Point of View / Bob Oates : Kick Out the Walls : How to End the NFL’s Scoring Slump and Encourage Offensive Coaches to Try Harder: Enlarge the End Zones, Widen the Gridiron

From the start, football has been a game of change.

More than perhaps any other game, it has repeatedly reinvented itself.

And yet at times, after more than 700 rule changes in its first century, it has failed to change fast enough. In the NFL, this is one of those times.

Touchdowns were drastically down again this past season, the nation’s most gifted offensive players frustrated by steadily improving defenses.

Ten years ago, NFL teams scored 1,164 touchdowns. This season, they scored 906.

There was a dramatic rise in field goals, annoying those spectators who maintain that if you’ve seen one field goal, you’ve seen them all.

Since the first 16-game season in 1978, field goals have jumped from 427 to a record 673.

Although the league’s most talented six or seven teams played a little better in January--when the playoff coaches, taking their best shots, opened up a bit--the cheering did not drown out the regular-season complaints.

The league heard a steady drumbeat of criticism from August to the final days of the regular season, when eight pro clubs, in one weekend, compiled this dismal file: New England Patriots 7, Cincinnati Bengals 2; Tampa Bay Buccaneers 13, Chicago Bears 10; Buffalo Bills 10, Philadelphia Eagles 7, and New York Jets 3, Washington Redskins 0.

In other words, during a December interlude that wasn’t greatly different from earlier weekends this fall, one-fourth of all NFL teams scored an average 6.5 points.

“There’s a touchdown problem, and we’ve got to do something about it,” NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue said the other day in Atlanta, commenting on season-long warnings of trouble ahead.

Some of the warnings took the form of wild and crazy suggestions from fans and critics who, among other things, would abolish zone defenses . . . or forbid all contact with quarterbacks after the ball has been thrown . . . or forbid all contact with receivers before the catch . . . or award points for first downs or crossing the 10-yard line.

But there’s a better idea.

At next month’s annual meeting, the league’s rulemakers--the 30 club owners--can end the touchdown crisis with one simple change.

What NFL offensive players need most is more elbow room. They have simply outgrown the field, which should be bigger.

SPRINTER VS. SPRINTER

Unchanged in length and width since 1903, the playing field needs to be wider, and it needs deeper end zones.

The players are unimaginably faster than they were in the early 1900s, when football was still being invented. They are also awesomely larger and stronger.

For defensive stars in particular, playing football today is like pitching horseshoes on a half-size court.

The field wasn’t always so small.

When American football began to evolve out of British soccer and rugby in the final years of the 19th Century, all three sports were played on grounds that were considerably longer and wider than the present American field.

The Americans, for various reasons, downsized, deciding on a 100-yard playground with end zones 10 yards deep.

So, there is precedent for changing it again. If they could shrink the playground, they can enlarge it.

Curiously, the width of the American field, 53 1/3 yards, was arrived at as a matter of necessity. A field that wide was the largest that would fit in Harvard Stadium, which in 1903 became, and ever since has been, home to Harvard football.

There was an accompanying serendipitous effect: The smaller playing surface proved to be the making of the American game.

As football developed into a nationwide pastime, it was played by those who had just the right speed and size for a Harvard-type field.

Even until quite recently, the game’s fastest running backs were known as 10-second men in tribute to their ability to proceed 100 yards in 10 seconds, more or less.

Today, some defensive linemen and linebackers are that fast. And there are defensive backs who approach 10 seconds for 100 meters.

As for height and bulk, more than one good football player 90 or 100 years ago was a five-footer weighing in the 150s. Big players stood about 5 feet 10 and weighed in at 190 or 195.

When former NFL coach Clark Shaughnessy was a college fullback on the 1913 Minnesota team known as the “Giants of the North,” he weighed an even 200 pounds.

“And I was the biggest man on the team,” he used to say.

Modern NFL players, many of them, stand 6-3 or more and weigh 300 pounds or more.

The NFL’s really fast players are the defensive backs, who have the speed to catch a receiver whose Olympic speed is blunted a bit by pads and the requirement that he pack a ball under his arm.

With so many sprinters facing one another on the same old field--a field now crowded with giants--it can’t come as a surprise that total points are down. And falling.

DEFENSIVE TAKEOVER

One extraordinary thing about football is that rule changes enacted to benefit offensive teams tend to make only a temporary difference.

The defenses always catch up. Thus, the game has had to be re-created periodically.

It has been done each time with new rules--often radical changes such as those legalizing blocking, outlawing the flying wedge, authorizing forward passes or sanctioning free substitution.

Revolutionary in their time, all of these changes were outdated eventually by clever defensive players and coaches.

And so it is that without another meaningful change soon, pro football is heading again for the kind of trouble it most recently had 20 years ago.

Then, an ominous decline in touchdowns was reversed only with a dozen significant rule revisions.

The league’s 1970s owners legalized offensive holding--for the most part--and curtailed, among other things, bump-and-run bumps, head slaps, head blows, excessive abuse of quarterbacks and other impediments to offensive mobility.

But the defenses are getting back at offensive teams with zone defenses.

Barred from beating up on downfield receivers in man-to-man schemes, defenses have found that zones--or, for variety, combination zone and man-to-man defenses--are more effective now.

That’s because NFL defensive backs are so much faster than they were only a few years ago.

The technical difference is in the size of the seams--the space between defensive backs.

Most zone-defense backs worried, until recently, that their seams were too wide. They lacked the speed to get to a receiver who drifted into the middle of a seam.

Today’s faster defensive players can get there easily. As they say, they have shrunk the seams.

This is most disturbingly true from the goal line out to the 10- or 15-yard lines. There, not so long ago, no NFL team could afford to play zone defense. In that area, one completion in a seam meant a touchdown.

No more.

The sprinters in today’s secondaries have proved that the best offensive teams can only rarely jam the ball into their shrunken seams.

And once more, the game is out of balance.

A BIGGER CHESSBOARD

Basketball was the first of the major team sports to confront the problems created by modern athletes’ greater height, weight, speed, quickness and athletic ability.

One night, basketball’s leaders looked under the basket and found a multitude of giants who could just stand there and flick the ball in.

So they acted.

Opening a can of paint, they redrew the floor to keep the big men away from the basket.

The NFL, by expanding the field, could reach similar objectives.

And some of the league’s coaches and players are in favor. Even some defensive players--Ronnie Lott among them.

Although he might be professionally harmed, Lott, one of the finest defensive backs in NFL history, argues for wider fields and deeper end zones for the greater good of the game.

“It would be a better game if the end zones were 15 yards deep instead of 10,” he said. “Offensive teams can still get down the field now, sometimes, but they can’t score. The end zone is loaded with defensive players who are much faster and more talented than they used to be.”

They’re standing there in all but impenetrable zone or combination defenses, said Lott, whose Hall of Fame career has reached from the San Francisco 49ers and the Raiders to the New York Jets, with whom he is planning on at least one more season.

“If world-class chess players wanted a bigger chessboard, they’d make it bigger, and we should do the same,” he said

Lott’s field would be four or five yards wider. Others suggest 10 yards. In time, no doubt, 10 will be needed--meaning that it might be wisest to do it now.

“In the end zone, (wider) fields would be a big help to the offense,” Lott said. “The way it is now, when a quarterback has to throw into the end zone, what he sees is a seven-across defense, with the other four defensive players rushing at him. He has to throw quickly--but most of the time there’s no place to throw.”

Many of the league’s passing experts who were in Atlanta for the Super Bowl agreed with Lott. Most defensive experts--Maxie Baughan among them--disagreed.

A former Ram Pro Bowl star, now linebacker coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Baughan said: “What are you trying to do, get my job?”

Taking the other side, Kevin Gilbride, offensive coordinator of the Houston Oilers, said: “If they can’t enlarge the field, it would help if they’d at least outlaw zone defenses from the 20-yard line in.”

Outlawing zone defenses is, in fact, a frequently mentioned remedy.

But that would change the nature of football, and Lott represents a persuasive group opposing such changes.

“I’m against a lot of new rules,” he said. “Let’s not make things harder on the officials. It would be a mistake to change the structure of the game by banning zone defenses, or awarding first-down points, things like that. You can accomplish the same thing by just enlarging the field a little.”

NO GIMMICKS, PLEASE

Three related questions:

--What will larger fields accomplish?

The NFL’s more imaginative and courageous coaches and players, when they have more room to work with, will make it a more open and stimulating game. And their reward will be more touchdowns.

That will require the other teams to go for touchdowns, too, resulting in a more interesting game.

It isn’t just low scoring that will be reversed, it’s the recent trend to dumb football.

Current rules invite the coaches to run the ball twice, take a sack and summon a kicker.

A larger field will invite them to use their intelligence to create something better.

--When the league’s defensive coaches slow things down again, what next?

Field goals should then be devalued from three points to two--encouraging offensive coaches to play for six points instead of two.

Many fans have called for other kinds of special-team changes: eliminating the extra point, adopting a two-point conversion or placing various restrictions on kickers.

But any repairs resting on historical foundations are preferable to gimmick fixes.

And to decrease the importance of field goals, football people have consistently favored a reduction in their value. The field goal was a five-point play in the 1890s, reduced to four points in 1904 and to three in 1909--for the same reason each time: To diminish the bloated influence of the kickers.

-- What other NFL rule change would help?

Limiting substitutions would make football a more human game for players as well as spectators.

With frequent packages of substitutes rushing in from both sides, no fan can keep track of who’s playing.

In the not-too-distant future, substitutions should be restricted to one per series. That’s one new player for each side, maximum, after every first down.

It’s true that football is most scientifically played with two platoons, offensive and defensive.

But it doesn’t follow that unlimited substitution makes football more fun to watch--whatever its attraction to coaches.

As a spectator sport, to the contrary, the game is most appealing when the matchup is one team’s best all-around offensive unit against the other team’s best all-around defensive unit, as it was when two platoons were first authorized.

In that brief era, the fan could see who was excelling and who wasn’t. And with limited substitution, that would be true again. Even on a larger chessboard. Especially on a larger chessboard.