Eric Crawford | St. X grad Chris Brown takes readers into huddle with football blog

Everybody has a blog. Not everybody has one like Chris Browns. In fact, I don't think anybody has one like Chris Brown's.

His website is called SmartFootball.com. He's been working on it in some form or another since 2003.

Inspired by a history book of soccer tactics titled Inverting the Pyramid and not seeing any of the kind of football discussion that interested him, he began to write in depth about the tactics he saw in college and NFL games.

It was slow going at first. He might blog just once a month. But today, he's writing often, plus doing guest pieces for Grantland, for Yahoo! Sports and for The New York Times. Today, hes getting clinic DVDs, old playbooks and game video from programs all over the country.

He has friends in the coaching business across the country who are willing to share, if not their secrets, then certainly their philosophies. Start-up football franchises in Europe are using his entries to build their offensive and defensive schemes.

Brown, 29, doesn't just write about football. He writes about its movements, its intricacies, its structure and flow. This year, he compiled some of the best of his blog and some new material into a book titled The Essential Smart Football. It's available now from Amazon.

I guess I just always tried to write the kind of things I wanted to read, Brown said this week from his Manhattan office where he's a corporate attorney. You spend so much time talking about football and what a player did well or didn't do well. It helps to know what he was asked to do. You see an offense hit a long pass and the camera zooms in on some corner and they say, He blew it. But really it was the safety who was supposed to rotate over.

So that's my motivation. To talk about what guys are supposed to do and how the game is supposed to work.

Folks in these parts might be interested to know that Brown's middle name ! is Barns table. Yes, of those Barnstable Browns. He had what he calls a basically undistinguished football career at St. X. As a student at Purdue, he didn't play but got to know the football staff and followed coach Joe Tiller, then went on to do some volunteer coaching before moving on to law school.

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You can't get through the first two chapters of his new book without running into significant local connections.

Before Urban Meyer crafted his offense at Florida, he made a trip to Louisville to visit then Cardinals offensive coordinator Scott Linehan, whom Brown calls Meyers intellectual mentor.

He goes into some depth about the beginnings of the 3-3-5 defensive scheme and how Charlie Strong, first as an assistant at Notre Dame and then at South Carolina, made some significant changes to it.

There's a lot of X-and-O football talk in this country. Almost none of it goes to the depth that Brown goes. And he has worked to be able to present it in an interesting and entertaining manner. Coaches and former players have trusted him with old playbooks or videos.

Hes not out to expose anyone's secrets. He just wants to explain the processes.

With the book, I just wanted to pull it all together and really put together an introductory work for people who really want to start thinking about the game, Brown said.

Brown's book breaks down personalities like Meyer, Mike Leach (whom he first met at a camp at UK while in high school) and Rex Ryan. He hits the history of Beamer ball and the zone blitz. He dives into the concepts of Nick Saban's defense and offenses from Steve Spurrier to Gus Malzahn.

And there's a chapter titled, Why Spiking the Ball is Almost Always a Bad Idea.

You can't read Brown's work without appreciating the game more. That's about the strongest endorsement I can give.