All Should Agree Warner’s the MVP

Kurt Warner, the Ram quarterback who, some believe, is football’s best passer since Joe Namath, isn’t getting the heavy support he has earned for the NFL

Most Valuable Player or even for all-pro.

When Warner was named league MVP by the Associated Press this week, he gotonly 211/2 votes in a nationwide poll of 50 football writers.

There were 28 votes--a clear majority--for other candidates. One man split his ballot between two Rams, Warner and running back Marshall Faulk.

Eleven writers voted for Green Bay quarterback Brett Favre or Pittsburgh quarterback Kordell Stewart or Chicago linebacker Brian Urlacher.

First-team all-pro votes this season have also gone to Favre and Stewart as well as Warner.

What accounts for this? Why is there a widespread reluctance to accept Warner as pro football player of this era?

The general problem is that the precise qualities that make football players great are frequently elusive. Excellence is harder to see and to measure in football men, particularly quarterbacks, than in baseball players, for instance, or Olympic sprinters.

In Warner’s case, moreover, several things cloud the picture.

First, and above all, Warner’s coach, Mike Martz, is clearly the most thoughtful and creative of modern coaches--producing an illusion that Warner is a kind of puppet. Secondly, Warner is surrounded by what seem to be the products of a giant talent-manufacturing machine--other Ram talent starts with runner-receiver Faulk and continues through both lineups, offensive and defensive--producing an illusion that any quarterback could give this team what it gets from Warner. Some critics have said exactly that.

On a more personal level, Warner, for a modern quarterback, is slow and small (smaller than his listed 6 feet 2 and 220 pounds) and he’s no scrambler. He comes across as neither a power-armed passer like Peyton Manning or even Vinny Testaverde nor an audacious scrambler-passer like Favre or even Stewart.

Warner, in other words, doesn’t match the general perception of a great quarterback.

Favre does, to be sure. And, this year, Stewart has.

By contrast, what Warner has that makes him an all-time quarterback is unusually difficult to see.

It IS easy to see his interceptions. And because the NFL’s many conservative coaches and commentators focus so heavily on turnovers, football fans have been conditioned to overrate interceptions and fumbles, failing to apprehend that turnovers rarely stop or even bother Warner’s kind of team, a passing team that almost always overcomes interceptions by going back out to the field and throwing again. And again. Often for touchdowns.

So what does their quarterback have that makes him what he is and that makes the Rams what they are?

Most of all, Warner is a unique decision-maker. He makes up his mind in a quarter of an instant to throw the ball to the right target in the right place, and, in that same quarter instant, he actually unloads. And who can see decision-making? Who can see magic? You can see the magician, but not, really, what the magician does. Even in slow-motion replays of Warner in action, it’s all hard to see.

Thus, he has never been wholly appreciated for what he is--or what he does--by sports fans, by the media, or even by his own teammates, many who consider Faulk the MVP.

For anyone can see what Faulk does. And that’s a lot.

Like Warner, Faulk is unique and extraordinary.

Still, in the playoffs last season, when Warner had a concussion, the Rams tried to run the ball with Faulk and couldn’t, losing to the New Orleans Saints.

The truth is that, as great as Faulk is, it’s Warner who makes the Rams go--who makes his teammates seem exceptional.

For one example, on a typical Ram play, the main reason the receiver looks so wide open is that the passer has so quickly found him. In the Martz system, there’s always a man open, but not, of course, for long, and Warner, the unique decision-maker, has already thrown him the ball. It comes out of Warner’s arm effortlessly, fluidly.

He sees and does, sees and does.

And, somehow, he not only hits the receiver in stride but in the defensive hole that has opened however briefly.

And so, after beating Atlanta last Sunday, 31-13, the Rams are 14-2 and favored in the Super Bowl run that began this weekend, when, along with second-favorite Pittsburgh, they’ll have a day off.

On the Las Vegas lines, the Rams have been favored since the start of training camp, currently at 4-5 to 1-2, with Pittsburgh next at 7-2..

It takes some luck as well as fine quarterbacking to win a Super Bowl, and the Rams, in a sport as rough as football, are assured of neither. But as long as Warner remains in action, he will offer the most to see--except that you can’t actually see it.

The Size Is Right

Also in the news this week was Emmitt Smith, who, for 12 seasons, Emmitt Smith has been the Dallas Cowboys’ principal running back, starting the year he was drafted in the first round in 1990, continuing through the Super Bowl seasons and the losing seasons

Last Sunday in Detroit, he became the first NFL ballcarrier to exceed 1,000 yards in each of 11 consecutive seasons. As a rookie, Smith had finished fifth in the NFC with only 937 yards.

Running backs don’t do--can’t do--what Smith has so effortlessly done.

Normally, when good pro clubs start to break up, the running backs are the first to go, then the receivers, then the defense, then the blockers, then the quarterback.

The Denver Broncos, for instance, went through 11 running backs in John Elway’s 15 seasons. .

At Dallas by contrast, runner Smith has outlasted his passer, Troy Aikman--and everyone else except one or two linemen--prompting the question that intrigues the league: What accounts for Smith’s continuing excellence and longevity--at that position?

Probably the most important part of the answer is that he’s the right size exactly for an effective modern running back: very short and stocky--at not more than 5 feet 9 inches and 209 pounds--with uncommonly strong legs and arms.

He has, in other words, the physical equipment to fight off the modern defensive stars.

Over the years preceding Smith, running backs changed markedly in physical structure:

* The first great one, Bronko Nagurski, was famous in his generation for size (6 feet 2, 225 pounds), strength, and power.

* A Nagurski contemporary, the extraordinary Red Grange, was lithe and ghostlike, known, in fact, as the Galloping Ghost

* Then came the anomalous Jim Brown, who combined Nagurski’s size with outrageous speed.

* Along the way, the NFL introduced the game’s noted specialists in speed and moves, All-Pros like Hugh McElhenny and Gale Sayers, who were succeeded by the fastest of them all, O.J. Simpson.

* Another in the Simpson mold was Eric Dickerson, who at 6 feet 3 was nearly as elusive and even taller.

To his peers, Simpson, at 6 feet 1 and 212 pounds, seemed football’s ideal running back, all-time, and so he still seems, except for his height. He would be too tall to make it big today. So was Dickerson, and so, in fact, were Nagurski, Brown and the other big backs over all the years.

For the NFL’s 21st-century defensive impact players have also changed in shape and style. Height isn’t the advantage it used to be.

The defining asset now is the strength and ability, in one-on-one contact, to drive up on one’s opponent. Today you can’t win hitting down on your man, in either boxing or football. Indeed, today’s football, whether you’re carrying the ball or attacking the ballcarrier, is chiefly about who’s driving up on whom. And Smith has the right asset for today’s game, as did the other short-statured strongmen who brought the modern style to fruition, Walter Payton (who was 5-10) and Earl Campbell (who at 5-11 was almost too tall). One question is whether there will ever be another All-Pro 6-footer at running back.

Smith to be sure has more than size and style. He is of the generation that is never out of shape, making it his life’s work to work out year-round. At gametime, in the incredible traffic one encounters in and around an NFL scrimmage line, he has the sixth or seventh sense to somehow avoid the solid hits that have crippled so many other players.

What’s more, he has heart and gumption. When the Cowboys started along the wrong track this season, Smith went public with an announcement that if they’d more often give him the ball, they’d be better off. And he made good on that perception and prediction. As a running back, Smith keeps proving that he is one in thousands. And thousands.

Numbers Problem

The people who think the NFL’s weekly statistics are not only incomplete but often wrong are probably right.

It’s obvious that the league could improve its statistical system someday. The one now in use provides no more than a fraction of the information you get in baseball’s statistics. But the problem is that like an errant forward pass, it’s easier to see what’s wrong than repair it.

For example, present weekly computations of total yards passing by NFL quarterbacks, though generally meaningless, are beyond a quick fix.

These numbers purport to identify the best passers in statistical terms. Instead, the kind of thing they tend to show is that those who throw passes for losing teams could well compile the most yards--a farce that happened again when last Sunday’s champion passer, Kerry Collins of the New York Giants, was on the losing side in the Green Bay game.

A principal explanation for this is simply that losing teams throw more second-half passes than winning teams. So of what use are such statistics? Whom do they inform?

Similarly lacking in meaning are individual yards-rushing totals each week.

Game-day ground-gaining success is usually a function of what’s happening on the scoreboard. Thus, running backs for teams that fall behind by one or two touchdowns get fewer carries and less yardage than runners for teams protecting a second-half lead. Here’s what you often see in an NFL game:

In the first half, when the running back for Team A is struggling against Team B’s eager, well-rested defensive line, his teammates open up a lead with pass plays or breaks or both. In the second half, when the Team B defense is tiring or demoralized or both during a losing cause, Team A’s running back explodes with a 100-yard day. Total statistics reflect, of course, the full 60 minutes of the game. And so at the winning coach’s press conference a day later, he points to the statistical sheet and says: “You win when you run the ball.”

The truth is far more complicated. During the stretches of the game when the score was close and Team B’s defense was fresh and charging, Team A couldn’t run the ball.

The yards-gained-rushing statistic for that game was, as it usually is, false--on balance--and, accordingly, no help to the coaches.

Even more erroneous is the statistic known as “third down conversions.” Although the difference between third and one and third and long is enormous--usually decisive--it isn’t reflected, or even hinted at, in the “third down conversions” table.

A third-and-nine pass is so difficult to complete that it doesn’t effectively measure the passer’s skill. No matter how gifted he is technically, when nine yards are needed, he can’t often get that much with a third-down pass against an NFL team that understands pass defense and executes properly.

And it’s about the same on third and six or seven. Thus, third-and-long passes are a test not of pass offense but of pass defense. When a passer completes one of those, as he does occasionally, the football question raised isn’t, “How good is the passer?” but, “How did the pass defense fail?”

What’s really important in offensive football is staying OUT of third down altogether because the defensive advantage on that play in today’s football is so overwhelming.

This season, the Rams led the NFL again in most points in part because they made it a point to attack aggressively on first and second downs, thus avoiding, where possible, the perils of third down. That could be a valuable lesson to other teams, both intellectually and statistically, except there’s no statistic for it.