysis and content. It’s why the RSP has grown so much in the past 10 years.

Download the 2015 RSP and RSP Post-Draft here

Listens: Gregg Bissonnette – Buddy Rich Big Band

In Case You Missed It/Coming Soon

• Advice on “Breaking into the Fantasy Football Biz” – A collection of tweets.
• The Chicken or the Gravy: A Player Evaluation Parable – You can create some fine gravy from a chicken. In David Cobb’s case, you’ll need some added ingredients from outside sources to make it. But no amount of outside help can help you create chicken from gravy, no matter how tasty.
• Gut Check No.343: Complete ADP Desirability Rankings – A simple, jarring way to see how you value players based on ADP.
• Gut Check No.342: Upside Down Draft Strategy 2015 – My suggested block of backs in the mid rounds, plus three mocks.
• Woot & Wye NFL Podcast – Talking fantasy shop Down Under in Sidney.
• Aussie Guys NFL Podcast – Talking RSP shop Down Under in Melbourne.

Reads (Life In General)

• The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion – Great video and article that shows the fears of overpopulation in the 1960s was far from correct.
• League of Legends Prodigy Faker Carries Country On His Shoulders – Video game as sport.
• White People Have a Race – But Everyone Flips Out When We Talk About it – Arizona State prof Lee Bebout received death threats to talk about whiteness in a college course.
• Creative Cleaning Hacks: 36 Cleaning Tricks For People Who Hate Doing Chores
• Solar Power Still Needs to Get Much Cheaper. Are Perovskites the Answer? – “Time will tell,” Varun Sivaram has written elsewhere of perovskites, “but many of us believe this is the field’s biggest breakthrough since the original invention of the solar cell sixty years ago.”
• The World’s 50 Best Restaurants  – Looks like a good list, even if it’s not truly the 50 best.
• The Beginning Jazz Improviser’s Biggest Mistake – Improvisation can seem like a mysterious, almost impenetrable process to those new to studying it. The idea that a musician can generate cogent, beautiful melodies on the spot seems almost superhuman. But in fact, it is one of the most  human characteristics we possess.

Views: Rich People Don’t Create Jobs

Via Business Insider: “As the war over income inequality wages on, super-rich Seattle entrepreneur Nick Hanauer has been raising the hackles of his fellow 1-percenters, espousing the contrarian argument that rich people don’t actually create jobs. The position is controversial — so much so that TED is refusing to post a talk that Hanauer gave on the subject. National Journal reports today that TED officials decided not to put Hanauer’s March 1 speech up online after deeming his remarks ‘too politically controversial’ for the site.”

Views: Who Are These Five Women?

L-R: Stephanie Wilson, Joan Higginbotham, Mae Jemison, Yvonne Cagle and  Sharon McDougle work at NASA. Wilson, Higgonbotham, Jamison and Cagle are astronauts. McDougle is a spacesuit team manager.