Miniature Football: It Has Points

How would you like to have a pro football team that scored 52 points and couldn’t even beat the spread? How about couldn’t even win the game?

How would you like to have a quarterback who can complete a touchdown pass from his own end zone to the other end zone--on the fly?

How would you like to have a quarterback who throws 10 touchdown passes in a game--and still needs a last-minute rally to win?

Like to have a quarterback who throws for 42 touchdowns and 1,975 yards in just 9 games--and wins only 4 of them?

Would you like to coach a team on which the highest-paid guy makes $1,000 a game? On which the lowest-paid guy makes $1,000 a game?

No, we’re not talking about some People’s Democratic Republic of East Europe here, we’re talking about the United States of America.

Has socialism come to American football? No, but miniaturization has.

It’s closet football. The half-court game. Fast-break football.

Would you like to coach a game where all but three guys are eligible to catch a forward pass? Where, as a matter of fact, the only ones who can’t legally catch it are the guy who throws it, the guy who centers it, and the one guy who blocks for it. That’s the kind of game we used to play in the streets. Everybody-go-out-for-a-long-one football.

You don’t have to worry about hang-time on punts in this game. No punts.

Your team always has good field position. Good field position in the NFL, by definition, is anything inside the 50-yard line. This whole game is inside the 50-yard line. You’re on the opponent’s 49-yard-line even when you’re on your own 1-yard-line. This robs TV announcers of one of their best ad-libs. “The Jets have good field position!” In this game, you have good field position coming out of the locker room.

We’re talking, of course, of Arena Football, the indoor game, the illegitimate child of George Halas, Jim Thorpe and the Four Horsemen. It began with the Decatur Staleys and the Canton Bulldogs, and it’s come to this.

There are 8 players on the team, 19 on a squad, of whom 18 can play. The 19th gets in a game only if one of the guys on the field can’t frost a glass or remember his first name. There’s none of this la-dee-dah platoon system. When you’re on the field, you’re it. Two platoons. You’re the wide receiver and the cornerback, the flanker and the free safety. You have to remember whether to try to bat the ball down or catch it and run with it.

You’ve heard of the flea-flicker play? Well, how’s this? The quarterback fades back--into his own end zone if necessary--and lofts a long one, which goes through the other team’s end zone and bounces off the fence and caroms into the arms of a wide receiver in the end zone. Incomplete pass? Uh-uh. Touchdown. Illegal man downfield? No such thing. The only time a ball is dead is if a customer catches it. Or it lands in a hot dog stand. Otherwise, it’s like golf. Play it as it lays. No foul balls in this business. Stay awake.

Sound like fun? It is. The players keep moving--and the clock keeps moving. If it didn’t, scores would be in three digits. You wouldn’t know whether a Detroit-L.A. score was from the NBA or the AFL. As it is, the scoreboard keeps just one blink away from a nervous breakdown, and some nights it’s like a stock exchange ticker in a panic--10 minutes behind the trading on the floor.

It’s a table-stakes game. It was the intent of the powers that be in the invention of this pool-without-pockets to keep the high rollers out, the Donald Trumps and the Texas big rich, who seem to manipulate athletics for their own non-sporting purposes. Here, the league runs the teams, not vice versa.

The playing field is small, 50 yards by 28. Not only do the nets behind the goal line come into play, so do the walls along the sidelines. They have broken up more plays--and players--than homicidal halfbacks on defense. The walls are the only ones who can play zone but, like the linebackers, they cannot blitz, either. (Well, one--and only one--linebacker can blitz but only in a restricted zone 1 yard on either side of the center, which is not really a blitz since a true blitz depends on the element of surprise in direction.)

Ray Willsey is in charge of this strange menagerie that is part football, part hockey and part street fight in a hallway.

It’s a little like playing baseball with 45-foot basepaths, basketball with a 5-foot basket. It requires some adjustment.

Nothing Willsey can’t handle. A career coach who left a business major at MIT, no less, to pursue a life in X’s and O’s, Ray began his coaching in Canada where they have some funny rules, too. He went from there to the universities of Washington and Texas, returned to his alma mater, California, where he was head coach and athletic director until, one day, an unsympathetic administration instructed him to fire two assistants for overeager recruiting. Academicians, who would have marched in the streets to free ax murderers on a technicality, wanted to throw two coaches and their families into unemployment for an illegal visit to a football prospect’s home.

“I told them to fire me first,” Willsey recalls. “They did.”

Willsey lasted 9 years with Al Davis and the Raiders. Which would seem to prepare a man for anything, from putting out oil well fires to collecting waterfront loans.

Or coaching Arena football. Willsey welcomes the challenge. His L.A. Cobras came late into this wild-card game that can only be likened to spit-in-the-ocean poker or seven-card stud low-hole-card-and-all-like-it wild.

Willsey’s team lost its first three games (in which it, nevertheless, scored 52, 35 and 43 points) but then compiled a 4-3 record. The Cobras missed a chance to clinch a playoff spot when they lost to New York, 40-30, Saturday night and must now face two closing games, both of which will be against the undefeated, league-leading Chicago Bruisers, who mopped up New England Friday, 66-25.

Someone said it’s Saturday Night Live football and you half-expect Eddie Murphy to show up barking signals under the center. But it can be exciting. “Like crawling in a bag with a leopard,” says Willsey.

It does have its advantages. When Ray wanted to talk the incomparable wide receiver, Cliff Branch, into returning to the game, and Cliff was undecided, Ray was equal to the persuasion. “Look at it this way,” he urged. “If they moved the mound up halfway to 30 feet 3 inches in baseball, Satchel Paige would still be pitching, wouldn’t he? And getting everybody out. Well, you got a 30-foot mound to pitch from.”

Yeah, but in regular football, the fence never got in the pattern--and 66 points won 10 out of 10 games.