The problem I have watching NFL football is the same basic problem I have watching journeymen prizefighters box after I got used to watching Roberto Duran; something in the picture just doesn't seem to measure up.
There were several major points of change in the game of football, at most of which the game became safer and more intelligent. There was a point at which the game was nearly banned in the early years of the 20'th century and was basically saved by a series of rule changes put forward by Harvard University. Injuries were reduced by half the year after they outlawed the flying wedge and again significantly when they legalized the forward pass. Modern helmets and face shields were obvious steps forward as was the T formation devised by Chicago.
But then something strange happened. Zone pass defenses seemed to come in somewhere back in the fifties and sixties. The NFL adapted by using older and older quarterbacks as it began to take more time to learn how to throw against the zones, and to learn
when not to throw the ball. As near as I can tell by watching, this has at least partially ruined the pro game. Running in the NFL is ineffective most of the time since the geriatric quarterback doesn't really contribute anything to running plays and it thus starts off as 10 men versus 11 and any sort of an outside running play generally requires that the man carrying the ball lose one or more steps waiting for a block in the form of either a pulling guard or a fullback to materialize.
Pro offenses depend on passing, and everybody gets killed in the system. Quarterbacks are getting killed trying to hold the ball five or six seconds waiting for somebody to clear zones and then getting hit blindside by a guy 100 lbs. heavier than they are, receivers are getting killed trying to catch balls in zones and then taking shots from guys running full-bore straight at them,
running backs are getting hit by several people at once at points of attack, and everybody else pretty much just gets trampled.
Colleges didn't have the option of using geriatric quarterbacks since in the college game quarterbacks graduate every four years, at least in theory. There were a number of years in the early 60s when national college championship football games were being won by scores of 6 - 3 or 10 - 6. The game was becomming boring. And then, in the late 60s, the colleges began to develop
running games so powerful, that they didn't need to worry about pass defenses, zone or otherwise.
For the first six or ten years of the wishbone, TV camera crews were consistently being fooled and following the wrong guy down the field. For over a decade, the two most powerful football conferences (Big 8 and SEC) were dominated by wishbone teams. But only one guy ever totally made a science out of it and that was Paul Bear Bryant. The Florida teams eventually started
lining up against the Okies with 11 men on the line of scrimmage and the Okies were not able to figure it out. Any time anybody ever did that against Bryant's teams it was an automatic seven points; that simply put Ozzie Newsome and two other gifted receivers out against man coverage with Richard Todd or Jeff Rutledge throwing the ball to them.
Bryant had somehow or other devised a passing game keyed to the action of the wishbone and it was not possible to tell when they were throwing. When the tide went to throw the ball, it did not look like a desparation act; it looked like something they practiced and were good at, and figured to do 20 times a game. Any number of their games started off with the other team lining up nine or ten guys close to the line of scrimmage. The score six minutes later would be 14 - 0, and then they would start keeping corners and safeties back far enough to cover passes, and then the wishbone would roll over them. It was not possible to defense both parts of the thing.
Bryant won two national titles with that system in the final few years before he died. Sonny Jurgenson claims that systems don't win in the NFL; that motivated players do. In the case of Bryant's teams that case would have been hard to make. I always figured the Alabama offensive system was worth something like14 points a game, everything else being equal.
That was the only time in my life I thought I was seeing a situation in which an amateur version of a sport had outgrown the professional version. I still believe that if there had been a college all-star game at that time with Bryant coaching the all-stars, i.e. if some NFL defensive unit had had to try to survive a sixty minute look at that Alabama wishbone, it's likely that the NFL could have been seriously embarassed.
The only one guy who led any sort of an inordinately rough life in the wishbone was the fullback; everybody else was safer. The quarterback was getting hit by guys closer to his own size and he saw it coming, halfbacks usually had one man to beat, and receivers got hit, if at all, by one guy who was running in the same direction they were. I never saw a quarterback get seriously hurt at Oklahoma or Alabama in those years.
The bogus claims that that system couldn't work in the pros is answered by noting that Oklahoma's 74 squad had a quasi-pro defensive unit of which 9 of the 11 guys were starting in the pros two years later and the only team which ever moved the ball against them at all that year was their own offensive unit in scrimmages.
______________________________________________________ RollTideFan - The University of Alabama Athletics Discussion List
"Welcome to RollTideFan! Wear a cup!"
To join or leave the list or to make changes to your subscription visit http://listinfo.rolltidefan.net
