NFL Teams Are Winning by Playing Their Aces : Pro football: Revolutionary offenses are taking over with a common thread--one runner in backfield.

As a game within a game, offensive football seemed to be changing in some dramatic ways last year in the NFL with the rise of the one-back, run-and-shoot system and the triumph of the Washington Redskins’ one-back, multiple-movement system.

A century ago, in an era that lasted through the Four Horsemen, football was played with four running backs. During the T-formation takeover half a century ago, four backs gave way to three--and then, a quarter-century ago, to two.

Thus an offense based on one running back--the generic name for it is ace formation--has, in a sense, been inevitable.

But a curious thing happened last year when two different ace systems, ignored by much of the league, succeeded spectacularly.

So this is a time of paradox in pro football. Grinding through another off-season, many coaches are still ignoring the offensive revolution while they do business as usual.

They’re clinging to their two-back formations and other conservative ways. They’re planning to use one-back sets only for change of pace. No new run-and-shoot converts have appeared. And the only convert to the innovative Redskin offense, ironically, is the most successful of last year’s run-and-shoot bunch, the Detroit Lions.

The truth is that most coaches seem singularly unimpressed with two significant developments in the NFL last season:

--Six of the eight teams in the January playoffs lined up in ace formations most of the time.

--In a league with only three teams committed to the run-and-shoot, which is the most extreme version of the ace, all three were still playing in January.

As a football season, how really different was it?

--Two ultramodern teams playing the one-back game almost exclusively, the Redskins and the no-huddle Buffalo Bills, fought it out last January in the Super Bowl.

--Earlier, the league’s run-and-shoot pioneers--the Atlanta Falcons (10-6), Houston Oilers (11-5) and Lions (12-4)--all won playoff games only two years after Atlanta had limped in at 3-13, Detroit 7-9 and Houston 9-7.

--In a season when the three run-and-shoot teams out-performed all but three of the 25 other clubs--Washington, Buffalo and Denver--it took the champion Redskins to eliminate the Falcons and Lions, and it took one of John Elway’s superman acts to eliminate the Oilers.

--Most strikingly, on the road to the Super Bowl, the Washington coaches made it a year to remember, refining and improving the unusual Redskin offense to include nearly twice as many formations as any opponent used or probably could understand.

On balance, therefore, it was a revolutionary season. Why didn’t it get the attention of pro football’s old guard?

“I’m not sure they wanted to see it,” June Jones, Atlanta’s offensive coordinator, said the other day.

Said retired Hall of Fame coach Sid Gillman, “We’re having a revolution, and nobody came.”

ALL (NEW) SYSTEMS ARE GO

The NFL’s most prominent new-style teams are planning to keep their little revolution going this fall.

They aren’t geared to reinforcing one another, though. Their offensive systems, as identified by Houston offensive coach Kevin Gilbride, are too different, falling into two main classes:

--The single-back run-and-shoot teams, playing without a tight end, use four wide receivers. At the snap, the quarterback rolls out.

--The single-back Redskins, emphasizing tight-end and wide-receiver movement, alternate two packages, one with three wide receivers, one with two tight ends. And, normally, the quarterback drops straight back.

“The Redskins have one big thing in common with the run-and-shoot: a pass-the-ball philosophy,” Gilbride said, noting that most of the NFL thinks of the Redskins as a power-running team, even though they’re chiefly using that power to set up the long passes they fancy.

The two leading ace systems were as continually effective last year as they were imaginative. “No (formation) moves the ball as easily as the run-and-shoot,” Atlanta’s Jones said. “That’s been proved.”

A Redskin partisan, Gillman, said: “Defensive teams can’t do it against a flood of intelligent movement and motion when you have a good passer and a good runner. That’s what the Redskins proved last year.”

What’s wrong with two backs?

“An extra back is a drone,” Gillman said. “In an 11-man game, you get more out of an extra tight end or an extra receiver.”

The efficiency of the Redskins was there for all to see in the Super Bowl. But a playoff game a few weeks earlier could have been even more influential.

At Pontiac, Mich., that early-January day, the run-and-shoot Lions, with an inexperienced quarterback, Eric Kramer, shocked the Dallas Cowboys, 38-6.

Kramer began the game with a storm of passes, throwing on almost every down to one of his four wide receivers. And he kept at it, devastating a Dallas team representative of almost everything traditional in NFL football.

The Cowboys were there with a tight end, two backs, two wide receivers, a ball-control mentality and their running-play commitment.

The Cowboys, strategically, had familiar objectives: to run time off the clock, to keep the opposing offensive team off the field and to use running plays to set up passes. Going in, they had won six games in a row.

And they lost in a rout to a young run-and-shoot team that seemed to be just having fun in a practice-field passing drill.

And still nobody noticed. The triumph of the run-and-shoot over Dallas that afternoon apparently has passed entirely out of the minds of most coaches.

Nor have the media been enthusiastic. The day after the Detroit-Dallas game, the run-and-shoot, as the offensive scheme that made the rout possible, was ignored in many newspaper accounts.

“When we win, the (system) is seldom reported,” Houston Coach Jack Pardee said. “When we lose, it’s always the run-and-shoot that shot us in the foot.”

One problem is that the run-and-shoot is misunderstood.

“So was the T-formation,” Pardee said. “People always distrust anything new.”

RUN-AND-SHOOT MILESTONES

Major indications that the game is changing--perceptibly if not rapidly--come from the seven cities where veteran coaches have embraced one or another of the NFL’s ace approaches:

In Buffalo, Coach Marv Levy has put together consecutive Super Bowl teams with a no-huddle approach featuring one ballcarrier, a tight end and usually three wide receivers.

In Indianapolis, Coach Ted Marchibroda, the Bills’ offensive coordinator in recent seasons, is taking that game to another team, the Colts, whose new offense, except for the no-huddle feature, won’t look distinctively different from Denver’s. Along with Levy, Bronco Coach Dan Reeves has moved to mostly one-back football.

In Washington and Detroit, the enterprising Redskin system will be in the hands of two groups of improving players under coaches Joe Gibbs and Wayne Fontes.

And, in Atlanta and Houston, coaches Jerry Glanville and Pardee are continuing to march under the run-and-shoot banner.

There’s room for others in that parade. But did the postseason performance of the run-and-shoot scare some off?

After steaming into the playoffs, the Houston-Atlanta-Detroit axis won three, then lost three.

What happened?

Run-and-shoot supporters say there have been some misconceptions. They contend that after the playoffs, their critics, as usual, spread more fiction than facts--at least in the following instances:

Fiction: The run-and-shoot is ineffective in rain and mud.

Fact: In the Atlanta-Washington playoff game Jan. 4, in a Washington rainstorm, in a hostile environment, the Falcons had the game’s two longest drives. The first went 80 yards on quarterback Chris Miller’s six-for-six passing. The other began with three Atlanta first downs and ended with a well-timed linebacker blitz by the Redskins, one of their few blitzes that day.

Fiction: Run-and-shoot running plays are ineffective on the goal line.

Fact: In the playoff at Washington, Atlanta’s last two plays after a long second quarter drive were run-and-shoot runs from the Redskin nine- and one-yard lines, the second for a touchdown.

Fiction: When the Denver Broncos won their Jan. 4 playoff game against the Oilers, 26-24, they proved again that a good defensive team can stop a good run-and-shoot team.

Fact: The Oilers never punted that day. They led, 14-0, and, 21-6. And in the second half, their two longest run-and-pass drives with quarterback Warren Moon ended with two short-yardage, third-down passes dropped by wide receiver Haywood Jeffires in the end zone. The Broncos haven’t stopped the Oilers yet. On a big day for John Elway, the Broncos never punted, either. They beat the Houston defense--not the Houston run-and-shoot.

Fiction: The run-and-shoot system was shown up twice at Washington in the playoffs.

Fact: The better team, much better, won twice.

The Redskins first eliminated Atlanta, 24-7, then Detroit, 41-10.

In the NFC championship game Jan. 12 at Washington, where the Lions fell behind in the first few seconds, 10-0, their run-and-shoot outplayed the Redskin offense thereafter. For more than three quarters, the Lions led continuously in total offense, although, in the end, they didn’t have a defense for Redskin quarterback Mark Rypien.

In all three playoff defeats, the run-and-shooters insist, their offense was good enough to win. The decisive breakdowns were all on defense.

A REFERENDUM FOR 1992

After the Lions’ title-game defeat at Washington, their coach, Fontes, a Redskin admirer, decided to change to the Redskin offense this season.

That will give football people a 1992 referendum on the NFL’s two revolutionary new offenses:

Can the Lions, winners of 12 of 16 in the run-and-shoot last season, improve on that this year in the Redskin offense?

BACKGROUND

Offensive strategy has been important to football since the game’s beginnings. Leaders as diverse as Knute Rockne, Clark Shaughnessy and Bear Bryant have succeeded with offensive systems as dissimilar as the Notre Dame box, the man-in-motion T and the wishbone formation. And now, others are changing football. In a two-part series, The Times will look at the state of the NFL in the 1990s: its current offensive revolution, the place of the run-and-shoot, the strategic contributions of Bill Walsh and Joe Gibbs and the influence of the one-back Washington Redskins.