No one feels sorry for professional football coaches, who
have astronomical salaries, legions of adoring acolytes in the public and
sporting press, and more than the normal allotment of toadies. But they do have their crosses to bear, most
notably the lacerations inflicted by football tacticians whose expertise is
born entirely of hindsight. These
people are known – in football and, metaphorically, in a thousand other
pursuits -- as Monday morning quarterbacks.
Their primary function: To dissect the tactical worth of play calls
after the outcome of those plays is known.
A lot of this goes on in a lot of different activities, but it is endemic to football. It goes on, to a greater or lesser extent, with just about every play (since every play has an outcome.) God knows it’s a thoroughly explored phenomenon here in St. Louis where legitimate coaching shortcomings have kept the Rams out of the playoffs since the Clinton administration. But legitimacy often gives way to irrationality, as when a play goes for a touchdown, and then, when the exact same play is stuffed at the line of scrimmage, the team is accused of, quelle horreur!, unimaginative play calling. Or, to put it another way, a play that works is a good call, and a play that doesn’t work is a bad call, even if it’s the same play. This is the equivalent, in baseball, of saying your slugger should never have swung at that pitch, unless he hits a home run, in which case he should have. Never once has a football fan been heard to say, following a touchdown, “I wish they hadn’t run that play; it was a bad call.”
Which brings us to the 2015 Super Bowl and the more or less instant judgment – and something that became conventional wisdom before the confetti settled to the ground – that calling the pass play on which the outcome of the game turned was a demonstrably and self-evidently idiotic decision.. The thing, however, is this: Had that play gone for a touchdown – and it absolutely could have – no one, as the trophies were being handed out and the breathless winners were being interviewed and the Gatorade was being splashed about, would have been saying what a dumb idea it was. The likelihood, in fact, is that the exact same people now calling the exact same play moronic would be calling it dazzling and tactically amazing and would be nominating Pete Carroll for genius of the century.
But wait. Everyone knows that calling for a pass play in that situation is crazy…something no one does and no one of sound mind would ever do. Right? Wrong. That strategy -- trying a pass play on second down inside the five -- is not a wrong one or even an unusual one. Nor is it a particularly risky one. From Benjamin Morris of the Web site FiveThirtyEightSports, we get this information: “On the 1-yard line, quarterbacks threw 66 touchdowns with no interceptions prior to Wilson’s errant toss. Not mentioned: They also scored four touchdowns on scrambles (which Wilson is pretty good at last I checked). That’s a 60.9 percent success rate. Just for comparison’s sake, here’s how more than 200 runs fared this year in the same situation: 125 led to touchdowns; 94 failed to score, of those, 23 were for loss of yardage; two resulted in lost fumbles.”
So, the idea that it was an inexplicably cockamamie call from nowheresville is just wrong. In fact, it was closer to being a customary call in that situation. There is an element of class resentment in play here, as in “these overpaid geniuses can’t see what we ordinary joes can see as plain as the nose in your face.” But what all the ordinary joes need to get their heads around: The play call didn’t fail. The play failed. (If they are prepared to say they’d have branded the play dumb and crazy even if it had won the Super Bowl for the Seahawks, then I stand corrected.)
Here’s the Morris article, which contains lots of interesting information about this episode…
