The euphoria Cleveland fans are probably feeling at watching the Bill Belichick-coached New England Patriots get their comeuppance in Sunday’s Super Bowl will probably be replaced by frustration as soon as it occurs to them that the New York Giants had a record of 10-6, the same as the Browns, entering into the playoffs.
The big difference, of course, is that the Giants got a chance to parlay its 10-6 record into a Super Bowl ring while the Browns were left once again watching from the sidelines.
This isn’t to suggest that the Browns could have made it to the Super Bowl. Hardly. The Browns, even at 10-6, were a seriously flawed defensive team that would never have survived the AFC playoff meat grinder. But on the other hand, the Giants win, coming off an 8-8 season the year before and a bad start that almost got its head coach, Tom Coughlin, fired three weeks into this season, demonstrates that indeed anything can happen come playoff time. This year, anything did happen.
The Giants playoff march was instructive for the Browns and their fans. Playing as underdogs on the road for three straight weeks, the Giants disposed of three supposedly superior teams in the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Dallas Cowboys and the Green Bay Packers. The Packers win was particularly impressive coming as it did in such frigid weather and adverse conditions.
What’s interesting about the Giants 10-6 record is that they lost only one game on the road and five at home. Having become road warriors during the regular season it served them well for the playoffs. Compare that with the Browns. This past season, the Browns failed to reach the playoffs as much as for their inability to win a few very winnable games on the road as anything else. A victory in Oakland, Arizona or Cincinnati would have put them in the playoffs. Two or more victories would have given them a home playoff game. Having finally figured out how to win at home, the next step for the Browns is to win on the road. It’s hard to get to the Super Bowl otherwise, let alone win it.
The other point about the Giants playoff success is that it demonstrated exactly why the worst thing a franchise can do is listen to the insane demands of fans when their ill-conceived and outsized need for instant gratification is not met. If the Giants fans had their way earlier in the season, Coughlin would have been canned during week three and Manning would have been benched. In fact, when it comes to Manning, it’s charitable to say that this year’s Super Bowl MVP had an uneven season, at least until the regular season’s final game. Manning was no better, and in some ways worse, than his previous seasons.
Maybe it was because there were no immediately available viable alternatives or maybe it was because Giants owners tend to be old school, meaning they prefer to make such dramatic changes in the off season. Whichever it was, or even if there was another reason, patience ultimately prevailed and the team and its fans were richly rewarded.
As much as many Browns fans dislike it, that’s the exact message that Browns general manager Phil Savage has been preaching since he arrived and at every opportunity since. The recent extension he gave to head coach Romeo Crennel was done to drive home that point to the team and its fans. Argue all you want about whether or not Crennel deserved the confidence, but from Savage’s perspective he did and he now has the example of the Giants to point to when fans continue to call for Crennel’s ouster and not his coronation. There is something to be said for stability, even mediocre stability.
The faith that Coughlin continued to show in Manning even as he struggled is also helpful context to understanding the Brown’s current quarterback conundrum. Coughlin really didn’t have a viable Plan B at quarterback so in some ways he had no choice but to stick with Manning. But Manning also had a decent pedigree so it made sense that the team would wait as long as possible for him to develop. And when the light finally went on for Manning in the regular season’s final game against New England and then stayed on throughout the playoffs, that patience was richly rewarded as well. Now Eli Manning is as solid in New York as his brother is in Indianapolis. That is something that no one would have imagined even halfway through this season. Again, there is something to be said for stability.
The Browns have two reasonable candidates in Derek Anderson and Brady Quinn but it is simply unrealistic to expect that there won’t be struggles, irrespective of who, ultimately, is anointed the quarterback for the future. But if those kinks are to get worked out eventually, and if stability is to be achieved at that position, it will take an unwavering commitment to allowing the process to take its natural course. Keeping that commitment with young quarterbacks is difficult under the best of circumstances and can be nearly impossible for the coach to keep and the fans to understand when there is another viable quarterback just licking his chops in the background. It introduces a dynamic that Manning, for example, didn’t have to contend with.
Despite what Savage says publicly, it is difficult for any NFL team to tolerate having two starting quarterbacks. It’s true that a team needs depth, but what it really needs is a situation where it has a starter and an established back-up. There is simply no way that either Anderson or Quinn at this point in their careers will be happy carrying a clipboard and waiting for an injury much longer. The Browns may be able to maintain peace, love and harmony with this situation for another season, but not beyond. Given that, it makes more sense now to commit to one, move the other, and find an established back-up who is more than happy to collect a paycheck for taking a few snaps during the week and running the scout team. It’s also the example from the Giants that Savage has to internalize to move this team forward.
***
One of the keys to the Browns success this season was the rebuilt offensive line, anchored by Joe Thomas and Eric Steinbach. Savage is to be commended for the improvements made and the results were dramatic. That being said, the Giants victory underscored the importance of the defensive line and highlighted one of the biggest differences between the Browns and the Giants, despite the teams having the same regular season record.
In the regular season, Tom Brady, like Anderson, was one of the least sacked quarterbacks in the league. The Giants, on the other hand, led the league in sacking the quarterback. When the irresistible force met the seemingly immovable object in the Super Bowl, the object moved. The pressure that Brady felt from the first play forward disrupted the Patriots rhythm and was the main reason history’s most prolific offense could manage only two touchdowns instead of the five they had averaged throughout the season.
Having a top offensive line will continue to serve the Browns well. But watching the performance of the Giants defensive line, Savage now knows beyond any doubt where he must concentrate his efforts this off season for the Browns to really take the next step.
***
Complain all you want about Belichick, but give the man his due when it comes to the rules. Until yesterday, you’d be hard press to find anyone, in or out of football, who knew that you could challenge a non-call.
Facing a fourth and two with 11 minutes left in the third quarter, the Patriots were in punt formation. As the ball was snapped, the Giants Chase Blackburn still was in the field of play, but just barely. Belichick threw the challenge flag, the replay confirmed, and a retroactive penalty was called. The five-yard penalty gave the Patriots a first down and allowed them to continue a drive. It didn’t result in any points, but had it made the difference you can bet that this move would be hailed near and far as the call of the game. You can bet just as much that the NFL’s competition committee would have worked to change the rule for next season. For now, it will probably just remain an interesting footnote.
***
The Browns’ Anderson and tight end Kellen Winslow II ought to send the Patriots Brady and Randy Moss postcards from Hawaii. It’s easy to see how the loss on Sunday soured Brady and Moss on playing in the Pro Bowl next Sunday, allowing Anderson and Winslow to make the trip instead. Sounds like a nice vacation for the two, but it also emphasizes how absolutely meaningless the Pro Bowl is and always will be. The players don’t care and the fans don’t watch. With nothing on the line and only injuries to be avoided, one wonders why the league even bothers with this charade. But on the plus side, at least the few fans that care won’t have to put up with Paula Abdul lip-syncing her way through another dreadful song in order to watch the game.
***
And finally, since this is the last “lingering items” for the season, a question to ponder this off season: If Danny Ferry was the GM of the Browns, would that mean the Browns would have to stand pat going into next season?
Showing posts with label Tom Coughlin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tom Coughlin. Show all posts
Monday, February 04, 2008
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
A Desert Disaster
The scene is eerily familiar, only this time the local fans don’t have the same rooting interest.
It was a little over a year ago when an undefeated team with but a few close calls during the regular season found its way playing for a championship in the Arizona desert. That team featured the top quarterback, indeed the top player in the game at least that season, and enough skill players surrounding him to make opposing coaches drool. To the extent that the media can ever reach a consensus on anything, it did this time. No doubt this team would finish what they had started and would be anointed one of the great teams of all time.
Making matters seem all that much more inevitable, its opponent was not highly regarded and was thought, at best, to be maybe a year or two away from being a serious contender for a championship. The opponent featured some intriguing players, to be sure, but had barely won its conference. There was also a double digit point spread to contend with. In short, but for a few contrarians dotting the landscape, mainly in the team’s hometown, no one else gave them much of a chance.
But the Florida Gators turned into the little team that could and handily wiped the carpet with the Ohio State Buckeyes at the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, capping an improbable year for the Gators and its coach, Urban Meyer.
In many, many ways, this Sunday’s Super Bowl featuring the New England Patriots against the New York Giants is playing to all these same themes. New England is the consensus number one team in the league with the consensus superior talent. The Giants seem lucky to be there.
The parallels, of course, don’t all work. For example, in most ways, Buckeyes head coach Jim Tressel is the anti-Bill Belichick. Tressel isn’t exactly a quote machine himself, but he is very accessible to the media and hardly treats reporters’ questions as if they are an intrusion. As passionately as he wants to win, Tressel hardly seems motivated by the kind of hate and rage that tends to fuel Belichick’s engine. Probably because he’s coaching college kids, Tressel maintains a much healthier perspective on not only what a game means, but what it doesn’t.
Meyer, too, is hardly Tom Coughlin, the Giants head coach. Where Meyer is cool and collected in every situation, Coughlin wears his emotions on his sleeve. Meyer has been nothing but successful at each stop along the coaching trail with no one ever threatening to run him off. Coughlin’s career has had at least as many downs as ups. When the Giants lost their first two games this season, the New York media and Giants fans were already calling for Coughlin to be fired, particularly coming off an 8-8 season that should have been much better but wasn’t because so often the coach and his players seemed to be at each other’s throats all the time.
Improbably, though, the Giants turned it around enough to finish at 10-6, the same record as the Browns, and now find themselves in the Super Bowl mainly because they got hot at the right time. The remaining question, of course, is whether the Giants are laying in wait, like the Gators, to deliver another disaster in the desert to what many consider to be an incredible mismatch.
This is where it gets tricky. In the first place, the differences between college and pro football are so vast that at times the only thing the two games seem to have in common is that the scoring plays in each count the same. For example, barring injury you’re never going to see either Belichick or Coughlin use a two-quarterback system just to give the other team a different look.
But the big difference is that it is much easier to make apples to apples comparisons in pro football than it ever will be in college. When the Buckeyes and Gators finally met in the national championship game, what they knew about each other is what they could see on film alone. Not only didn’t they play each other during the regular season, they didn’t have any common opponents. Thus, despite all the talk about the difference in speed in the SEC vs. the Big Ten, it was nearly impossible to tell if that really was the case with respect to these two teams.
Moreover, the talent level from team to team in college football, even when played at its highest levels, is wildly inconsistent. Even really good teams in college aren’t good top to bottom. Thus, what a coach observes on tape about his opponent is difficult, at best, to translate. That stud defensive lineman who seems to dominate may just be a case of facing relatively weak offensive linemen from week to week. That quarterback who never seems to get sacked may just have been playing against relatively poor pass rushing teams most weeks.
In the NFL, the talent level is far more consistent. In a sense, every NFL team is a college all star team. There are differences in talent levels from team to team, but they aren’t substantial. Using this year’s Browns team as Exhibit A, the difference between a team with a losing record and one who went 10-6 is usually one or two players, not 10-12.
But perhaps the biggest difference is that it is not all that unusual for the Super Bowl participants to have played already played each other in the regular season, and if not the current season, then the previous one. One of the most memorable games of this year was the Patriots/Giants game during the final week of the regular season. It not only had historic overtures, but it also essentially sparked a resurgence of the Giants, even in defeat.
But the larger point for this discussion is that each team is well aware of what the other can do, having just played each other a few weeks ago. Each team knows the other’s strengths and weaknesses not just based on what they see on film but what they personally experienced. For each team, their game plan for the Super Bowl will be based far more on actual knowledge than mere guess work than either Tressel’s or Meyer’s game plan for the national championship game.
In a way, Sunday’s Super Bowl is but a continuation of that final regular season game, with the two week run-up to it serving as an extended halftime. Given what each team already knows about the other, the difference maker is less likely going to be pure emotion, as it was when the Gators faced the Buckeyes, and more so on which coach can make the right adjustments.
Indeed, if that is the criteria, the Patriots have a decided advantage. Using just this season as an example, the Patriots have outscored their opponents by a large margin in every quarter. They were +93 in the first quarter, +103 in the second, +46 in the third, and +73 in the fourth. The Giants, on the other hand, were a remarkable -24 in the first quarter, +28 in the second, +1 in the third and +21 in the fourth.
Some simple conclusions that can be drawn from this are that the Patriots were a far more dominant team than the Giants, within each game and from game to game. It also tells you that the Patriots were not often challenged whereas the Giants often played from behind and that their 10 victories were highly dependent on their ability to eke out close games.
It’s also fair to suggest that these figures also underscore that Belichick’s teams were far better prepared for their opponents going into each game than the Giants given the point differentials in the first quarter. Coughlin and his staff eventually made adjustments throughout that helped them ultimately be successful, but Belichick and his staff got off to great starts each week and kept the pressure on throughout. By doing so, the Patriots were able to dictate the tempo of the game and force teams to adjust to them, not the other way around as was the case with the Giants.
It also says something about the game-day coaching abilities of Belichick and Coughlin. An interesting article posted last summer on the web site NFL Stats sought to quantify the impact of game-day coaching by taking the number of wins that a team could expect in a season based on its on-field statistical performance and comparing it to actual wins. When actual wins exceeded expected wins on a consistent basis, the author surmised, one differentiating factor was the head coach and his ability to squeeze more out of the talent at hand.
In that analysis, which did not even include the 2007 season, Belichick in New England (as compared to Belichick in both Cleveland and New England) led the pack. In New England, his teams consistently win over two games more per season than on-the-field performance otherwise bears out. Indeed, anyone watching the Patriots this season had to marvel at the team’s ability to win when not playing its best. Coughlin’s teams, in both Jacksonville and New York, tended to win slightly less games than expected. Neither of these results is much of a surprise.
None of this means that Coughlin is a lousy head coach and thus the Giants have no chance. But it does point to an X factor to consider when placing your Super Bowl wagers. And while all this may be just another elaborate set up for the ultimate downfall of the seemingly superior team, this isn’t Ohio State vs. Florida either. There very well could be a disaster in the desert. Just don’t look for it from the underdog this time.
It was a little over a year ago when an undefeated team with but a few close calls during the regular season found its way playing for a championship in the Arizona desert. That team featured the top quarterback, indeed the top player in the game at least that season, and enough skill players surrounding him to make opposing coaches drool. To the extent that the media can ever reach a consensus on anything, it did this time. No doubt this team would finish what they had started and would be anointed one of the great teams of all time.
Making matters seem all that much more inevitable, its opponent was not highly regarded and was thought, at best, to be maybe a year or two away from being a serious contender for a championship. The opponent featured some intriguing players, to be sure, but had barely won its conference. There was also a double digit point spread to contend with. In short, but for a few contrarians dotting the landscape, mainly in the team’s hometown, no one else gave them much of a chance.
But the Florida Gators turned into the little team that could and handily wiped the carpet with the Ohio State Buckeyes at the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, capping an improbable year for the Gators and its coach, Urban Meyer.
In many, many ways, this Sunday’s Super Bowl featuring the New England Patriots against the New York Giants is playing to all these same themes. New England is the consensus number one team in the league with the consensus superior talent. The Giants seem lucky to be there.
The parallels, of course, don’t all work. For example, in most ways, Buckeyes head coach Jim Tressel is the anti-Bill Belichick. Tressel isn’t exactly a quote machine himself, but he is very accessible to the media and hardly treats reporters’ questions as if they are an intrusion. As passionately as he wants to win, Tressel hardly seems motivated by the kind of hate and rage that tends to fuel Belichick’s engine. Probably because he’s coaching college kids, Tressel maintains a much healthier perspective on not only what a game means, but what it doesn’t.
Meyer, too, is hardly Tom Coughlin, the Giants head coach. Where Meyer is cool and collected in every situation, Coughlin wears his emotions on his sleeve. Meyer has been nothing but successful at each stop along the coaching trail with no one ever threatening to run him off. Coughlin’s career has had at least as many downs as ups. When the Giants lost their first two games this season, the New York media and Giants fans were already calling for Coughlin to be fired, particularly coming off an 8-8 season that should have been much better but wasn’t because so often the coach and his players seemed to be at each other’s throats all the time.
Improbably, though, the Giants turned it around enough to finish at 10-6, the same record as the Browns, and now find themselves in the Super Bowl mainly because they got hot at the right time. The remaining question, of course, is whether the Giants are laying in wait, like the Gators, to deliver another disaster in the desert to what many consider to be an incredible mismatch.
This is where it gets tricky. In the first place, the differences between college and pro football are so vast that at times the only thing the two games seem to have in common is that the scoring plays in each count the same. For example, barring injury you’re never going to see either Belichick or Coughlin use a two-quarterback system just to give the other team a different look.
But the big difference is that it is much easier to make apples to apples comparisons in pro football than it ever will be in college. When the Buckeyes and Gators finally met in the national championship game, what they knew about each other is what they could see on film alone. Not only didn’t they play each other during the regular season, they didn’t have any common opponents. Thus, despite all the talk about the difference in speed in the SEC vs. the Big Ten, it was nearly impossible to tell if that really was the case with respect to these two teams.
Moreover, the talent level from team to team in college football, even when played at its highest levels, is wildly inconsistent. Even really good teams in college aren’t good top to bottom. Thus, what a coach observes on tape about his opponent is difficult, at best, to translate. That stud defensive lineman who seems to dominate may just be a case of facing relatively weak offensive linemen from week to week. That quarterback who never seems to get sacked may just have been playing against relatively poor pass rushing teams most weeks.
In the NFL, the talent level is far more consistent. In a sense, every NFL team is a college all star team. There are differences in talent levels from team to team, but they aren’t substantial. Using this year’s Browns team as Exhibit A, the difference between a team with a losing record and one who went 10-6 is usually one or two players, not 10-12.
But perhaps the biggest difference is that it is not all that unusual for the Super Bowl participants to have played already played each other in the regular season, and if not the current season, then the previous one. One of the most memorable games of this year was the Patriots/Giants game during the final week of the regular season. It not only had historic overtures, but it also essentially sparked a resurgence of the Giants, even in defeat.
But the larger point for this discussion is that each team is well aware of what the other can do, having just played each other a few weeks ago. Each team knows the other’s strengths and weaknesses not just based on what they see on film but what they personally experienced. For each team, their game plan for the Super Bowl will be based far more on actual knowledge than mere guess work than either Tressel’s or Meyer’s game plan for the national championship game.
In a way, Sunday’s Super Bowl is but a continuation of that final regular season game, with the two week run-up to it serving as an extended halftime. Given what each team already knows about the other, the difference maker is less likely going to be pure emotion, as it was when the Gators faced the Buckeyes, and more so on which coach can make the right adjustments.
Indeed, if that is the criteria, the Patriots have a decided advantage. Using just this season as an example, the Patriots have outscored their opponents by a large margin in every quarter. They were +93 in the first quarter, +103 in the second, +46 in the third, and +73 in the fourth. The Giants, on the other hand, were a remarkable -24 in the first quarter, +28 in the second, +1 in the third and +21 in the fourth.
Some simple conclusions that can be drawn from this are that the Patriots were a far more dominant team than the Giants, within each game and from game to game. It also tells you that the Patriots were not often challenged whereas the Giants often played from behind and that their 10 victories were highly dependent on their ability to eke out close games.
It’s also fair to suggest that these figures also underscore that Belichick’s teams were far better prepared for their opponents going into each game than the Giants given the point differentials in the first quarter. Coughlin and his staff eventually made adjustments throughout that helped them ultimately be successful, but Belichick and his staff got off to great starts each week and kept the pressure on throughout. By doing so, the Patriots were able to dictate the tempo of the game and force teams to adjust to them, not the other way around as was the case with the Giants.
It also says something about the game-day coaching abilities of Belichick and Coughlin. An interesting article posted last summer on the web site NFL Stats sought to quantify the impact of game-day coaching by taking the number of wins that a team could expect in a season based on its on-field statistical performance and comparing it to actual wins. When actual wins exceeded expected wins on a consistent basis, the author surmised, one differentiating factor was the head coach and his ability to squeeze more out of the talent at hand.
In that analysis, which did not even include the 2007 season, Belichick in New England (as compared to Belichick in both Cleveland and New England) led the pack. In New England, his teams consistently win over two games more per season than on-the-field performance otherwise bears out. Indeed, anyone watching the Patriots this season had to marvel at the team’s ability to win when not playing its best. Coughlin’s teams, in both Jacksonville and New York, tended to win slightly less games than expected. Neither of these results is much of a surprise.
None of this means that Coughlin is a lousy head coach and thus the Giants have no chance. But it does point to an X factor to consider when placing your Super Bowl wagers. And while all this may be just another elaborate set up for the ultimate downfall of the seemingly superior team, this isn’t Ohio State vs. Florida either. There very well could be a disaster in the desert. Just don’t look for it from the underdog this time.
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