The Art of Smart Football by Chris B. Brown

Author:Chris B. Brown [Brown, Chris B.]
Language: eng
Format: azw
Publisher: SCBB Press
Published: 2015-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

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Still maddeningly addictive, the old Tecmo Bowl video game had an extremely basic but intuitive play-calling system. Each team had four plays to choose from on offense—usually two passes and two runs. There were also four choices on defense, but rather than choosing from the set of sophisticated coverages, blitzes, and fronts available in today’s football games, players instead chose what play they thought the offense would run. If the guess was correct, the offense’s failure was preordained: the quarterback would be sacked or the runner tackled for no gain. If wrong, two of the options might only go for a moderate gain, but the third meant catastrophe for the defense.

Admittedly or not, most fans think of real-world play calling as a slightly more complicated version of the Tecmo Bowl model. The offense’s job is to keep the defense guessing, and the defense must guess right to make a stop. On some level, even with their lengthy play sheets and reams of data, professional coordinators are engaged in a version of this same psychological battle, employing little more than educated guesses about the opponent’s tactics. Until recently, even the best, from Bill Walsh to Bill Belichick, have been playing what amounts to a complex game of Tecmo Bowl, improved only by the marginal differences coming in the form of various checks or audibles by the quarterbacks.

That little drive by Ole Miss reveals that things are no longer so straightforward. There’s a new game, and it takes those time-tested plays and blends them into something new. And it blends them so seamlessly that it threatens to upend the very ideas of run and pass. The answer to “What play was that?” is increasingly, “All of them.”

It’s understandable that most fans (and even many coaches) think of football plays in terms of the strict run-pass dichotomy of the Tecmo Bowl model. Fantasy football is founded on the difference between passing and rushing statistics, and even recent scholarly articles about football are built upon the distinction because that’s what shows up in the box score. And at least on some level, the idea of packaging multiple options for the quarterback based on the movements of defenders is not entirely new. But the trend of combining entirely different categories of plays—runs and passes, screens and passes, runs and screens—is new, and these ideas are at the forefront of thinking about football.

“The basic premise is to make a key defender be in two places at the same time,” said Keith Grabowski, a former college offensive coordinator. “We’re only scratching the surface of what’s possible.”

One of the most interesting packaged concepts—and the play that first helped me begin to rethink the very nature of a football play—is known as “stick-draw,” which combines a delayed run, or draw play, with the quick-passing stick concept. The first coach I saw put it in action was Dana Holgorsen, the current head coach at West Virginia. Like all of the best packaged concepts, nothing about the play is particularly new.

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