Josh, here’s a topic ripe for discussion. I grew up in the stands at Autzen with my father shaking his head in dismay at other spectators loudly bemoaning Rich Brooks’ playcalling. Football coaching, like presidenting and a lot of other stuff, is pretty easy to criticize, since every other play or so your team will be stopped for virtually no gain, and every tenth play or so something genuinely bad (sack, fumble, penalty) will happen. (This excludes the Auspicious Event of November 29, 2008).
Now, in retrospect, Rich Brooks’ playcalling was probably not off the charts in its greatness, but, first, he was generally in “run the ball and shorten the game and hope like hell their better, stronger, faster players have an off day” mode. Second, he was the professional football coach of the team: he knew his players, he lived and breathed football strategy, his career depended on success (or, in those days, a semblance of success). Who the hell am I, or is the drunk guy in section 22, to think I honestly have a better idea about what to do than Brooks?
(Tangent: did you see the article about Rich Brooks’ vomiting problem? Who knew that gruff old buzzard had it in him!)
To this day, I’m loathe to criticize my teams’ football coaches. I check out Rob Moseley’s blog sometimes, and I’m jarred by the criticism that some folks level at Mike Bellotti and Nick Aliotti. I’m of two minds about this, I guess: on the one hand, criticism is healthy and American, and I’m sure the coaches can take it. On the other hand, what the hell do these people know that the coaches don’t?
I’m going to assume you hold Mike Bellotti in the same high regard I do. His willingness, having seen firsthand what Urban Meyer’s Utah offense could do, to scrap his own signature offense, that’s an old dog learning a new trick. I’m grateful to the guy, and proud of what he’s helped build.
Then there’s Aliotti. That old buzzard just keeps sticking around. As discussed in an earlier post, his defenses do pretty well when you take into account the sheer volume of defense they have to play (40 minutes or so per game, versus 30 for other teams), but he’s not greatly loved. I defer to his understanding of defensive schemes, since I can’t tell the difference between a cover two and a punt return, and his experience, and his success in moving guys to the NFL, but am I wild about him? Not especially.
July 22, 2010 at 11:58 am |
Bellotti, Aliotti, Belotti, Alliotti, Beloti, Samuel Alito. You can kind of see where people run into problems. One more vote for the metric system.
I agree with you wholeheartedly about Bellotti. As an offensive coach, he was the rare expert who is able to succeed, interrogate the means of that success, and then abandon those means to find new success. That’s a great accomplishment, as museum-worthy as Jordan’s late-career fadeaway jumper, Kasparov’s reengineered midgame to combat the computers, and the reinvention of Tom Waits’s music in the Kathleen Brennan era. Caterpillar to butterfly is cool. Butterfly to new, better butterfly is amazing.
Maybe it’s wrong to draw this connection just because of the proximity of the ideas in your post, but one could make a case that Aliotti is the negative case. He has stubbornly persisted — so far as I understand it, which is about three inches — in sticking with his same defensive scheme through highs and lows.
That requires serious commitment in his case, because his preferred scheme is heavily dependent on having a pair of elite cover corners to handle one-on-ones while basically everyone else on the team stacks up the box. With Oregon’s recruiting power, we are only able to fulfill the two-elite-corner requirement about every third year, which means Aliotti spends a lot of time either getting burned in the secondary as his charges prove themselves too young or not talented enough or, usually under a flurry of criticism, he is forced to adjust the scheme, drop safeties into coverage, and then watch as some second-string fill-in tailback runs over our typically undersized front for 225 yards and the ballgame.
I don’t know the answer to the resulting question, though, which presumably is this:
Is Aliotti (a) a committed, unflappable master of a certain pragmatic brand of defensive football, unshakable in his faith in his team and his scheme, and thus properly associated with unwavering performers like, say, the Ramones and Johnny Cash (at least in the late-career popular conception of him), and Cal Ripken (who, yes, did eventually move to third but was none to happy about it), or (b) an outdated, inflexible, overly dogmatic practitioner of a single basic idea that used to work better when it was fresher, the football equivalent of, say, an epiphany-less Jordan who keeps driving to the hoop at 36, despite aching knees and reduced spring, and is perpetually shocked when his dunk attempts are batted away, or a 50-year-old Tom Waits who never left Hollywood & Vine, never lost the fedora or the Bukowski notebooks or the fascination with post-shift prostitutes slumping in diner booths, and is playing the same old haunts, still backed by the same set of balding drummer and standup-bass player in rumpled suits?
Icon or has-been? Like I said, probably just a lazy connection and inappropriate. If forced to choose, though, let’s go with the former.
August 10, 2010 at 6:16 am |
Ignore everything I said before. So apparently we have a brand-spanking-new defense this year, with a 3-4 alignment. Huh. Why did no one call me about this?