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Up For Grabs

Eight weeks into a season dominated by defenses, only this much is certain: It's anybody's ball game

By Peter King
Issue date: November 8, 1999

Standing together on the field at the St. Louis Rams' practice facility last Friday were two men whose sudden prominence is emblematic of a year in which things have grown exceedingly strange in the NFL: Dick Vermeil, at 63 the second-oldest coach in the game, and his quarterback, Kurt Warner, the instant superstar. They are perhaps the last two men you would have ever expected to be making headlines this year, but they are on top of the world in this upside-down season. "You know," Vermeil, flashing a quick grin, told Warner, "in seven weeks, you've turned me from a jerk to a genius."

Even a genius couldn't have predicted that the marquee game of the first eight weeks would turn out to be the unbeaten Rams, who haven't had a winning season since 1989, on the road in Nashville against the once-beaten Tennessee Titans, a franchise that last made the playoffs as the Houston Oilers, in 1993. The biggest attractions from '98 -- the Atlanta Falcons, the Denver Broncos, the Minnesota Vikings and the New York Jets -- are 9-22. John Elway, Reggie White and Barry Sanders have retired; Steve Young, Michael Irvin and Dan Marino are injured and might have to join them. Bad things happen in threes? The top three rushers from last year -- Terrell Davis, Jamal Anderson and Garrison Hearst -- are out for the season with injuries. The three leading passers in '98 -- Randall Cunningham, Vinny Testaverde and Young -- have been benched, knocked out for the year by a ruptured Achilles tendon and sidelined by a concussion, respectively.

More remarkable still, the fans don't seem to miss them. The NFL appears on its way to an attendance record. Last year 75% of the games played to full houses; this year 94 of the first 114 games (82%) were sold out. Through seven weeks three of the four NFL TV partners reported ratings increases (ABC was down a point), thanks in part to a schedule that opened a week later than last year in order to avoid the ratings-poor Labor Day weekend. CBS's ratings, up 15%, are particularly stunning because the network's biggest draws, the Broncos and the Jets, are in last place in their divisions.

Denver fans might be mourning the departure of Elway, but local TV ratings for Broncos games in the first seven weeks were up 11% over the same period last year. Detroit Lions fans may never see Sanders run in silver and blue again, but ratings in that city were up 16%. Folks in Wisconsin have apparently gotten over the Green Bay Packers' loss of White and coach Mike Holmgren, who left to coach the Seattle Seahawks; in Milwaukee, Green Bay's first seven games garnered a record 44.6 rating and 71 share, meaning that 71% of all TVs turned on while the team is playing are tuned in to the Pack.

There is some justifiable hand-wringing going on in NFL front offices about the quality of play. "How much more can this league withstand?" says San Francisco 49ers coach Steve Mariucci, presiding over the decline of a once proud franchise. "The injuries and retirements have had a drastic effect on teams' production, records, confidence and swagger."

Pittsburgh Steelers president Dan Rooney is so concerned about the degree of player movement since the 1993 advent of unfettered free agency that he has persuaded NFL Players Association executive director Gene Upshaw to convene a meeting with leading players and owners after the season to discuss revising free-agency rules. The Steelers have lost 37 players from the 49-man roster that played in the Super Bowl in January 1996. Could free agency be revamped? "You never know," Upshaw says. "At least we'll talk it through."

Some of the unimaginative strategy this season -- the Baltimore Ravens, the New Orleans Saints, the New York Giants and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers have set offensive football back to the Nagurski era -- is due in part to the lack of cohesiveness caused by free agency and the need for unproven or unskilled backups to step in for star quarterbacks. "We're at the crossroads we all knew was coming," says first-year Ravens coach Brian Billick. "We're in a transition time for quarterbacks in a quarterback-driven league. Three quarters of the teams are in quarterback flux."

But what's so bad about unpredictability? Fans like to watch close games. They like exciting finishes. Sure, star players are still a big attraction, but even more important to fans is that their team has a chance to win every week. "In 20 years, when you're gone and I'm gone," Bill Parcells told his precocious quarterback, Drew Bledsoe, after Bledsoe found fame and lucrative endorsements in just his second season with the New England Patriots, "none of these fans around here will care about you. They'll care about the next guy wearing the blue jersey. Fans love the uniforms, not the players." Parcells's words still ring true.

In the first two weeks this fall, 17 of the 30 games ended with the trailing team in possession of the ball and having a chance to win or tie in the last two minutes. Green Bay's first three wins came on last-minute touchdown passes by Brett Favre. Five of New England's first seven games were decided by one or two points. All told, 41 of the season's first 114 games (36%) have been decided by a field goal or less; at the same point last year 18% of the games were that close. Somewhere, Pete Rozelle is smiling. One New Jersey country club has been holding an NFL knock-off pool for years. The rules: Put $100 into the kitty. Each contestant picks one team each week that he thinks will win. He can't pick a team more than once, and as soon as he picks a team that loses, he's out. Last man standing wins the pot. Before the '99 season no winner had ever been crowned before Thanksgiving. On Oct. 10 the last 29 players (of the original 69 who entered) were knocked out, all victimized by either the Philadelphia Eagles' upset of the Dallas Cowboys or the Chicago Bears' win over the Vikings. (A rule change allowed those final 29 players to start anew the following week.) "Paul Tagliabue has exactly what he wants, and it isn't parity," one pool player says. "It's creeping communism."

"You've got to bring your best to the stadium to win every Sunday," says Patriots tackle Bruce Armstrong, a 13-year veteran. "In the early 1990s we'd go to Buffalo, and the Bills were just a better team. We had to play much better than them, and they still had to turn the ball over for us to win. It's not that way this season, and the players who've been around sense it. It's why I keep telling our younger players, 'Just hang in there and we'll have a chance at the end of the day to win.' You have to accept that no matter what your team did last year or how good anybody thinks you are, most games will go down to the last minute."

"I like the game the way it is today," says Bucs director of player personnel Jerry Angelo, "because I know when I go to the stadium we're going to see two teams get after each other. Seldom is the game over at halftime. I like to get to the last chapter before I know who committed the murder. What we're getting are games played with more intensity because the players know anything can happen. No team can just turn it on at the end and pull out a win like some of those teams could when they had dynasties, like the Steelers of the '70s."

The biggest reason for so many close, low-scoring games? Blitzing. Lots of it. From any position, at any time. Last Saturday night, as the Rams' offensive players had one final tune-up for their game at Tennessee, offensive coordinator Mike Martz showed them a videotape of a play from the Titans' Oct. 3 game at San Francisco. Tennessee's defense was in its usual 4-3 alignment, but at the snap all three linebackers looped into pass-rush lanes and stormed the quarterback. Mind you, this was on first down -- a rushing down. Three linebackers run-blitzing is the kind of craziness that offenses have been seeing all year. "Fellas, expect this kind of blitzing from the very first snap tomorrow," Martz said. "They'll come after you all day."

That the Titans did. While allowing Warner to throw for 328 yards and three touchdowns, Tennessee also sacked him six times and caused four fumbles in a 24-21 win. Coming off a bye that gave them an extra week to prepare, the Titans' coaching staff devised a bizarre 3-0-8 scheme -- three linemen, no linebackers and eight defensive backs -- that was used about a dozen times. St. Louis running back Marshall Faulk was also double-covered almost every time he came out of the backfield.

"When we watched them on tape," said Tennessee coach Jeff Fisher, "everyone except Baltimore laid back and played it safe. And got beat by about 35 points. We said, 'Why not be aggressive?' I thought the eight defensive backs would neutralize Faulk and challenge their short and intermediate routes."

Defenses are getting so sophisticated that some have taken to calling audibles just before the snap. "The way we work it is if we see one formation, we can blitz it; another formation, we play zone," says Green Bay safety and defensive signal-caller LeRoy Butler. "I think defenses are way ahead of offenses. They know we've got a nickel in, but they don't know if we're going to blitz or play zone or man."

Says San Diego Chargers coach Mike Riley, "I bet we're getting blitzed 60 to 70 percent of the time, in some fashion. Either a zone blitz or an all-out blitz."

"Never in my career have I seen some of the things I'm seeing now," says Cowboys running back Emmitt Smith. "The Giants' defense coming at us with eight to stop the run -- and we've still got Troy [Aikman, at quarterback]. Washington's putting an eighth man up and blitzing to stop the run. I guess teams believe what everybody's been saying about football in the '90s: You stop the run, you win games."

What's frustrating is that so many offenses are incapable of fighting off the superior defenses and are playing ultraconservative football instead. "It's a reflection on the caliber of quarterbacks in the game today," says Buffalo Bills general manager John Butler. But that doesn't explain why the Jacksonville Jaguars, who have a very good quarterback in Mark Brunell and whose top running back, Fred Taylor, has been slowed by a hamstring injury, are nevertheless second in the NFL in run-pass ratio on first down, running the ball 63% of the time. Even with a dominating line, the Jaguars are averaging only 3.9 yards per attempt, down from 4.7 last year. In fact, only 11 teams are averaging more yards per carry than they were in '98, and the 3.75-yard league average is almost a quarter of a yard less than it was last year and the second-lowest figure this decade. Even in some of the prime-time matchups, teams play snoreball. The winners of the last three Monday-night games in October scored 16, 13 and 13 points. "If I'm the Packers, I say my best chance every week is putting the ball in Brett Favre's hands," says Holmgren. "But when your quarterback is young and inexperienced -- like our Jon Kitna -- you approach the game differently."

Of course, offensive coaches will eventually figure out how to counter the latest defensive fad. Don't be surprised if they go the way of Joe Gibbs's old max-protect package, using a fullback or an extra tight end, or both, to pick up stray blitzers, then run safe routes. Some of that's happening already; though the league's overall quarterback rating is down from last year, completion percentage is up a half a percentage point, to 56.8%. Says Broncos offensive coordinator Gary Kubiak, who, after losing Elway and then Davis and then tight end Shannon Sharpe, has been patching together an offense all season: "For a few weeks, defenses come up with a package that hurts you, then you find the way to beat it, and you have a few good weeks."

After practice one night last week, in preparation for Sunday's game against the Cowboys, the Indianapolis Colts' second-year quarterback, Peyton Manning, spent 3 1/2 hours studying tape at the team's training facility. "I try to play the game in the film room," he said from his car phone shortly after 9 p.m. It paid off against Dallas, as Manning completed 22 of 34 passes for 312 yards and a touchdown, leading the Colts to a come-from-behind 34-24 win.

Quarterbacks like Manning -- and Warner -- are beginning to break the defensive stranglehold on the game. Soon enough, some of the five quarterbacks drafted in the first round last April will help fill the void at their position -- and make their coaches suddenly look like geniuses.

Issue date: November 8, 1999

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