Newton's Football by Allen St. John

Author:Allen St. John [St. John, Allen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-54515-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

* Wolfram, though, is quick to point out that the Butterfly Effect is more useful as a metaphor than a practical example. In the real world, the flap of the butterfly’s wing would be damped out by the viscosity in the atmosphere; only in the rarest of circumstances would a factor that small actually change the weather.

CHAPTER 10

PLAYING DEFENSE, HEISENBERG STYLE

A hacker can tell you that there are two basic ways to gain access to a secure computer system. You can build a strong, sophisticated computer that will monkey-brain its way through layers upon layers of encryption. The problem is that once you crack the code, the code writer can just up the ante by adding another layer of encryption. All of a sudden you’re back to square one, but now you need an even more robust computer to hack through that new encryption.

The other way is to sneak into the office and find the password written on a steno pad in the secretary’s top desk drawer.

Up against the game’s increasingly complex offenses, football’s defensive coordinators faced a similar choice. They could find guys who were bigger, faster, and smarter to provide a better man-to-man response to offenses that were increasing their complexity at a geometric rate.

Or they could change the way defense was played. Within the rules. And outside of them.

——

One by-the-book response to a modern passing offense is the zone blitz. This defense mirrors the West Coast offense in that it marries high- and low-risk strategies into a sophisticated hybrid that’s designed to stop a West Coast passing attack. The zone blitz was popularized by Dick LeBeau, defensive coordinator of the Cincinnati Bengals, who would later go on to run the defense for two of Pittsburgh’s Super Bowl–winning squads.

“It was on a cross-country flight following the team failure of 1987 where LeBeau drew up the Gutenberg bible of NFL defenses. With his tray-table down and a pen in hand, LeBeau began doodling on a napkin,” wrote John Breech on the Bleacher Report website. “The doodles turned into safeties blitzing, but that had been done before. Then another doodle: defensive linemen dropping back into pass coverage to make up for the blitzing safeties’ exposed area.”

To understand the zone blitz, it’s best to break it down into its component parts.

First the blitz. Even the name is edgy, conjuring up World War II fighter planes, and as Chris Brown observed on Grantland, “A blitz is the closest thing we have to football bedlam.” In its simplest form, the blitz is one or more defenders abandoning pass coverage in order to increase pressure on the quarterback.

This makes the blitz a play of both great opportunity and great peril for a defensive coordinator. If the blitzing defender does his job, good things happen. At a minimum, he jars the quarterback out of his progression. Time is a quarterback’s best friend, and losing a second or two can be his worst enemy. A harried quarterback makes bad decisions. Sometimes he throws inaccurate passes.

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