NRO Weekend, January 27-28, 2001
A Question of Command
When the troops are equal, go with the better general.

By Geoffrey Norman, NRO sportswriter

or the teams, as well as the fans, the Super Bowl comes at the end of a long campaign. This thing started back in the summer with two-a-days and exhibition games that didn’t count unless you happened to tear an ACL or play indifferently enough to lose your job. The actual season began around Labor Day and went 16 games before the playoffs even started. To make it through the playoffs to the Super Bowl, a team had to win at least two games, possibly three.

There were casualties along the way. Coaches, like Bobby Ross at Detroit, burned out and quit. Others, like Vince Tobin at Arizona, got fired. Teams that had high hopes and good prospects were hit by injuries. Last year’s Super Bowl champs, the St. Louis Rams, lost both their quarterback and their star runner for part of the season. Still, they made it to the playoffs — barely. They were a “wild card” team, which meant that to get to the big game, they would have to win three playoff games. They lost, in the first round, to the surprise team of the season, the New Orleans Saints who won the first playoff game in team history. The Saints’ had made it that far in spite of losing their quarterback, their star receiver, and their franchise running back. They lost the next weekend, in Minneapolis, to the Vikings.

A long campaign, then, with endurance and luck counting for a lot. This year’s Super Bowl teams seem not champions so much as survivors. Which is a trendy thing to be. CBS, which broadcasts the game, will follow it with this year’s version of its show about coping in the boonies. Survivor is being held in Australia this year and while I won’t be watching, I will be pulling for the snakes.

The game, on the other hand, has the makings of one of the more interesting Super Bowls ever.

Interesting, however, does not necessarily mean exciting. The game does not shape up as much of a contest for the kind of person who watches one game a year — the Super Bowl. For one thing, there is no individual player with much celebrity, unless you count Ray Lewis, the dominating middle linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens who beat a charge of first degree murder last year. Lewis is one of the few felons who did not get a Presidential pardon last week and he is about as unapologetic about his past as the guy who did the pardoning. The non-fan, then, may be able to gin up some interest in the game by rooting against the Ravens. Pulling for the Giants is made easier, in this vein, since their quarterback is a recovering alcoholic and has held up admirably under the requirement to talk about his ordeal to the press for whom it is just another “story line.” (Why not just a “story?”) The mood of this game — the kind of non-football aura that hangs over it — is a strange, incompatible mix of crime and therapy. America’s Most Wanted and Oprah. You almost expect Regis and Kathy Lee to be doing the play-by-play with an assist from Judge Judy.

A lot of people whose only football game of the year is the Super Bowl like to see big plays and lots of scoring, and this year’s game seems certain to disappoint them. Both teams got this far on defense and in football, as Daryl Royal — the eloquent head coach of Texas back in the 60s and 70s — put it: “You dance with the one that brung you.”

The ascendancy of the defense in this year’s game is striking for two reasons. First, last year’s champs, the Rams, were supposed to have established conclusively that offense was the way of the new millennium. The Rams could score enough points to win some basketball games. And in the NFL, as in most of life, when something works, it is copied. Teams all around the league were expected to imitate the Rams this season. The offense of the Ravens is lamentable. The Giants are a little better.

And, then, the head coaches of the Super Bowl teams — Jim Fassel of the Giants and Brian Billick of the Ravens — both made their reputations on the offense. Fassel paid so much attention to the offense in a losing season last year that the defense virtually mutinied. This year, Fassel mended fences with the defense and became a complete coach. Billick, whose defense kept the Ravens in the playoff hunt despite a stretch of four games when the team could not score a single touchdown, now says he has “gone over to the dark side.”

Both men plainly did something right and while nobody would yet mistake either for Lombardi or Landry, they are the pivotal figures in Tampa this weekend. Football, more than any sport, is a coach’s game. Great coaches find ways to win with the talent at hand. They take the players they are given and mold them into a team. They push the right emotional buttons and devise the strategy that maximizes their team’s strengths and exploits their opponents’ weaknesses. Another coach once said of Bear Bryant, “He can take his and beat yours and then he can take yours and beat his.” Among coaches, there is no higher praise.

Football coaches are like generals. It is hard to say why one is successful and another is not. Xenophon tried to sum it up and came up with this:

A general must also be capable of furnishing military equipment and providing supplies for the men; he must be resourceful, active, careful, hardy and quick witted; he must be both gentle and brutal, at once straightforward and designing, capable of both caution and surprise, lavish and rapacious, generous and mean, skilful in defense and attack; and there are many other qualifications, some natural, some acquired, that are necessary to one who would succeed as a general.

Which clears things up nicely.

The great coach, like the great general, finds a way to get it done. Which, so far, both Fassel and Billick have done admirably. The fact that neither man coaches what would be called a “complete” team makes the case. If there are better teams staying home, what does that tell you about these coaches and the job they did with inferior material. If you want to argue that they were merely lucky (both of them?) then you can take your case to General Napoleon who once said, in effect, that of the important qualities he looked for in a general, luck was the most important. He also said that the gods of war favored the big battalions. In this Super Bowl the battalions are pretty much equal in both size and ability. The Ravens are a two or three point favorite and just about everyone expects a close game.

The coach who does the better job of motivating, and who turns out to be the more supple strategist, will win. Both coaches are playing quarterbacks whose psyches are exceedingly fragile. The game will be played in Tampa where Trent Dilfer, now of the Ravens, was routinely roasted by the fans when he played for the Bucs. He was, eventually, run out of town. Collins has been through his well publicized ordeals. These are not competitors who cannot imagine themselves losing. They do not remind the fan of Bobby Lane, Johnny Unitas, Joe Montana or John Elway.

As a motivator, Billick seems to be playing Patton, though he reminds you more of Karl Malden doing Omar Bradley to George C. Scott’s turn as “Old Blood and Guts.” Billick likes to get in the face of opposing fans and the media, doing the “us against the world,” routine. So far, it has worked.

Fassel made a rambling speech back in mid-season when it looked like the Giants were about to collapse. He guaranteed the playoffs for his team and talked about putting in all his chips and trains leaving stations and thew in a lot of other all-or-nothing metaphors until you weren’t quite sure what he was trying to say. But it seemed to work. His team didn’t lose any more games.

Fassel has been almost as subdued in his talk as Billick has been belligerent. One thinks of Robert E. Lee plotting the destruction of a General named Pope who was fond of big talk. To his staff, Lee called Pope a “miscreant,” and said he should be “suppressed,” which he was, decisively, at the Second Battle of Bull Run.

The motivational contest comes down to a trash talk vs. we’ll-let-our-game-do-the talking-for-us.

The matter of strategy will not be settled until, at last, they kick it off and play the game. In the playoffs so far, Fassel and his staff have demonstrated some resourcefulness and a willingness to take chances on the offensive side of the ball. The same can not be said of the Ravens who are still dancing with the one that brung them. Dilfer is instructed, essentially, to not go out and lose it. Collins, on the other hand, came out throwing against the Vikings and had a day for the record book in a 41-0 rout.

If the two defenses are as good as advertised — and there is no reason to think they are not--then somebody is going to have to find a way to make something happen on offense. That will require that quality of generalship known as audacity.

And some good blocking up front.