In the End, All You Do Is Throw Off Your Game

OK, where do you want to begin? The World Series was postponed again. The Rams, Raiders, USC, UCLA all lost. And Benoit Benjamin returned to the Clippers. California is not having a very good last half. The state motto, instead of Eureka! should be Help!

The Raiders and SC went out scratching and fighting--with their boots on, their guns out and their flags waving. The Rams and Bruins went out waving white handkerchiefs.

SC played valiantly against a Notre Dame team that would probably be only a one-touchdown underdog to the Chicago Bears. But you didn’t need a slide rule to know they were going to lose. A peek at the game plan would have sufficed.

It is a rule of thumb in football that, any time you put the ball in the air 50 or more times, you lose. It is as axiomatic as “sides opposite equal angles are equal, or the square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides.” There is no arguing with it. It happens too often to be moot.

This is not to say that the forward pass does not win football games. It does. But not when it is used indiscriminately. Not when it is used exclusively.

The late Red Sanders put it in focus.

“He who lives by the pass, dies by the pass,” he predicted.

Sanders was not talking about the use of the forward pass at all. He was referring to what he used to call the over-reliance on the pass.

“It sometimes seems to put your team in a stand-around mode,” he explained.

It’s not a blue-collar play and it’s in a blue-collar game. It is like trying to win a game by leveraged buyout.

Coaches fear the forward pass. That is because most successful coaches are defense-oriented and the forward pass is Public Enemy No. 1. They put in nickel defenses (five defensive backs), dime defenses (everybody is a defensive back). They rewrote the schemes of the game.

Teams that used to use 11 men on the line play a three-man rush today. Their panic defenses don’t always work because the best defense against the buzz bomb is to destroy the launching pad. And any defense that knows the forward pass is coming can throw caution to the winds and descend on the passer like a stampede in a lightning storm.

You can bet the 49th, 50th, 51st and probably any subsequent passes in a 50-pass day will fall incomplete.

It is part of football mythology that the forward pass was invented by Knute Rockne and Gus Dorais one fall afternoon at West Point in 1913 when a little-known Notre Dame team shocked mighty Army, 30-13. Notre Dame threw an unheard-of 17 passes that day for 243 yards, but the forward pass had been used by coaches Amos Alonzo Stagg at the University of Chicago and Dan McGugin at Vanderbilt. Rockne didn’t invent it, he just perfected it.

In the ‘20s and early ‘30s, another little known team, Southern Methodist, began to go East with a dazzling attack in which its quarterback, or halfback, would throw the ball as much as once in a series of downs.

The press dubbed the phenomenon “Coach Ray Morrison’s aerial circus.” By today’s standards, it would be considered as stodgy as Woody Hayes’ best teams. But in those times, two incomplete forward passes resulted in a five-yard penalty, the passer had to be five yards behind the line of scrimmage and an incomplete pass in the end zone was a touchback and meant you had to cough up the ball to the other team on its 20.

Those rules made cowards of most college coaches and it wasn’t till the rules were liberalized by the pros that the strategy of the pass came into any kind of favor at all.

But even in the pass-happy pros, a warning light still seemed to come on when the pass total reached 50.

Sonny Jurgensen at Washington was probably the best passer this side of Norm Van Brocklin. He averaged almost 50 passes a game. He usually lost.

In the record books, there are six passers who once threw more than 60 passes in a game--George Blanda, 68; Joe Namath, Steve Dils and Phil Simms, 62; Tommy Kramer and Neil Lomax, 61. They all lost those games.

Miami Quarterback Bob Griese once won a Super Bowl game, in 1974, with an aerial circus of seven passes, six of them completions. His successor, Dan Marino, throws that many before the coin comes down. Marino once threw 623 in a season.

Todd Marinovich is a gifted passer, but the quantity of his passes, not the quality, undid him at Notre Dame. A passing team that puts the ball up 55 times in a game is like a fighter who throws crazy rights. He may knock out a few palookas, but a good fighter might hand him his head. A guy leading with his right leaves himself wide open.

A passing attack wins Rose Bowls and Super Bowls. But 50 or 60 passes is not an attack. It’s a retreat. You look good losing. But you lose.