The series of tubes is suddenly sort of buzzing about a new football offense developed by a high school coach in Piedmont, Calif., called the A-11.

The A-11 is named after the idea that everyone is eligible. Fast receivers replace slow behemoths in the formation. Sounds like fun. The NFL will hate it

Deadspin and Yardbarker have had posts about it in the last 24 hours, which fully qualifies as buzz. An excellent explainer on Rivals.com is probably the spark for this week's football-nerd firestorm.

The offense is named for the idea that all 11 players on the field are potentially eligible, though only six are eligible on any given play. Piedmont High coach Kurt Bryan and director of football operations Steve Humphries developed it before the 2007 season to help the undersized school compete against rivals with larger bodies drawn from larger student bodies. Piedmont is a small, affluent town completely surrounded by Oakland.

Bryan installed the offense for 2007, and after two losses while, Bryan writes, "working out some kinks," the Highlanders reeled off seven straight wins before losing their last two, including a playoff game.

The offense is a variation of the spread and the run-and-shoot, with two tight ends surrounding the center, three split ends on each side and two shotgun quarterbacks, one of whom has to be at least seven yards behind the line of scrimmage. That way, the formation qualifies as a scrimmage kick formation, which makes it legal.

Whether the whole thing was legal was Bryan and Humphries' biggest question last year. They got approval from the National Federation of High Schools and the California Interscholastic Federation, Rivals.com reports.

In a blog post, Bryan writes:

The A-11 allows smaller teams a better chance to compete vs. larger opponents by spreading out the defense. And it emphasizes speed and precision combined with effective physical movement

The A-11 makes the game safer for the players, as smaller athletes are not forced to bash heads against physically superior opponents every play ...

The A-11 is fun for the players and coaches, and exciting for the fans

Because the A-11 forces all 11 players to be able to get downfield and possibly catch or carry the ball, it discourages the use of immobile blocks of lard on the interior line. Bryan -- who has produced instructional DVDs and an "installation manual" for coaches who want to adopt the scheme -- mentions on the A-11 Web site that Piedmont moves its traditional offensive-line types over to the defense so they'll still get a chance to play, with the bonus that the defense has more players and stays fresher.

But an offense that emphasizes speed and quickness at all 11 positions would lead to fewer jobs for the 350-pound behemoths who are pro football's greatest health risks. That's aside from it being -- I'm assuming here because I've never seen it in person, though I'm planning a transbay trip this fall -- exciting and fun to watch.

In other words, as soon as an NFL team starts thinking about using it, the league will ban it.

If I were in charge of marketing for the WNBA, I would have planned for this week to go almost exactly the way it's gone.

A brawl Tuesday at the Palace of Auburn Hills resulted in suspensions for 10 players from the Los Angeles Sparks and Detroit Shock, as well as Detroit assistant coach Rick Mahorn. In the wake of the brawl, the Shock signed 50-year-old playing legend Nancy Lieberman to a 10-day contract to leave the ESPN broadcast booth long enough to play one game, Thursday night in Houston against the Comets.

So that's three headlines -- brawl, suspensions, Lieberman -- in one week, which is about four more than the WNBA gets in a typical week, even during one of the lulls in the sports year, which we're in now.

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Last week's item about blogging minor leaguers included some excerpts from San Diego Padres farmhand Dirk Hayhurst's "Non-Prospect Diaries" at Baseball America. I had tried to reach Hayhurst without success before writing it, but he got in touch after the item appeared and we spoke by phone Wednesday as he and his Portland Beavers teammates prepared to start a road series against the St. Louis Cardinals' top farm team, the Memphis Redbirds.

In addition to his monthly pieces for Baseball America, which are columns, not blogs, Hayhurst writes a blog with a similarly self-effacing title for his hometown paper, the Repository in Canton, Ohio. It's called Misadventures of a Minor League Nobody. It's updated fairly often.

His latest entry, about feeling like a salesman during an obligatory ballplayer visit to a kids cancer ward, was posted after we spoke and before he pitched two shutout innings in Portland's 1-0 loss to Memphis.

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Someone put the New York Post to work on airport security.

All of one day after the paper reported on the New York Yankees' absurd sunblock ban, the team announced it would allow fans to bring the stuff into Yankee Stadium in containers of any size. Still no aerosol cans, though.

The Yankees had been confiscating sunblock at the gates in order to protect the park -- I am not making this up -- from terrorism.

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It's probably not possible to say this without sounding like a misanthropic chump, but we're in a period of runaway statue inflation in major league baseball.

Last week the Chicago White Sox unveiled a statue of Harold Baines at U.S. Cellular Field, and the San Francisco Giants announced plans to honor Orlando Cepeda at AT&T Park.

Nothing against Baines or Cepeda, fine ballplayers and much loved in their respective cities, though both were traded away during their prime. Baines, in fact, was sent packing twice by the White Sox.

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Detroit right-fielder Matt Joyce went 4-for-6 with a triple, a home run, three runs scored and five RBIs Tuesday night in the Tigers' 19-4 rout of the Kansas City Royals.

That's a pretty good night for anyone, not just for a rookie. He keeps up that kind of hitting, he just might be ... the best hitter on his team some night. While Joyce was having his career night, Miguel Cabrera, hitting in front of him, was one-upping him. Cabrera went 5-for-6 with two doubles, four runs scored and six RBIs.

OK, Joyce has been his team's best hitter on a couple of other nights this season, but still. If I get four hits and five RBIs, I want to be the guy. Let's win by only 10 runs and have Cabrera go 3-for-6, whattaya say?

President Bush and his wife, Laura, gave the U.S. Olympic team the big presidential sendoff at the White House Monday, stuffing the athletes with duck pastrami and cheese puffs and telling them, "In Beijing you will convey our nation's most cherished values."

It actually will be the record number of official Olympics sponsors who will convey our nation's most cherished values to the world's largest advertising growth market, but have you ever tried to get Coke, McDonalds, Starbucks, Nokia and Gatorade into one ballroom? And besides it sounds better to talk to the athletes.

"As ambassadors of liberty," Bush said, "you will represent America's love for freedom and our regard for human rights and human dignity." That was a mild reference to China's human-rights record. Bush has turned down calls from human rights groups to boycott the Opening Ceremonies as a protest of the crackdown in Tibet, arguing that the Games shouldn't be a political event and that there are better times to discuss serious issues.

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A federal appeals court in Philadelphia has thrown out the $550,000 fine the FCC imposed on CBS for airing Janet Jackson's breast for nine-sixteenths of a second during the Super Bowl halftime show in February 2004.

The court ruled that, because "the commission frequently declined to find broadcast programming indecent, its restraint punctuated only by a few occasions where programming contained indecent material so pervasive as to amount to 'shock treatment' for the audience," it had effectively changed the rules on CBS without warning.

"The FCC arbitrarily and capriciously departed from its prior policy excepting fleeting broadcast material from the scope of actionable indecency," the court said.

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The latest flare-up in the Unwritten Rules War happened at the Toronto Blue Jays-Tampa Bay Rays game in Florida Saturday.

Toronto pitcher Brandon League was ejected after plunking Tampa Bay catcher Dioner Navarro in the eighth inning. In Navarro's previous at-bat, the Rays up 5-0 with two outs and one on in the sixth inning, he'd bunted for a single.

Now, what really happened is he said-he said. League said the pitch got away from him, Rays manager Joe Maddon said League threw a purpose pitch.

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Professional-athlete blogs are springing up all over, which mostly means the demarcation lines of journalism are continuing to blur, Buzz Bissinger's ears are continuing to emit steam and not a lot of interesting writing is going on.

For every engaging and readable Curtis Granderson or Greg Oden or Curt Schilling, there are dozens of banal exercises along the lines of

What's up everybody! I'm really excited to be going to the All-Star Game, so let's take a question from a reader.

"Dear Star, what do you do when you're not playing? -- Joe Blow, Tulsa, Okla."

Well, Joe, I like to chill with my family ...

You just lost 38 brain cells and that wasn't even real.

One area that seems to be a reasonably fertile ground for interesting blogging is minor league baseball.

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