Orchestra Suffers if Orchestrator Is Ailing

The well known healer, Dr. Alfred Labbermacher, is seeing patients today. He is looking at Jim Kelly, who has a problem known medically as a joint disturbance.

“A joint disturbance,” Labbermacher says, “is not to be confused with a ruckus in a Buffalo bar, where joints are disturbed, if not destroyed, when someone tries to dance with someone else’s girl. With Kelly, a piece of semilunar knee cartilage got caught between the bones when he twisted his leg.”

“And this translates to what?” Labbermacher is asked.

“It translates to Kelly’s walking with a limp for four weeks.”

Phil Simms is next examined. Phil has a foot in a cast. He is no more of a threat to catch Bo Jackson from behind than Kelly.

And Jim Harbaugh? He has a dislocated shoulder, which doesn’t help his passing, any more than the torn rotator cuff of Don Majkowski.

Steve DeBerg retired from the game the other day with a broken finger. Boomer Esiason tried to play with a groin pull, but lasted only until the third quarter.

When Bo Jackson was running for 88 yards, you pictured Boomer grumbling, “I’d like to see him do that with my groin.”

All of Labbermacher’s patients today are quarterbacks whose departure creates immense problems for their teams.

It doesn’t seem possible that football could have painted itself into the corner it has, creating a game so dependent upon a single performer.

Football is a team game until the quarterback goes down, at which point the whole structure deteriorates if the replacement isn’t equally competent.

And how often do you find a second-stringer as skilled as the first?

Trying to compensate for loss of the air game, teams shift to more running. And quite aware of what is coming, the defense will concentrate its forces against the run, untroubled by threat of the pass.

So then it is said, as it is today of Buffalo, that when the quarterback departs, it becomes the responsibility of the Bills’ defense to dig in and take up the slack.

But for how long can the slack be taken up? If your offense, crippled by the loss of your starting quarterback, keeps handing over the ball to the other side, how long can your defense persevere?

Sooner or later, hope vanishing, that defense must pack it in.

When Buffalo is shooting for big chips and Kelly gives way to Frank Reich, something happens to Buffalo that isn’t reasonable.

Same with the New York Giants when Simms leaves in favor of Jeff Hostetler.

And Cincinnati? Gunning for a spot in the playoffs, it finds itself in the second half proceeding with Erik Wilhelm, the stand-in for Esiason.

And there was a desperate Kansas City, trying to catch Houston in the second half not with DeBerg, but Steve Pelluer.

The consequences of losing a quarterback are preposterous.

All of which returns us to the point earlier established, namely, it is incredible that football has been set up in a way making it so dependent upon one position.

If Pavarotti, working at La Scala, bows out with a knee, giving way to a substitute, the concert suffers.

But concerts don’t pose as a team game.

Rather than develop creative ways of attack to skirt such dependency on the quarterback, football occupies itself more with protecting him.

And it still fails, proof of which is, six quarterbacks of note bite the dust in a period of a week.

So now you ask, “OK, Mr. Advice, how would you arrange the offense so as not to live and die with your quarterback?”

And we shrug, not even able to explain why the bottom falls out on a split-finger fastball.

But football has been played for more than 100 years, and a lot of guys are occupied daily with offensive design.

Just as easily as a genius came up with the T-formation, the I-formation, the single wing, the double wing, the shotgun and the Notre Dame box, not to mention the run-and-shoot, someone must figure a way to water down the importance of the quarterback, whose presence may be destroying today’s game.

I mean, if the nose guard at Buffalo comes up with a joint disturbance, the town doesn’t go over Niagara Falls on a pair of bed slats.