Earlier this football season, I survived something of a crisis. For about the 25th time in my life–but for the first time in several years–I decided I just didn’t enjoy the sport. I spent the first three weeks of the season in Europe, which effectively removed me from the season-long, spread-based office football pool, and when I returned I threw myself briskly back into baseball. By the time I got to football, studying it as yet another cultural artifact, it seemed once again a mean and brutish sport, violent and territorial. Which it is. But this time–without the point spreads to concentrate on–football seemed especially senseless. When the Bears game had ended, and the next game came on, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why anyone was watching, and sometimes I couldn’t even figure out why anyone was watching the Bears. This may seem a rational state of mind to many people, but it is a very dark night for anyone attempting to write about sports.
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In fact, the book does explain various tactics, defenses, and offensive plays in detail, but its main strength is that Zimmerman (a former high school, college, and semipro player himself) is always alert to the players’ and coaches’ idiosyncrasies and foibles, to human nature as it’s displayed on the gridiron–a trite phrase that doesn’t do justice to the people and their conflicts portrayed in the book. The book is peppered with anecdotes that entertain on all levels, that illustrate the points Zimmerman makes in a way that always reminds the reader that it’s people playing the game. For an example, this wonderfully philosophical quote from the recently retired coach of the San Francisco 49ers, Bill Walsh: “The key to professional growth is a natural inquisitiveness. When you lose that you’re not going to grow at all.” A better title for this book might be “The Best Football Book Ever Written,” although this, no doubt, would alienate at least as many people as the current title does.
Suddenly, I found every game entertaining; the sport made sense as a battle of tactics between two coaches and as a battle for domination between two groups of men, the offensive and defensive lines. I could go over to visit my friend the Boomer–an attorney, a Georgetown Law School graduate, a University of Illinois sportswriter, and a high school center and nose guard who devolves along just this course every weekend–and we could discuss the splits in the formation of an offensive line, the strengths and weaknesses of the queer defense of the Los Angeles Rams, which sometimes shifts to two down linemen and five linebackers, the advantages of trap blocking over straight-ahead bursts against a team, like the Minnesota Vikings, that relies on quickness and pursuit. If this sounds tiresome, it probably is, but it brought me back to the game, and it heightened the simple pleasures of watching a Notre Dame-Penn State contest–football as it’s meant to be played, between two sound squads, and with that wonderful, quick, massive, precise Fighting Irish offensive line blowing a very good Penn State defense off the ball with every snap.
As the game went on, however, it moved toward an almost inevitable conclusion, because cracks showed in both the Bears’ offensive and defensive lines. Are the Bears’ Jay Hilgenberg and Tom Thayer suddenly being caught for holding, or are they finding it necessary to hold because they can no longer block as they once did? The number of penalties argues forcibly for the latter. And as for the defense, quoting Walsh from Thinking Man’s Football again: “A pass rush, late in the game, is the key to NFL football.” Allow me to add emphasis: the Key. With Perry an excellent run defender but a poor pass rusher, they shifted Armstrong to tackle and played Roper as a down lineman at left end. Neither reached the quarterback during the final two Tampa Bay drives that crushed the Bears’ comeback.
