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| Carolina Panthers special teams, brought to you by Maalox |
There are always going to be bad teams, of course, but I cannot remember a year in the NFL when so many teams seemed to be so bad. We’re three-fourths of the way through the season now, and a full one-fourth of the league – eight teams – have only managed to win one-fourth of the time they take the field. If this were the NBA, I would just assume these franchises were all tanking to try and strike it rich in the draft lottery. Given some the utter incompetence on display last weekend, you might think that anyway:
• I said not too long ago that the blocked punt returned for a touchdown was just about the worst play in football. The Carolina Panthers allowed Minnesota to do this not once, but twice in their 31:13 defeat last weekend. It’s been a lost season for Carolina, who overachieved a year ago and earned a first-round playoff bye by winning the always humorous NFC South. Remarkably, Carolina still has a playoff shot with a 3-8-1 record, because their division is so bad that the 5-7 Atlanta Falcons currently have the lead. And given the fact that Cam Newton’s been a piñata all season – the Eagles sacked him nine times a few weeks ago, and he was sacked four more times by the Vikings – the fact he’s still standing at all is somewhat remarkable.
• Also somewhat amazingly still alive in the chase for the title in the humorous NFC South are the 2-10 Tampa Bay Buccaneers, though the Pewter Pirates did themselves no favours in squandering a winnable game at home to Cincinnati. Trailing 14-13 late in the game, with no timeouts remaining as they attempted a last-ditch rally, Tampa Bay completed a long pass deep into Cincy territory which would have surely set up a game-winning FG – only to have the play called back because of a penalty. The Bucs had 12 men on the field. 12 men on the field! How does that happen? The play having been called back, the Bucs then did the classic dumb thing to do at the end of a game, which was to complete a pass in the middle of the field and allow the time to expire.
“This is why we’re 2-10.”
– Tampa Bay coach Lovie Smith
No argument here.
• The Redskin Potatoes have been quick to blame all of their woes on QB Robert Griffin III. RG3 had the look of a transcendent talent when he arrived at
• Speaking of poor career choices, Ken Whisenhunt was the finalist for two head coaching jobs in the offseason – Detroit and Tennessee – after a successful stint running the offense in San Diego. The Lions, in fact, had a jet juiced up and sitting on the tarmac ready to fly to San Diego to pick him up. But for some inexplicable reason, Whisenhunt chose the Tennessee gig. Now, Detroit has a justly-deserved reputation as being a coaching graveyard, of course, but the Lions also have a roster which includes a 5,000-yd QB, the best WR in football, and a whoopass defensive line – which is six more good players than can be found in Nashville. The Lions may be a mess, but at least there is some talent there, which can’t be said of the Titans, who got blasted 45:21 by Houston on Sunday and who allowed journeyman Houston QB Ryan Fitzpatrick to throw six TD passes, including one to a defensive end.
• With all of these bad teams in the NFL this season, having two square off on a weekly basis seems almost inevitable. The Jacksonville Jaguars are awful and have been awful for several years now, but if you squint enough, you just might be able to see some light at the end of the tunnel. The Jags play hard and have a few pieces to build around. Their opponent last Sunday, the New York Giants, are old, slow, can’t run the ball, have 11 matadors masquerading as a defensive unit, and QB Eli Manning has regressed to being the turnover machine he was when he first came into the league. For the Jints, no lead is safe, not even their 21-0 margin at the half in Jacksonville. New York promptly conceded two TD’s on fumble returns in the second half on their way to squandering the lead and the game. Now, if you’re as bad as Jacksonville is – the 25:24 win over the Giants raised their record to 2-10 – it could be argued that you’re better off tanking and trying to get the first pick in the draft, but that logic doesn’t really hold in the NFL, where you need so many players to fill out your roster. Unless he’s a franchise QB, one position in the draft isn’t going to make much difference, and as we’ve seen with Cam Newton and RG3, even if he might turn out to be a franchise QB, you still have to keep him upright.
• Or you could just decide to go without a QB entirely, which is essentially what Rex Ryan did on Monday night vs. Miami. Give the beleaguered Jets head coach credit for realizing that his best chance to win a game with Geno Double Donut Smith at the helm was to abandon the forward pass entirely. The Jets channeled their inner Nebraska and ground out 277 rushing yards in the game, thus becoming the first team in recent memory to tally up that many rushing yards in an NFL game and lose, because the Jets always screw it up somehow, and this game was no exception. Their attempts at boring the Dolphins into submission almost worked, but the Dolphins rousted themselves out of heavy slumber to take a 16-13 lead in the last 90 seconds of game, meaning the Jets then had to pass – at which point Geno Smith was promptly intercepted, to the surprise of absolutely nobody.
• Oh yeah, and the Raiders lost 52:0 in St. Louis. Yeech.
That right there is a lot of bad football. (And I didn’t even get into the Cardinals’ tackling shadows in Atlanta, the lousy defensive efforts put forth by Chicago and Pittsburgh, or the heap of hot garbage which is the current 49ers offense.) So much lose, so little time. The standings are now getting wackily stratified – in the AFC, 12 teams are .500 or better, and the other four are 2-10 or worse – which should make for an interesting playoff chase. I’m not sure, however, if these NFL back markers are necessarily worse than bad teams of games gone by. Being someone who contemplates relative awfulness, this is an idea which intrigues me. I’m not sure teams are worse than before so much as the game has changed to the point where bad teams appear to be worse. It’s getting harder and harder to hide your weaknesses in football. Whereas, in the past, a bad team might be able to go about eking out a few 13:10 games here and there, and win a few more games than should be expected, in the modern day they’re not only less likely to win, but you’re more likely to wind up getting annihilated.
The blowouts have been everywhere in the NFL this season. The Rams putting up a half-century on Oakland was the 6th time a team has scored at least 50 this season. The Packers did it twice in a row, v. the Bears and then the Eagles. Team Cheese’s 55:14 win over Chicago came on the heels of the Bears giving up 51 in New England in their previous game, which marked the first time in the NFL since the Rochester Jeffersons of 1923 that a team gave up more than 50 in back-to-back games. It wasn’t that long ago that 40 points constituted a monstrous offensive outpouring in the NFL, but along with six 50-pt. games this year, teams have broken 40 another 21 times. NFL offenses are going crazy this year.
And this was bound to happen, at some point, since the offenses have been going crazy in football at pretty much every other level for most of the past decade. It’s most apparent at the NCAA level, where the numbers being run up are straight out of a video game. Western Kentucky and Marshall tried to break football last week. Had WKU not gone for 2 in OT (a gutsy and awesome move on the part of the Hilltoppers), there’s no telling what the final score would’ve been. As it stands, I’d be willing to wager the 67:66 final score of that football game will be higher than when then two schools square off on the basketball court. Games in the Big 12 and Pac-10 are track meets on grass. Everyone has a QB and a fleet of receivers, the ball is flying all over the place, teams are scoring tonnes of points and rendering the defenses as good as helpless.
Which is a revolution in the game that, quite honestly, should’ve happened about a century ago. It never made any rational sense to run the ball straight ahead into a pile of 14 guys, seven of which are your own. It always seemed to make more sense to run away from the defense entirely, or at least try to run around them. And no kids grow up playing sandlot football run the fullback dive. You spread everyone out and go out for a pass (except for the slow fat kid who stays in and blocks, of course). It’s obvious. Part of why it’s easy to teach, on a high school and collegiate level, is that it’s the natural way that kids grow up playing the game. It also negates size advantages and emphasizes speed, and fewer collisions around the line of scrimmage mean fewer injuries. It’s really the way the game seems like it should be played.
As is the idea of playing hurry-up and doing away entirely with the huddle. Keep the tempo up, keep the pressure on the defense, don’t let them substitute or get set. It’s an obvious idea, and one which should’ve been done decades ago. It’s sort of a no-brainer.
Throw in some sophisticated scheming and play design, and now you’ve got seemingly unstoppable offenses – spread out formations, 1-on-1 matchups against defenders and the like. The short pass becomes just as effective a tool for ball and clock possession as the run, even more so since you’ve got 1-on-1 matchups and the 7-yd pass can become a 15-yd or 20-yd gain with a single broken tackle. It’s all very logical. The revolution in the way football is played has been cerebral, first and foremost.
Now I personally don’t mind this trend in football, having found far too many sports becoming far too defensive in recent years. It’s a dead ball era in baseball with far too many strikeouts. Basketball went through about a 15-year period where nobody could shoot (and college basketball still sucks because the control-freaky coaches won’t let anybody shoot). Fewer teams are parking the bus in soccer, but everyone’s been parking the zamboni in hockey. The fact is that, in most sports, it’s easy to play defense. Overly defensive sport is a dumbing down of the game. Football has shown itself to be the most creative and imaginative of sports in recent years (although, to give it some credit, the NBA is pretty cool these days when teams, you know, aren’t trying to purposely stink).
But with all of these changes in the game of football, defenses are now under siege. At the high school and collegiate levels, the entire concept of what ‘good defense’ is has necessarily had to change. Given that your team is spread out all over the place, the offense is going to find seams and move the ball. It’s inevitable. So on the defensive side, your best bet is to play for big plays – sacks, turnovers and the like – and also try to minimize the damage along the way. Auburn gashed Alabama on Saturday for 44 pts. and over 600 yards of offense, but the Tide turned back the War Eagles repeatedly in the red zone, forcing Auburn to kick five field goals. In the modern age of football, this constituted good defense. Alabama wound up winning the game 55:44 – nothing Auburn did constituted good defense in the slightest – and Alabama head coach
“There wasn’t any ‘seemed like it.’ You’re not going to hurt my feelings. They passed for 465 yards. I’ve got it right here on paper. The way we’re headed in college football, there’s going to be games like this, and you’re going to have to be able to win games like this. There’s a lot more points being scored in this day and age of college football than ever before. I think the hurry-up offense, the advent of the zone read and the option passes that come off it that people throw make it very difficult to defend.”
And a fair amount of the tactics and techniques which have proven so successful in the high school and college ranks have begun creeping into the NFL game. This isn’t the least bit surprising – not only do the professionals have the best talent, but they ultimately will also find the best ideas for utilizing that talent. Chip Kelley brought the University of
Which is easier said than done, of course, particularly if you’re a bad football team and make the assortment of mistakes which bad football teams generally make more of, most of which occur on the offensive side of the ball. Turnovers, in particular, are more of a killer than ever, since it’s an opportunity lost to keep pace. And modern defenses which go hunting turnovers will attack the ball and look to score, which means you see quite a few pick sixes and fumble returns for TDs, as well. The whole goal of modern defense is to make big plays, so the last thing you want to do is make it easy for them to do that.
In the end, every mistake gets magnified when stopping the other team is so difficult. A good rule of thumb in sports is that the higher the score, the harder it is to spring the upset. You can luck your way into a 1-0 win in some sports, but in football you have to make 120 plays with 22 players and so many moving parts, and in this day and age, it’s very likely that you can’t stop the other team to begin with. Even the most élite of defenses in the NFL, the Seahawks, got abused by San Diego and Dallas earlier this season. It happens to everyone. If the Seahawks can’t stop anyone, how is an error-prone team going to stay within 20 pts. of a competent opponent?
So I don’t necessarily think there are more bad teams, they are simply losing more spectacularly – and more entertainingly in the process. All eight of the offenders mentioned in the buzzard points above are among the bottom-feeders in statistical categories on both sides of the ball, being neither able to score or defend with any sort of effectiveness. The 3-9 team of the modern NFL is probably closer in skill to, say, a 5-7 team of the past. (This year’s crop of 5-7’s include the Falcons, Saints, and Bears, three teams allergic to defense who have enough firepower to win from time to time.) But 5-7 is pretty boring, when you get right down to it. Mediocrity sucks. Go big or go home. If you’re going to be bad, be really bad!
And on that note, I think I’m going to check in on this 76ers game …
