It's time to stop selling Flutie short
Posted: Thursday October 22, 1998 03:20 PM
Sports Illustrated NFL writer Paul Zimmerman checks in each Thursday
with an analysis of trends and players to watch. Click here to send an email to Dr. Z.
I watched Doug Flutie
practicing drop-kicks in the warmups before the Jacksonville-Buffalo game,
and someone said to me, "What's he doing that for?" I smiled and
shrugged because it was one of those things that I both knew and didn't
know.
I thought about a conversation I once had with Flutie 10 years ago in
Foxboro, when he was the Patriots' quarterback. The topic was: Ways to
win a game that coaches would never think of.
"You're down by a point and you're out of timeouts and you've got
the ball at midfield with time for only one play," he said. "What
do you call?"
"Well, I'll tell you what I wouldn't call," I said.
"I wouldn't call the Big Ben [that was before they named it the Hail
Mary] that everyone uses." He nodded in agreement.
"I'd probably go to a hook-and-ladder with two laterals," I said.
"Throw a hook pass, have the receiver lateral to a trailer and have
the guy catching the lateral pitch back to a second trailer behind
him."
"No good," he said. "You'd run out of sideline."
"Well, then make it an inside lateral."
"Uh-uh. You'd be going right back into the flow of traffic."
This was obviously something that he'd spent considerable time thinking
about.
"O.K., what would YOU call?"
"Here's what I'd do," he said.
"Line your kicker up as a wideout. Have him run a 20-yard crossing
pattern, throw him the ball and have him stop and dropkick a field
goal."
Huh?
"It's legal,"he said. "You can drop-kick a field goal during
the course of play."
"Well, who knows how to drop-kick these days?"
"I do," he said. "I practice it."
So there was little Doug last Sunday, practicing his drop-kicks before the
Jaguars game. Watching him, I got this tremendous feeling of nostalgia, and
admiration. By golly, he was still thinking of weird ways to win a game.
Then, unfortunately, I called Jerry Seeman, the NFL's supervisor of
officials, just to see if the maneuver was kosher.
"When you talked to Flutie it was," he said. "But seven
years ago we changed the rule and now you can only drop-kick it behind the
line of scrimmage."
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Flutie's late-game heroics led the Bills past the then-unbeaten Jaguars in Week 7. Richard Mackson |
Well, maybe someone in the officiating office got wind of Flutie's scheme
back in '91 and decided that such originality simply had no place in a
dignified sport. And Flutie just said the hell with it, I'll practice it
anyway. You never know. But to me that's kind of a microcosm of Flutie's
whole career—the heavy hand of officialdom coming down hard on a
maverick with maverick ideas.
Here's another one he gave me that day.
"This would be good in college football, where they have the two-point
conversion," he said, "or in the NFL if they ever put it in
[which they eventually did]. You're down by a point near the end of the
game and you're out of timeouts. You're on defense and you can't stop the
clock and the other team is still calling plays, right before it goes into
its kneel mode. What do you do?"
"Take off my head set," I said.
"You let them score," he said. "Then you get the ball back,
and you're down by seven with a chance to win it or tie it if you've
blocked the extra point, and a chance to tie it if you haven't. If you
don't let them score, you've got no chance."
"Yeah, and if they recognize what you're doing, they'll simply pick up
the first down and drop."
"Uh-uh," he said. "No running back with a chance to up his
average from 3.8 to 4.2 on one carry is going to pass it up."
I mentioned this to a couple of coaches. They shook their heads. Sheer
nonsense. Then, lo and behold, Mike Holmgren went and did it at the end of
the last Super Bowl. Of course, he misread the down and the situation
wasn't exactly similar and the Broncos were down near the goal line anyway,
but the logic was the same.
Flutie was nine years ahead of him. But who was Doug Flutie to the NFL?
Just a little guy who didn't measure up to the league's height and weight
standards. Better off going up to Canada where you'll be out of our
hair.
I thought of all this as I watched the 5'9" Flutie work his magic
last weekend and upset the unbeaten Jaguars. There is something seriously
wrong with a sport that has no place for a guy like this. But let's be
totally honest, and I'm so much in his corner that it's difficult to admit:
In the late 1980's, when he was quarterbacking the Patriots, he wasn't as
good a quarterback as he is now.
Nine years in Canada, where he became a CFL legend and won the MVP six
times, changed all that. I covered one of his Grey Cup games, and he was a
flashing, dashing, human exclamation point, smart, unbelievably effective
on the move, blessed with a tremendously strong arm—which he still
has. There's no law that says that just because you're short you can't
throw hard.
And now he ranks with Brett
Favre as the NFL's best quarterback at throwing on the go, improvising
and creating something out of nothing. Does this mean so little in the
modern pro game? Isn't there a place for it—somewhere, somehow? Would
it not be a darn shame if he goes back to the bench when the big-money guy
in Buffalo, Rob
Johnson, is deemed healthy?
Unfortunately, Flutie didn't grow any taller during his Canadian stay, and
that's the big knock, the only knock, on him. He's 5'9". Every time he
has a pass deflected, and there have been a few, the scouts look at each
other and smile. See?
The NFL has seen its share of small, scrambling quarterbacks.
"Scatter guys," Weeb Ewbank, one of the proponents of the classic
drop-back style, once called them. "They scatter around for a while,
then someone nails 'em and they don't scatter anymore."
Marlin "The Magician" Briscoe (program height, 5'11", but
actually shorter) thrilled the world for a while in Denver. This was in
1968. Then he started throwing interceptions. Then he became a wideout. The
5'10" Frankie Albert was a wonderfully innovative quarterback for the
original San Francisco
49ers, a magnificent scrambler with many of the moves that Fran
Tarkenton later made famous. And Tarkenton himself, an inch or two less
than his 6-foot official height, became a Hall of Famer, although people
still mention the passes that the Steelers' L.C.Greenwood batted down in
the '75 Super Bowl.
In 1969 Kansas City coach Hank Stram won the Super Bowl using a moving
pocket, rolling his quarterback out. "Football of the Seventies,"
Hank called it, predicting that it would revolutionize the game. It didn't.
It's still used as a mixer, but the straight drop-back remains standard.
But what's wrong with a bi-level approach, especially for a team that plays
in such horrendous wind conditions as Buffalo does? The Hawk, that fierce
wind that swoops down from the Canadian frontier, has unhinged many a
strong-armed passer in Buffalo, and I'm sure that's one of the reasons why
the Bills brought in Flutie in the first place. Your passer is having
trouble, come in with little Doug to move around, to improvise, to put it
to a team that's getting too tired to chase him.
Personally, I'd love to see Flutie as the fulltime starter, and based on
his two victories in his last two appearances, he certainly deserves it.
But barring that, how about a two-pronged attack, some Johnson, some Flutie
as a change of pace? Only Favre can match Flutie's innovation when a play
breaks down. No one can match his heart. But he happens to be 5'9" and
that's the one thing they'll never let him forget.
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