Damnare Currunt Pila (They Run the Damn Ball)
Long time readers since two days ago will know that I correctly picked Super Bowl LIX, that I predicted a blow out in favor of the Eagles, and that I implied Saquon Barkley would be the key to their victory. I was right on all three counts.
“But wait, Dan,” you might be saying, smirking and stroking your chin because you think you’ve come up with a very clever counterpoint, “Barkley only ran for 2.3 yards per carry. I would hardly call that key to victory.”
WRONG. Not only is that wrong, it’s the worst kind of wrong. It’s wrong with a capital-W, capital-R, capital-O, capital-N, and a capital-G.
The Kansas City defensive game plan was to take away the Eagles run game and dare them to win in the air. They were going to zig where everyone else has been zagging; rather than play with six men in the box (a very technical term for “near the line of scrimmage”), they played virtually every snap with seven. Sometimes they even went with eight. This hamstrung what they could do in pass coverage.
It’s hard to figure out exactly what teams are doing in the secondary because broadcast angles focus so much on the quarterback, but from what I could tell, it looked like the Chiefs were mostly running Cover 1, which is a fancy way of saying “man-to-man with one deep safety.”
That’s a perfectly acceptable coverage but it’s not going to hack it when the receivers you’re trying to cover include a three-time Pro-Bowler (AJ Brown) and the only wide receiver to win the Heisman Trophy in almost 35 years (DeVonta Smith). It’s a very easy decision tree for Philadelphia quarterback Jalen Hurts. He can just throw it to the star wide receiver on the side of the field the single deep safety isn’t covering.
This wasn’t the only way the Chief’s fixation on Barkley affected their play. It also rendered them vulnerable to read options. This, for the uninitiated, is a running play where the offensive line will block everybody you’d expect them to except one guy. That one guy will realize he’s unblocked just as the quarterback is starting to hand the ball off to the running back.
If that one guy makes a beeline for the halfback, the QB will yank it and scurry away like the roadrunner on crack. If that one guy freezes because he’s seen this movie before and doesn’t want the QB to scurry away like he’s the roadrunner on crack, the QB will hand it off to the halfback, who will then scurry away like he’s the roadrunner on crack.
This was only possible because of how afraid the Chiefs were of Barkley, but frankly, the offense wasn’t what won the Eagles their Vince Lombardi trophy. It was largely the defense, who put in an all-time great performance.
That’s not hyperbole. They held the Chiefs to six points until the last two minutes of gametime, during which Kansas City scored two touchdowns to make the final a deceptively respectable 40-22. The Chiefs sudden explosion wasn’t because their offense was finally clicking, it was because the Eagles had it in the bag, knew it, and were phoning it in like office workers on the Friday before Christmas.
To find a defensive performance comparable to what the Eagles pulled off last night, you have to go back to 1990, when George H.W. Bush was President of the United States, Stevie Ray Vaughan was alive, and the 49ers stuffed the Denver Broncos into a lock to the tune of 55-10. San Francisco did this with over 300 yards through the air, but also with 144 on the ground while holding the Broncos to 167 yards total.
So long as football is a being played, smashmouth, grind it out, running attacks are going to have a place in the sport. The running back is not an afterthought, it’s a key component of success. The impact can be felt even if he’s being held to 2 yards per carry. Neglect it at your own peril.
In conclusion: Go birds. 🦅