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Marching madness
Updated: Thursday October 25, 2001 11:02 AM
I can't stand the West Coast offense. I don't like the name, since it's wrong, but I've harangued you enough about that one. What I really don't like is what it's done to football. I'm in the press box watching the Eagles-Giants Monday night. I'm watching the Eagles getting attacked by a swarm of gnats. Dink, dink, dink, dink, the ball moving down the field like it's on some antiquated, herky-jerk conveyer belt. But this approach is eating up the clock, right? And no one's making mistakes and turning the ball over. Best of all it's keeping the defense off the field. Aren't those the current mantras of the NFL? Call it the Prevent Offense. First quarter: The Giants get off on a 13-play drive, with the longest gain being 10 yards, and that's on a run. The longest pass completion is nine yards. This march has taken more than eight minutes and netted three points, but it has kept the defense off the field, right? The defense is so happy at this lengthy vacation that it intercepts Donovan McNabb's long pass ... I guess he wanted to show the Monday night viewers that quarterbacks still were allowed to go downfield ... on the Eagles' first play. Back comes the dinkmobile with a 10-play drive good for three more points. The guy next to me has to wake me up. "Hey, they just kicked a field goal." I am quite annoyed. I'd been dreaming about John Unitas and Joe Namath.
What happened was fascinating. The Eagles, who had played stout goal-line defense, keeping the Giants out of the end zone, now had a fix on that dink stuff. They crowded the line and the short zones. They defied the Giants to go downfield. Huh? Why go downfield when we've got a 9-0 lead? New York's offense accounted for 59 yards, three first downs and no points in the second half. It was the Giants offense that had run out of steam after all those plays, not Philly's defense. The Eagles scored twice and won the game, 10-9. New York had a real shot at the end, getting the ball back on its own 30 with 1:47 and all three timeouts left, but now they were in a catch-up mode. They had to open things up, at least a little bit. And up to that point, Kerry Collins had completed 20 passes, but only three of them were for more than 10 yards, and the longest one, a 38-yarder to Ike Hilliard, came from a little five-yard curl, followed by a missed tackle. I don't really know how tough it is for a quarterback who's been zeroing in at the six- and seven-yard range all night to lengthen his approach, under pressure, with the game riding on it. So I asked Philly's old Pro Bowl QB Ron Jaworski, when I ran into him in the tunnel after the game. "Of course it's tough," he said. "It's murder when you've spent the whole game in a certain rhythm and now you have to get out of it." Well, on the second play, Collins scrambled, was hit, fumbled, and that was it. We never got a chance to find out. But I hope that what I'd seen might signal a change of approach in the NFL, or at least a topic for further study. McNabb, who didn't have one of his better nights, completed a 23-yard fade to James Thrash, over very tight coverage, to set up a field goal. And the winning TD pass covered 18 yards, a kind of inside move and then break back out to the corner, again by Thrash, the play successful because McNabb had lots of time to watch the whole thing develop. Both completions were longer than the deepest Giants completion of the night, except for that fluky missed tackle thing. The most successful offense in the NFL, Mike Martz's Rams' attack, is non-West Coast (actually true West Coast, but as I said, we're not going to get into that whole business). The Chargers' coordinator, Norv Turner, who comes from the same background as Martz does, is another of the breakaway band. Tom Moore in Indy is a down-the-field guy. There are others throughout the league, and I hope their approach becomes the vogue and the dinky-dunk finds its place in the closet with the mothballs. Nobody's saying that an offense has to be a never-ending succession of deep heaves, but geez, let's see some stops and fades and posts and corners at the 18-20-yard level. In their locker room after the game, the Giants pointed to their inability to stop Philly at the end, and especially to their own failures in the red zone, their inability to score touchdowns. "They can sit on our short stuff because we have no speed on our offense," one guy said. "That's the thing this team lacks." It's part of it, but not the whole picture. They had the same personnel last year and Collins passed for 381 yards against the Vikings in the NFC Championship Game, not to mention 321 against Jacksonville in the regular-season finale. OK, you say, not the best pass defenses. But the Steelers finished ninth in the NFL, and two weeks before the Jacksonville game, Collins hit them for 333 yards, the most they'd given up to any QB all season. I think it's something else. "Your offense gets locked into a certain mindset in some games," tailback Tiki Barber said. "Then all of a sudden at the end, the game plan changes and the mindset is different. It's tough." "The thing that kills you is marching up and down the field and then getting three, three, three," left tackle Lomas Brown said. "That's doing it the hard way. The easy way is getting your seven when you have a chance." And how about the whole idea of staying on the field for 45 snaps for a half? That can't be any picnic for a lineman. "I'll be honest, it wears you out," center Dusty Ziegler said. "The defense substitutes people. You look up and you keep seeing new faces in front of you. No one substitutes for us." The offensive line got tired and I got tired in the press box watching these endless marches into three-point land. There's got to be another way. Sports Illustrated senior writer Paul Zimmerman covers the NFL for the magazine and CNNSI.com. His "Inside Football" column and Mailbag appear weekly on CNNSI.com. To send a question to Dr. Z, click here. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.
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