He Pivoted Senior Trivia Into Comprehensive Football Guides

Hello, my football friends.

This is Darren Hees of pigskindispatch.com welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history.

And welcome to another episode where we get to have a guest come on to talk a little bit of football.

This time it's from the trivia aspect.

This gentleman has wrote a couple books on football iq, two big books on football trivia.

His name is Steve Vernon.

Steve, welcome to the Pig Pen.

Thanks, Aaron.

Great to be here.

Yeah.

Well, we are so happy to have you.

First of all, I want to thank you for sending a couple copies of your football IQ books.

Your volume 1A and volume 1B.

Very interesting books indeed.

We'll get more detail on those in a second, but first, let's learn a little bit more about you.

You have a couple really nice trivia books here, but what got you into, why don't you put together some books like this?

That's sort of a funny story.

I actually worked for about 10 years for a.

In fact, my last job before retiring was working for 10 years for a retirement committee down in the Hyde park area of Tampa where I live.

And during that time, the whole thing was just really a fluke.

They had been meeting for the activities director would do an activity every, every Saturday in the bar area where I, I was actually their bartender, this retired community.

And one Saturday she just didn't show up.

So I had about six or seven residents sitting there going, okay, what are we going to do?

I said, well, I'm not busy, but we can figure out something to do.

I ran down to the front desk and the front desk person gave me the idea of doing some trivia.

I went, okay, I've never done trivia, but we'll try it.

So I went back upstairs, went online and looked up some trivia questions and spent about a half hour or so asking them questions.

And they loved it.

Says, see, can we do this again next week?

I said, well, that's okay with me if you want to.

And that turned into a weekly every Saturday activity at the retirement center.

And I would, I went from attracting about six people to that event to a couple of dozen people every Saturday.

And they got to the point where they asked me if we could do it twice a week.

Said, oh no, it takes me too much time to, to prepare for this once a week.

So we, we for about six or seven years.

And then after retired, after I retired, I was at home one day looking through my computer files.

I thought, my gosh, Steve, you've got enough trivia.

Here to put together a book.

So I put together a book originally for that I called Senior Trivia.

And from that, more recently I ended up turning that into six volumes of.

Excuse me, for sports trivia and other kinds of trivia.

I've got six, five different sports trivia books that I've done.

One on baseball, one one football, of course, American football, basketball, soccer and hockey.

And then I've got one on senior Trivia and one more for classic trivia.

And each of those books is.

There's like two volumes of each book and each book runs about 500.

Excuse me, my dinner's coming back.

I wrote about 500 questions, 550 questions a book.

Yeah, they are really nice looking books.

And you know, like you said, you have say right on your cover, you have 500 some questions in them.

But these aren't normal trivia questions.

They're in a normal manner of trivia questions.

Like probably like you were asking your audience, you do a little bit of educating in this as well.

So maybe you could explain the concept here.

Well, that was my idea.

And even the concept even grew of my original.

My original plan was just a trivia book.

And then I don't remember where I came up with the idea.

I know in our trivia sessions we will always have conversations after the question.

And after somebody or table answered the question, we would do three rounds of 10 questions each.

And so each table was competing against the other, the other tables.

And we always have a little conversation after that.

And I thought, you know, there's a thousand trivia quest trivia books out there, but not a lot that add a lot of, you know, conversation afterwards.

So I wanted to go ahead and add a little bit of explanation to the answer and what I call an IQ note, which is where the name IQ for the books comes from.

I had what I call an IQ note that has a little bit more maybe historical, historical significance to that question or answer or another little concept about that answer that some people, you know, a lot of people might not think about.

Yeah, I mean, I just happened to, you know, going through this and you had some really interesting things, you know, like some common questions that people might ask for, like a novice fan, but even a more experienced fan of watching football.

Like I just happened to open up your, your volume 1A.

You have a question 148, like what is cover one?

You know, the defensive coverage.

And you have four choices, multiple choice.

Yeah, you give the answer, you know, the answer is a D man coverage with one deep safety.

You give an Explanation, you know your explanation, if you don't mind me reading it verbatim here for you.

Number one uses man coverage on all receivers with one safety stain deep in the middle to serve as a center field safety net on deep balls.

It allows aggressive man coverage while maintaining some insurance against big plays.

And then you have your IQ note after that, which is, you know, just talking about this as again, quote, the single high safety in Cover 1 is a free roaming center fielder helping the coverage.

When the coverage breaks down, it lets corners play man more aggressively underneath because they know there's a backstop.

The trade off is that the safety can only be in one place and the smart offenses attack the side he's away from.

So great explanation for even the experienced fan because they'll hear, you know, people, you know, some of the coaches, John Madden used to use it, John Gruden, Tony Romo, and even some of the announcers now they'll say, hey, they're in cover two.

Or they're in cover one.

And you have some of those questions in there which are really great to educate.

So and the idea, of course, you know, you're looking at over a thousand questions, so about one sport.

So the idea was to go from very simple, very basic questions, you know, about how many downs are there, you know, that kind of thing, to more advanced questions like what you're talking about.

Yeah, yeah, here's another.

Go ahead.

No, no, I'll just say here's another.

Sort of challenging question for you.

This is one of them.

Why is a no huddle offense useful after creating a favorable matchup?

Definitely.

So defenses can't bring substitutes in.

There's a lot of benefits to it.

But that's, that's probably the major one that's used nowadays.

That's the main one.

Yeah, it was four choices at man.

The first choice was it may prevent the defense from substituting out of the unfavorable personnel package.

Right, yeah.

Other choices should go along with that.

Yes, that is just some very handy stuff.

And now do you find that people maybe are using this maybe to sit there and they'll sit, maybe they'll hear on TV they're in a cover one scheme and somebody can go through your book and say, hey, what is cover one?

Did you find people telling you that they use it that way as a reference book?

Well, to be honest, the books just recently went on market, so I really haven't had a lot of chance to get feedback yet on the books.

So that's why this interview is so, so timely.

It's really perfect.

So I really haven't had a chance to like, the people have seen it, have commented nicely about it, but I really haven't gotten a lot of foot feedback about, about them because they have not, they haven't been on the market yet long enough to really get a lot of feedback.

All right, well, I guess this might be a great opportunity.

We've got people's appetite whetted a little bit here.

Why don't you give the title of your books and maybe where people can find it?

Well, they're, they're both found on Amazon and my, the name, the COVID name for all the books is the Fan Edge iq, which I'm sure will bring up another question.

But the, the Fan Edge iq.

And the name of the book is simply the sport football IQ.

And there's volumes 1A and Vines 1B.

And then I've got baseball IQ, soccer IQ, whatever.

But the, the Sam, the, the label, the title is very simple.

The Fan Edge IQ or Fan Edge Baseball IQ would be the, would be the title of that book.

And they're all found on Amazon.

All right.

And folks, if you're driving or you're at the gym and can't write these down, don't worry, we will have them in the show notes of this podcast.

We'll get you links to get hooked up with Steve and his books here on this and we'll give you another opportunity here at the end of this podcast to announce that again.

So I'm sorry, please go ahead, explain what the Fan Edge IQ is.

Well, the Fan Edge iq, really, I, and when I first thought of it, I thought it was pretty unique.

Then I found out there's a lot of books out there called the Fan Edge, which I thought was disappointing, but I still tried to take a different take on it.

But the Fan Edge really is sort of a double meaning.

You've got the sports fans and sports fans sitting on the edge, hopefully sitting on their edges, the edge of their seats or from reading my books, they're at the leading edge of the trivia about that sport or about that subject, the bleeding edge.

So that's why I call it the Fan Edge.

Of course, we all know what IQ means, and so that's where all the names sort of came up, came from.

Very clever.

I like it.

So I've got the Fan Edge right now for 5 Sports.

And it's just a growing, it's a growing series.

I plan on adding some other sports to it, especially like golf and tennis and some other very Popular sports, they're all team sports right now, but they'll more, they'll expand.

Yeah.

Okay, folks, just another way to look at it.

When you go on Amazon, if you want to see some of Steve's other books, just go under his author name on Amazon.

Just type in the search bar Steve L. Vernon.

And it comes up and there's many more of your books on some of the other sports as well as the football and some other IQ stuff.

So, yeah, very, very good.

Very good.

Okay, so.

So Steve, why don't you tell us a little bit.

You know, where did.

So you.

Some.

You use the basis of your trivia games you're playing at the senior center, but I know you to put a thousand football questions together, you had to have some manner of research and come up with these things in order.

So maybe you could just explain how you came up with those.

Well, to tell you the truth, I.

Use AI hey, that's a great resource.

No, there's no way, as I tell everybody, I could have sat in a library for months searching every shelf in the library for information and still having trouble having coming up with the questions that, I mean, how can one person come up with a thousand questions about one sport?

I mean, I'm sure it happens, but that's a lot of work.

And with AI, I was able to do it in a matter of, you know, short time.

And so I allowed AI to come up with the questions.

I came up with the idea of how I want the whole thing organized.

I want a multiple choice exam or not exam, a multiple choice quiz on all these sports.

And I want to make sure those multiple choices are varied.

They're not all the same thing.

And then we just sort of.

I worked together and anybody who's worked with ChatGPT or any other kind of AI program knows that you get to where you're actually, you feel like you're actually sitting next next door to a div.

A separate person, an actual real person sitting there talking to you and talking back and forth and conversing about this stuff.

So it really, I really call Chat gpe, my, my editing partner on this whole thing.

I gave the overall direction.

It came up with the questions and text and the material.

Yeah, I can tell you that from firsthand experience of writing down over a thousand questions by hand.

It does take a long time since that's what our trivia game we have on our, our thing, which are much differently formatted than what you have.

Ours are more about the games and the players and stats, you know, Football history.

Yours are more about, more towards the concepts and terminology of the game, which are fascinating.

I think that's a great way to, to apply this book.

Hopefully you'll find that I've got quite a bit of history in there as well.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I'm not saying you don't, but I'm just say, you know, it's not like, you know, who was a Super Bowl MVP or something like that.

I didn't see any of those kind of questions, you know, but it was more, you know, the concepts and some of the historical ruling, I guess is more or less better terminology.

Yeah, yeah, interesting.

All right, so how do you recommend, people, do you recommend this as almost like a coffee table book or maybe one you have, like when you have free time and you, hey, you got that extra five minutes while you're waiting for your kid to get out of school or waiting for your loved one to get out of work or something.

You just want to catch a couple people or is it something you want to sit down and read, you know, by the hour?

Well, I don't, I don't think.

It's definitely not the kind of book that I think most people would want to sit and read cover to cover, you know, like a novel.

It's more really more.

I think you hit the nail on it.

It's really more.

I see it more as a coffee table book.

Something that's there that some, anybody who's interested in that particular sport can pick up off the copy, flip through it, find something they interesting that it, you know, that interests them and look up the facts about that in the history of that, you know, this is that fact.

It really is.

I think you hit the nail on head.

I see it in all kinds of situations, but it really is really more of a coffee table book.

Yeah, I think, and we touched on a little bit earlier about almost being like a reference book.

You have a really handy index in the back of this and maybe explain how your, your index works to, to get you to some of the questions.

Like, like you said, use the example of, you know, somebody hears something on their game this weekend, you know, their favorite college game or favorite NFL game, and they want to look up this term more.

How can they use that using your index?

Well, just do exactly that.

Go to the index, look up that term, and instead of pointing to a particular page, it will turn, it will refer you back to a particular question that answers found in.

So it's not really a page index, it's a question index.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Is that what you're asking?

Yeah, yeah.

And most of these terms, when I'm looking in your first one, some of them you'll have like the word false start.

You have multiple questions you can go to that are on false start.

So.

Right.

A couple different angles to get your.

Maybe your question answered.

Right.

Where was that term found in the book?

And what question was that term found?

Yeah.

So they can get more information on that.

Exactly.

Very clever.

Hopefully it'll be a very, very helpful book for any kind of sport.

I'm certainly not an expert on any of these sports, but it was fun putting it together and it was a.

And it was in many ways a true learning experience for me.

The whole process was how to put these together, where to get the patient, how to get, how to organize the information.

All that stuff was a total learning experience for me.

I'll bet.

Is there any, like, questions in particular that maybe really caught your eye or made you dig in a little bit deeper on something?

Oh, gosh, I think.

Well, there are quite a few questions like the one that I asked you about that I really didn't know that much about.

About what is, what is a.

The hurry up offense.

That's what I was trying to think.

And what is a big nickel defense?

I didn't know any of that stuff.

Yeah, they throw these terms out there and they, they sound like words that we've heard before, like big nickel.

But in a football terminology, it doesn't always mean maybe what you think.

So that's fascinating.

And you have to remember this is, this is a game that's been going on for 150 years and has grown from.

I mean, it's a totally different game than it was even 50, 60, 70 years ago.

Yeah.

And I'm sure there are a lot of terms of the.

A lot of terms that have arisen over the years that nobody ever heard of, you know, 70, 80 years ago.

Especially when the, you know, particularly when the game started 150 years ago.

Well, I, I can tell you.

I can tell you in reverse too.

Like a line buck, you know, nobody in modern.

I had to look up and find out what a linebuck was.

Actually, I asked the question of another historian because I didn't know what they were talking about.

And it's just an.

A gap run, you know, so it's a pretty Pretty simple concept, but, you know, Linebuck.

Right.

Very foreign to us.

So very.

We find out through things like this that football is a lot.

It's a lot more than just running up and down a field.

Yeah, most definitely.

It almost has a language all to itself, and I think you cover that very well in your book.

So who would you recommend these books to?

If somebody wanted to buy as a gift and they're trying to think, is this something that you could buy for.

Somebody could buy for their grandchildren?

Is this somebody to buy for their grandfather?

Who would enjoy a book like these?

I think, oh, my gosh.

You know, there's so many different audiences for these books.

I really see them as great books for young athletes who are coming up, like young football players that are just getting into the game and wanting to learn more about.

Coaches can give the books to their teammates, their team members, as teaching tools or as coaching tools.

Coaches could use them on a bus on the way to a game.

There's all kinds of uses for the books.

They're not, like you said, like we talked about before.

They're not just for sitting down and reading.

There's all sorts of uses for these books and.

But I really see as a major audience young.

Young athletes coming along in the game.

Yeah.

I don't disagree with you, but I think, you know, from what I'm looking at, too, I would almost recommend this to some because I do have people come to me and say, hey, you know, my.

My girlfriend is, you know, starting interest in the game.

You know, she's asking a lot of questions, and it's hard for me to answer all her questions because I'm trying to focus on the game, too, you know, but is there something.

Maybe this is a resource for somebody like that or somebody.

I know we have a lot of folks that are over in Europe that are becoming interested because we have all these international games going on.

And I see them on some of the Reddits and forums like that that are coming on.

They're asking novice questions, trying to learn more about the game.

Just like I probably would if somebody.

If I started watching a game of cricket, I wouldn't understand it, you know, so they're the same thing.

But you having that terminology and what people are talking about in there, pretty good explanation.

So maybe even some recommendations for folks like that.

And you brought up another point, too, being international, just so people know, the book is the book.

Both volumes are both.

They're available both in English and in Spanish.

Nice.

Yeah, that is.

That is good.

Yeah.

And that was another learning experience and learning and trying to figure out what.

Okay, we all know, especially, you know, somebody like myself who lives here in Tampa, which is a largely Spanish community.

A lot of people here from Cuba and Puerto Rico and all those countries whose Spanish, their Spanish is totally different than the Spanish they speak in Mexico or in Madrid.

It's a different Spanish.

It's like the difference between English that we speak here in America and English that they speak in Britain.

There are different languages.

Yeah.

And strobe.

But I found out there's one type of Spanish, it's generally called neutral Spanish, that if you're watching Spanish on the news or reading Spanish like a national Spanish newspaper, it's going to be likely written in what they call neutral Spanish, which is the general Spanish that they were speaking in North America or the Caribbean or whatever, you know, in those.

Or in Mexico, all those resident in Spain or other countries.

So the books are.

Tried to be.

I tried to gear the books toward mostly North America and the surrounding countries, North America, Mexico and Canada.

Same thing with my soccer book, which is translated into English.

It's written, of course, English translated to Spanish, French and Portuguese, which are the major soccer countries, but it's geared toward that particular type of Portuguese or Canadian French.

Yeah.

So that was a learning experience itself.

If I'm going to translate this book, what version of that Spanish, of that language am I going to translate this book into?

And again, thank goodness for AI.

I don't speak all these languages, but AI can do it in a heartbeat.

Fascinating.

Yeah, it is.

Essay.

You know, modern technology is really, really fascinating.

Yeah.

But.

All right, well, why don't we give the opportunity.

Let's, like we promised the folks, let's give the title of the books again and where people can get it and.

Okay, well, the books are available on Amazon, and the COVID title for all the books, the whole series is the Fan Edge iq, and then simply the name of the sport, Basketball iq, Football iq, Baseball iq, whatever.

Just look up the Fan Edge IQ by Steve L. Vernon, and then look up the sport and you'll find it on Amazon.

And all the books come in Kindle and paperback.

All right, well, that's good to know, too.

Well, Steve, we really appreciate you taking the time to get these books out and help educate folks on the game of football, the sport that we love here on Pigskin Dispatch and all our listeners love.

And we appreciate you preserving that history.

History.

And joining us today to talk about them.

I appreciate you, Darren.

Thank you very much.