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Urban Unrenewed

 Remember hearing that Julia Roberts had married Lyle Lovett and your first thought was "six months, tops"? Remember watching an NFL game on TV, hearing Jim, Joe or Al read the promo for an upcoming new network show and thinking "three episodes and then boom, no way it makes Thanksgiving"?

Admit it, that's how you felt when you heard the Jaguars had hired Urban Meyer as their head coach last winter. You, me, and everybody else inside and outside the NFL world knew this was a disaster in the making, with the only question being "will this Hindenburg make it to Lakehurst, N.J. or not even reach shore before the explosion."

If you bet the latter, you won. Jags owner Shahid Khan fired Meyer this morning. Khan was the last man left not to realize the scope of his initial blunder, but he wised up, far too late for this season, but perhaps not for a season or two down the road.

How universal was scorn for Meyer as an NFL head coach? Try this. The point spread yesterday for Sunday's Houston-Jacksonville game was Jaguars -3.5. As of this afternoon, it's Jags -5.5. The bookies, not prone to either prejudice or sentiment, made Meyer worth 2 points to Jacksonville's opposition.

The list of Meyer's misdeeds as head coach is so long I won't bother to recite it here, although it must be said that when kicking one of your own players is not a coach's most spectacular shitshow, he's setting some kind of record. And we must also pause to reflect that Khan stuck with Meyer through the coach getting videoed rubbing up against young women in his own restaurant the night following a loss, with bringing back Tim Tebow, and with badmouthing his own assistances. But as soon as number one draft choice QB Trevor Lawrence started beefing about Meyer, poof! the coach was gone.

Meyer's behavior was so erratic, I can see only two possible explanations. He was driven around the bend by the realization he was hopelessly over his head in the NFL, or, he realized that very quickly and engaged in coachly leasebreaking, trying to get fired in a way he could still collect most of his extortionate contract in an "undisclosed settlement."

Meyer wouldn't be the first hypersuccessful college coach to abandon the NFL in short order. Lou Holtz did it. Nick Saban, only the best college coach in a century, did so too. Meyer's departure was funnier and possibly more underhanded than theirs, but all three stemmed from the essential difference between college and pro head coach. All coaches are control freaks, but some have more actual control than others. In college, a coach is the boss. In the pros, he's not. If he's as good as Paul Brown, Bill Belichick and Vince Lombardi, he can be first among equals -- sometimes.

In fact, a college coach at a big program who won as much as Meyer did at Utah, Florida and Ohio State can be far more than a boss. He will likely be his state's highest paid employee. He can be a Czar. In the SEC, he can be a God-King.  If Meyer was still winning national titles at Florida, and he somehow got it in his head that Critical Race Theory would help him in recruiting, Gov. Ron DeSantis would introduce legislation making teaching CRT compulsory in preschools.

In the pros, the coach is a very important employee. When he comes to a perennial loser like the Jaguars, he can be the most important employee. But he'll never be the boss. That's the owner, a billionaire who more often than not has never had a real boss in his own long life. 

The players who determine any coach's fate are grown men making big money in the NFL. They have a union, a pretty strong one, too. They cannot willy-nilly be bossed around unless the bossing delivers victories. When they perceive a coach can't do that, the victories stop and the coach is removed from the equation.

If a rookie, albeit the team's most important player, QB like Lawrence (having a terrible year BTW), can get a coach canned, imagine what the real veteran stars at that position can do if they choose. Or you could just look at Aaron Rodgers.

(Don't speak to me of Tom Brady and Bill Belichick. Yes, the coach is still with the Patriots and Brady isn't, but theirs was a mutual breakup. The best guide to the end stage of their relationship is the Beatles documentary "Get Back." As with the Fab Four, Tom and Bill still liked and respected each other, but both were also quite aware their relationship had run its course.)

Some coaches can prosper as both rulers and loyal subjects in Football Kingdoms. Jim Harbaugh has, So has Pete Carroll. But the fundamentals of the two different jobs are still such that very few winning big-time college coaches move to the pros (Carroll did so one step ahead of the NCAA posse) and almost no pro coaches move to college jobs (Harbaugh lost a power struggle in San Francisco). 

Temperamentally unfit for any role below that of Coach God-King, Meyer's tenure was doomed from day one. At least his doom was highly entertaining for the rest of us. 

That says it all about the franchise Khan owns, too. The worst coach in Jacksonville Jaguars history was the only entertainment the team has provided in at least three years.

posted by Michael Gee @ 2:09 PM 0 comments

Three Yards and a Cloud of Little Rubber Pellets

Bill Belichick not only proved last night he could coach the Patriots to a big win without Tom Brady at quarterback. He showed he could do it without a quarterback at all.

The Pats attempted all of three forward passes in their engrossing 14-10 victory over the Bills, a game played in ludicrous weather conditions even by Buffalo December standards. Mac Jones spent a chilly three hours doing nothing but handing off and watching the show. Not even in hot take and quarterback obsessed Boston can his performance be seen as having any effect on the game whatsoever.

Wind is the one element to which professional athletes in any sport cannot really adjust, but merely submit. Wind masters Bryson DeChambeau as easily as it does any 20-handicapper. It can turn Fenway Park into a pitcher's paradise or the set of Home Run Derby. 

The Pats and Bills played in the kind of Great Lakes wind associated with the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. In a burst of inspired passivity, Belichick surrendered to the gale before the game began. The Pats would run and nothing else. They'd run on third and four, or eight, or 14.  If football had ground balls, Belichick would've ordered Josh McDaniels to call them.

The Globe's Ben Volin had a story this morning saying the Patriots "played it safe" in running on every down. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was Belichick's decision that refusing to pass was his LESS risky option on offense, that it was a way to minimize the number of funny bounces and opportunities for chaos (coaches hate chaos). And it was, but it was also a major gamble that what funny bounces did occur would be more for his side than against it.

In theory, a team that averages four yards a carry (pretty much the NFL average) could run on every play and never surrender the ball. Of course, it doesn't work that way. One or two runs get stuffed, it's third and nine and the coordinator tells the QB to sling it. Even more basically, smashmouth uber alles offense only works if a team is ahead. Two first quarter touchdowns by the opposition, and even a team with Barry Sanders and Jim Brown in the backfield is going to start chucking the old melon around.

There were only two big gainers of consequence in the game, the causes of its only two touchdowns. The first was Damien Harris' 64-yard run, a textbook example of what happens when a defense does a goal line sellout when not on the goal line. The other was a funny bounce supreme, the punt that bounced off N'Keal Harry's helmet setting up the Bills' TD.

Now suppose Harry's miscue had come first. Suppose the Bills had a 7-0 lead in the first quarter. Would Belichick have held to his game plan in that circumstance? We'll never know. He'll go to his grave without saying. But the coach's strategy would've been sorely tested.

The major risk, however, of taking the football out of the air is that by minimizing the possible number of big plays, the Patriots were maximizing the probability of a low scoring game, where one slip by the defense or one funny bounce could mean disaster. That didn't happen. But let's not forget how close it came to happening. If the Bills don't shank a 4th quarter field goal, if the Pats get called for PI in the end zone as they should've, Belichick is getting roasted for his choices this morning, not hailed.

In a way, last night was a reverse of another famous Belichick coaching call, the loss to the Colts in 2009 where he had Brady pass on 4th down deep in Pats territory inside two minutes instead of punting. In macro terms, the logic of both decisions was the same. "I will put the game in the hands of my best player (s)," Brady in 2009, the defense last night. When the call didn't work in Indianapolis, Belichick was blasted around the world. It worked last night, so he's a genius again. Wonder why Belichick doesn't care what other people think? It's a survival mechanism.

Football is chaos with a layer of choreography on top. That means all coaching is accepting risk, if not of one kind, then of another. If there's an element of his skill set that sets Belichick apart from the other great NFL coaches in history, the Browns, Lombardis and Walshes, I believe it is this. He is willing not merely to tolerate risk. If Belichick believes he has no other choice, he will embrace it.

posted by Michael Gee @ 10:07 AM 0 comments