They had the Army-Nayy game yesterday, and you had to have flyovers of military aircraft over the Redskin's stadium (interestingly, the first time the game had been played in metro DC) to get something of an air game yesterday. Army passed six times all day, and the winning Navy side only three.
If throwing the ball was strategically effective for those teams, they would do it, but an option running game has long been the hallmark of the service academies; even the Air Force doesn't air it out, running almost 80% of the time during this season. An option scheme seems to lend itself to the relatively undersized but smart officers-to-be that play for the service academies.
Would it work for oversized-but-smart? That's what Denver is doing with fullback-sized Tim Tebow; a cute take on l'affair Tebow casts him as the Tortoise chasing down Air Hare, getting encouragement from a fox named John. Part of the flak surrounding Tebow is his in-your-face evangelicalness, which gets the more libertine wing of fandom rooting for the sinners. But the bigger part is Tebow's heterodoxy from conventional NFL quarterbacking, that a option-based system can't work in the NFL; a quarterback isn't built to take the punishment of oversized DL and LBs that patrol the other side of an NFL line.
You can have great quarterbacks who can run (Tebow's front office boss John Elway was at his most dangerous on the move), but a run-first QB is heresy to conventional NFL wisdom. However, the heterodox Broncos are 5-1 with Tebow running the spread option.
The Broncos get the Bears today, which brings to mind an interesting point of football history. In 1960, San Francisco introduced the shotgun to the NFL as a running offense; they ditched immobile pocket-passing Y.A. Tittle to the Giants as they installed the system full-time in 1961. They did great with this new offense until they ran into the Bears and their veteran owner-coach George Halas. Halas went back to the birth of the NFL, having run a Jim Thorpe fumble back for the longest pickup-six in league history for decades.
Halas saw that the shotgun was a revamped single-wing from the 20s and 30s and got out his old defensive playbooks from that era before the QB-under-center T formation became the norm. Chicago shut down the 49ers and the shotgun went the way of the dodo for a decade until the Cowboys reintroduced it as a passing-down formation.
The modern post-Cowboys shotgun has become standard, but the 21st century college-style spread-option out of the shotgun has yet to get to the NFL in any quantity until now. The guard may be changing, but the Bears might look to Papa Bear Halas for inspiration to make Sir Charles' dream come true.
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