Chapter 8. Achtung, Baby

by Bob Andelman

"I enjoyed the military. It was precise. It was teamwork. Maybe I like football for the same reason. Football is fairly macho; it brings out the macho in guys that other sports don't bring out. It was something we watched in Viet Nam when I was there. If we could get near a TV and football was on, we'd watch it."

Frank Bryant
Former Army helicopter pilot
Long Beach, California

The blitz.

The bomb.

Down in the trenches.

Aerial assault.

Field generals.

Quick strike.

If you haven't noticed how football is steeped in military terminology and strategy, you haven't been paying attention.

"Sports ought to be the substitute for war," Dr. William J. Beausay says. "When you listen to sportscasters and coaches, the war metaphors that they use to describe the game just go on and on. You could write a dictionary of the war metaphors that are used to describe athletic contests. That is not an accident. I think that the same genetic drive in the human being is being acted out and in this case it is sports instead of the battlefield."

Nobody promotes an NFL game by saying it's gonna be a party. They say, "It's gonna be a war!"

More proof:

Team names are almost all war-like: Vikings, Patriots, Chiefs, Seahawks, Buccaneers, Raiders, Chargers, Cowboys. Even the animals teams choose to represent are aggressive by nature: Rams, Falcons, Eagles, Bengals, Broncos, Lions, Bears.

The cities they represent? Ancient clans and tribes on missions to take and defend territory. They stand up for their community honor. They put forth a bruising, total effort.

Military games have a lot of appeal. They involve strategy and calculation: the manipulation of varied components to accomplish a common goal, outsmarting, outwitting, outplaying and outfighting an opponent. Your army exists to battle and win, to achieve its goal it fights both offensively and defensively. Football is a military game with military correlates. It appeals on that basis.

The game's war cry? "Take no prisoners." "No one here gets out alive."

After a Big 7 Conference game in Kansas City, Oklahoma coach Bud Wilkinson was seen reading a book about General Rommel and the fighting in North Africa during World War II. Questioned by sportswriter Volney Meece about his choice in reading material, Wilkinson said, "With the tanks and everything they were planning to outflank the enemy, to fool them about which direction they were going to go. Desert warfare is exactly like planning a football game."

Football represents the epitome of 19th century engineer Frederick Taylor's belief that the most efficient organization would be one where the workers don't make many decisions. To win in football you have to use the very same concepts: Division of labor, very rigid rules and regulations, highly scientific training procedures and, more than anything else, you have to rationalize. You have to eliminate anything that is ad hoc. It has to be 11 human beings working as a machine. The entire organization must be geared toward producing these highly efficient machines. Just like industry.

But Dr. Allen L. Sack, a Taylor proponent, wonders if football may be out of synch with late 20th century life.

"Taylor believed that the best organization would be more and more management with management making all the decisions, where the workers shut up and were compensated fairly with monetary rewards. They were not meant to think," Sack says. "But the newest movements in management thought emphasize employee involvement. Total quality management puts the emphasis on the workers who are closest to the action being involved and discussing how to improve and become more efficient. The Japanese mauled us because we were late in realizing this. IBM has had problems because of this -- centralization, lack of involvement of the work force. It seems the whole world is now discovering that maybe it's more efficient and effective to treat workers or athletes as valuable human resources whose ideas and opinions about running things should be taken into consideration.

"Maybe football is only a preparation for military life, for winning wars or going into the front lines," Sack says. "Maybe it's no longer the best preparation for a life in a modern corporation where you have to be able to listen and to take the lower echelon's opinion into consideration."

The current coaching philosophy of football and some other sports came out of World War II and the Korean War. Many coaches are products of those wars. They believe the best approach to winning in football is the same as winning in the military and that proves true in most cases.

Are military skills and the way we look at the world psychologically the best tools for performance and success in a modern approach to industrial society? As another generation passes without being sent to a full-scale, multinational war, Sack suggests football will become more important as a military-style outlet.

"It's necessary that we have that kind of exposure because it's a reality that there are times when people do fight to the death," he says. "In those times you probably don't need democratic institutions. It's not like you take a vote (to go to war). There are places where the most effective organizational tools are probably Tayloristic principles and the football approach. But I think there are fewer and fewer areas of regular life where that really fits."

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Teamwork is another way football parallels the military. Without teamwork, the 49ers and Cowboys are lost. Without its multinational allies, Operation Desert Storm would have been a disaster for the U.S. armed forces.

Teamwork is the essence of football.

Young men learn the value of teamwork through football. How to work together. On a great football team you can see that and appreciate it.

"Baseball is an individual game," says Pat Harmon, historian of the College Football Hall of Fame at Kings Island amusement park near Cincinnati. "The batter is there and what he does, he does himself. Football is a team game. You have to have the performance of all the people on the team to make a team successful."

We use the example of "pulling together as a team," "conquering our problems as a team" and "only together can we win." If everyone does their specific task then goals will be accomplished. That fits with bureaucracies, too. Football is a rigidly timed game and we are a time-oriented society.

We each have a certain role and to the extent that all of us can do our roles well and we mesh and complement one another, we will be successful in life as in football. "That part hits home for me," Dr. Rick Weinberg says, "and in fact in my work with groups very often I use the metaphor of a professional sports team as a way to build a sense of teamwork."

Teamwork is instilled in children from the earliest days of their education. It's a concept that we very much want to teach our kids. The whole idea of teamwork at that level of development is very useful to get kids involved in sports and watching sports and participating in sports as a way of on-line learning about the value of teamwork. Once you have that as a kid it stays with you as a meaningful adult value.

But the concept of the team runs smack into the treasured American spirit of individualism and individual achievement, doesn't it?

"It is a contradiction, I think," Sack says. "On the one hand, as Americans, we like to think that these are individuals who are succeeding on their own individual efforts. We love heroes. We are a hero-oriented society. We value individualists, so we delude ourselves into thinking that a football team is 11 individuals."

Nothing could be further from the truth. There is no game in the United States where the individual is more subservient to the group.

"When I think of football, I think of a pinball machine," Sack says. "The little receivers are running back and forth and the ball is going up and down and being hit; football players are like the little arms that are flicking and there is a coach in back of all that who is pushing the buttons. There is all kinds of action, lights flashing and there's ringers and buzzers. The players themselves are like little parts within the pinball machine. Every one of their movements is perfectly planned and timed. They are being dominated and synchronized and told exactly what to do at certain moments.

"What is it that we like about watching that?" Sack asks. "We like to watch the quarterback, the hero, because it gives us empathy in terms of individualism. Do we identify with the tackles and the guards in the same way? Probably not. I think we are probably most amazed by the tremendous coordination of all this working together."

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chapter 16. I Don't Like Mondays

by Bob Andelman

"There is validity in what some people say, because sometimes the coaches don't have a clue. I've seen high school games where my mother could call better plays."

Larry Mayer
Managing editor
Chicago Bear Report

Everybody knows better than the coach whose team lost the big one on Sunday. Come Monday, it's crystal clear to the world that the Chargers should have gone for it on fourth down and inches, with 4:02 remaining in the fourth quarter.

Men develop an unshakable sense that they know better. It's fourth and inches and we're calling out the plays in our living rooms, praying Bill Parcells hears us through the miles and wires. If the coach calls a different play and it doesn't work, 9 out of 10 times we're cursing him for not doing it our way. "We would have gotten the first down and scored.







Sportswriters and sports talk show hosts from coast to coast devote barrels of ink and hours of air time to dissecting wrong choices, "what if" and "if only" strategies straight through till late Wednesday, when they start previewing the next game.

"I remember a friend of mine who was one of the greatest fans of Oklahoma football," Volney Meece says. "He was a fanatic but also a pure fan. In 1957, when Oklahoma's 47-game winning streak was snapped by Notre Dame, 7-0 at Norman, my friend walked out of the stadium behind a guy who was really getting on Bud Wilkinson for losing that game. The guy said, 'Don't you think maybe Bud Wilkinson's spending too much time on his TV show and we're not getting the coaching we used to?' Wilkinson won 47 straight and lost one and the guy wants to get on him!"

God love the Monday morning quarterback. Tolerate him, anyway.

When we know the players, study the depth charts or just listen to endless hours of analysis and debate over the relative merits and potential of certain players, men feel empowered. Knowledge builds kings, but it creates a good number of sports idiot savants, too.

Image via Wikipedia

The popularity of sports radio call-in shows, which give fans a forum for sounding off, encouraged many newspapers to establish separate letters to the editor columns in their sports pages. Meece hates them. "You get nothing but the lunatic fringe writing in," he says. "Coaches have enough problems nowadays with kids having changed so much individually. You have enough discipline problems without having some fan write in and say that the coach isn't doing a good job."

Fans might question whether Meece, a retired sportswriter, isn't just protecting his turf; until recently, the only guys with a forum to blast coaches were sportswriters.

Sometimes the only joy a fan gets out of seeing his team lose is getting mad at the coach and second-guessing him. It's fun, a sport in and of itself.






"When your team loses," Larry Mayer says, "the first thing people complain about is the play-calling. That's the one thing everybody has an opinion about."

Because the game's action is frequently interrupted, fans -- like coaches -- have several moments to plot the team's next play or series. In that way, men can fantasize about being involved in the game. They can call the play and, if they're right, take great satisfaction in being geniuses. Or morons, if the opposition intercepts, forces a fumble or shuts the offense down some other way.

Monday morning quarterbacking is one of the major gratifications of football. In hockey and soccer the action is continuous. Strategies evolve during games, but fans don't feel the same involvement. It deny us a chance to participate. In football, the clock and action stops on every play.


* * *
An interesting phenomena: the fan whose team can do no wrong. The players, anyway. The coaches earn no loyalty; they're all idiots. Management? Where did those guys ever play ball? And team owners draw more derision than anybody short of game officials. The guys at the top of the 28 NFL franchises are usually the most disliked figures in town. Spoiled brats who earned their money and teams the old-fashioned way: They inherited it.

It's easier to direct resentment toward management, coaches and the owners because they are the ones who are supposed to be putting the team together. They're supposed to be getting the best available material. It's also the "American Way" to be able to second guess, to question and say, "I know better. Why did you make that move? What did you hire this coach for?"







* * *
There's no denying that some fans might actually know more than the coaches or the owners. There are guys who consume every magazine, newspaper article, book, TV and radio show on football. Coaches have their hands full just keeping up with their own team's day-to-day operations. But the fans study for drafts as if the teams might actually be call late one night to ask their learned recommendations. Fantasy football leaguers do draft players, so they probably do know a thing or two.

"I tend to critique the coach non-stop about play-calling and personnel decisions," Jeff Spear says. "I love watching the draft and thinking about where my team is going to pick. It's a whole separate strategy. What are their weaknesses? Long range goals are important; you have to be thinking a few years down the road. The thinking process that you can put on the game attracts me to it. I'm a baseball fan. People say that's the thinking man's game. I see football that way also."

Game strategy is an important lure for men who put themselves above the violence and aggression that's commonplace in football. Can the offense anticipate the defense? Or can the D throw the offense off?

Proponents insist football is more than three yards and a cloud of dust. There is strategy and a certain appreciation of thinking in the planning and the organization behind the game. It leads to very different views.

• "I like the well-placed defensive schemes, the well-executed plays," Andrew Spear -- Jeff's brother -- says. "One year, the Redskins kept repeating the same play to the left. When it came down to it against the Giants late in the season, they ran it to the right. For me, it's not the hits, it's the aesthetics. The well-executed offensive or defensive play, as opposed to one guy taking somebody's head off -- I enjoy that as much as anybody, but I enjoy the beauty of the game much more."

• "I don't know the buzz words," hospitality management consultant Mark von Dwingelo says. "I can talk about pulling guards and off-tackles, bombs and screens. I also like 290-pound guys who run the 100 in nine seconds. It's become more of a science. The play-action pass? Joe Montana used to do that. He'd feint the hand-off, throw the defense off and throw the other way."

• "When I go to Tampa Stadium," Dr. Rick Weinberg says, "I don't like to sit on the 20-, 30-, 40- or 50-yard line. I sit in the end zone with my son and bring a pair of binoculars. We can see the defensive scheme and the offensive scheme. I certainly can appreciate the different plays and how the defensive backs cover the receivers as they go out. The play starts and you see the quarterback going on a pass-play. In the binoculars you can see the ends or the wide receivers go out and criss-cross or do their various patterns. It all comes together in that picture like clockwork. I find our end zone view really adds to the appeal of the game."

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!