Way They Play Defense Has Been Most Puzzling
Today’s anagram . . . N-F-E-E-D-E-S.
Today’s question . . . Can anyone who plays football for either the Chargers or San Diego State solve today’s anagram?
Probably not.
Neither team seems to be able to either play or spell defense. Around these parts, seven-letter words can truly be nasty.
Sitting poolside with a radio nearby last Saturday afternoon, I attracted the curiosity of some folks a few lounges away.
“What you got on there?” a neighbor asked.
“San Diego State,” I answered.
“Oh, how are they doing?”
“Just scored,” I said. “They’re at 51 points and going for a two-point conversion.”
“Gasp,” the neighbor said. “That’s piling it on a bit, isn’t it?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “Wyoming has 52 points.”
We all know by now that SDSU missed that two-point conversion attempt and lost a 52-51 decision. There were surely newspapers across the nation who carried the result under “Basketball Scores” rather than “Football Scores.”
This was ugly.
And then came Sunday afternoon in Pittsburgh, where the Chargers were playing a team that had gone 279 days since it scored its last offensive touchdown. Defense being the Chargers’ presumed strength, it figured to be a showcase occasion. One wire service forecaster predicted the Chargers would win, 3-2.
No one could fault the Chargers for giving up a touchdown to such an overdue team, the odds being that Pittsburgh would eventually score just as Oakland will eventually lose a postseason baseball game.
Thus, the fact that Pittsburgh scored a touchdown was not disturbing. What was disturbing was that Pittsburgh scored four offensive touchdowns en route to a 36-14 victory. Note that the Steelers had scored 32 points in their previous four games.
This was ugly.
Can it get any uglier this week?
It sure looks like it.
San Diego State goes to the Rose Bowl tonight to play UCLA. True, UCLA is a very average team, but also remember that SDSU has been defeated, 34-16, 47-14 and 59-6, in its three trips to the Rose Bowl since this series was renewed in 1984. And those were likely better SDSU defensive teams than this one, which doesn’t take much.
Assuming that UCLA is weaker than usual defensively, which seems a safe assumption, Dan McGwire and Co. could well score 28 to 35 or maybe even 42 points of their own.
Given that UCLA is favored by 10, this would beg the question . . .
Did SDSU cover the spread?
The Chargers do not have quite the same problem against the New York Jets on Sunday. They are not playing a traditionally strong team on a down cycle but rather a team on the upswing after a last place finish in 1989. What’s more, the Chargers are on the road.
When the season started, the Chargers probably looked to their two games against the Jets as reasonably assured victories. But nothing is reasonably assured to the Chargers this year . . . except maybe that the offense will not score many points.
What no one expected was that the defense would go into the tank. No one expected this defense to be the one that Pittsburgh plundered, especially scoring its first touchdown of the season with the wrong play run from the wrong formation.
No one, in August, would have been surprised to hear that a Charger defensive player would be on the cover of the Oct. 15 Sports Illustrated . Not at all. What would have been surprising, however, was that the cover boy, Burt Grossman, would be there because of his big mouth rather than big plays.
So what we have here are two defenses arriving in the same place from different directions.
SDSU’s defense was not expected to be very good, though Coach Al Luginbill has stressed all along that improvement in this area was the Aztecs’ No. 1 priority in 1990. We are left to wonder how bad the Aztec defense might be had it not gotten so much attention.
The Charger defense was, to be sure, expected to be quite solid. It has hurt that Joe Phillips is sidelined because of that beating he absorbed a couple of weeks back and it has hurt that Junior Seau missed all of training camp, thus turning his rookie season into a version of Sunday afternoon kindergarten. But that does not account for how vulnerable this defense has become over the last couple of games.
The difference is that the Aztecs, at least, have an offense. They can get into games which turn into football’s version of Loyola Marymount basketball and have a chance to win.
Let the Charger defense fall apart, and there is absolutely no hope. I’m not sure the Charger offense could move the ball on the SDSU defense, much less against its NFL brethren.
The way things are going, in truth, perhaps another anagram would be appropriate.
Y-A-R-E-R-P.