Let me introduce you to the football gods: they are teamwork, talent, planning, preparation, execution, aggression and opportunism. The football gods reward with greatness the teams that worship all of these equally, and they allow those with an excessive worship of talent to rise and fall. Because gods require epics, epics are tragedies - and tragedies end in sacrifice.
There are sacrements to the football gods, among these are the sack, the stuff, the safety, the bonecrushing hit, converting third and short, and pooching a punt that pins the receiving team inside their own 1. Those who observe the sacrements will achieve that higher state of being: domination.
The football gods are not happy with the teams this year, which is why old teams are falling on hard times, and the teams with winning records sit precariously on their perches.
Let us start from the outer frozen circles of football god hell: The NFC North and the NFC West.
A Coach should be a priest of the football gods, and convey a humble worship of their rituals to the players and assistant coaches. The football gods do not smile on sex cruises, the football gods do not smile on having a high round draft quarterback behind an offensive line that features Sponge Bob at tackle. The football gods do not smile on teams that have secondaries made of aerogel. And so the NFC North is condemned to the torment of having talented, even hall of fame, players, who must watch less talented teams destroy them weak after weak, and division leaders who sit at .500
Do the owners not realize that having Mike Tice as a coach is tempting the football gods? And the football gods love to yield to temptation.
The NFC West has only one good football team: the Seahawks. A good football team is one that uses teamwork, execution, talent and aggression to control the line of scrimage. This is half of football, the line of scrimage. The other half of football is, the ball. Controlling the ball, moving the ball, protecting the ball, and stripping the ball. Bad teams covet the ball, good teams take the ball.
Bad teams can win 10, 12 - even 15 games - by having a hugely talented cast of people who handle the ball. Then they reach the playoffs, and the good team's linebackers slam talented ball handlers into the tundra, and the winds - those servants of the football gods - freeze their fingers into arthritic claws. What happens next is not pretty.
The other teams in the west are all trying to be winning bad teams, allowing poor coaching and poor preparation to compound the errors of lack of talent, and thus flower into poor execution. It is not fair to a quarterback behind a jello offensive line. But you will note that fairness is not a football god. If the football gods believed in fairness, they would not have created zebras.
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But let us talk of a team that the football gods are smiling on: the Indianapolis Colts. Last year the football gods watched as hoardes of heretics sang the praises of a bad team with a great quarterback. Bad teams do not control the line, and thus, they try and use talent to make up for it. This road leads to grief, as Indianapolis nearly lost to an upstart team, and was then humbled by a good team.
This year the Colts control the line on both sides of the ball. Thus they do not need to rely on the play action pass - which the football gods invariably grow weary of if a team does not have a running game - or on Manning's adjustments. Instead, Manning can exploit his team's strength, and not the otherside's weakness. They will go far.
But they will hear footsteps all year, that echo from Mile High Statdium. The Broncos are a good team with a less than good quarterback. They also lose focus and attention. They play where the air is thin and cold, and the tundra gets hard early. And this is why the Colts will have to win, win, and win again to keep from being dragged into that fortress of cold cold ground.
A team that has tempted the football gods is the Pittsburgh Steelers. Their line has often failed to execute. It has cost them two games, one of which the football gods afflicted them with Tommy Maddox, who demonstrated why the game is called football. They have the talent, the planning and the preparation, but they allow details, such as picking up incoming linebackers, to slip all too often. The football gods smile on open field unassisted tackling, and on ball control offenses. But they will not be toyed with.
To make sure the Steelers continue to worship the football gods, the Bengals have been blessed with talent and arrogance. Their line is not yet strong enough, they are still a bad team. But they are a winning bad team, and will torment good teams that are insufficient in their devotion. But if the Bengals work hard this year, and improve their defensive line against the run, they could be more than merely "dangerous" next year. Otherwise, they will follow San Diego and Buffalo into the spiral of mediocrity.
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Next post - the battleground of the football gods - the NFC East, and whether Gruden has finished paying his penance and will be allowed to take his team back to the Super Bowl.