US Presswire
con·serv·a·tive [kuhn-sur-vuh-tiv] adjective
1. disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.
2.traditional in style or manner; avoiding novelty or showiness: conservative suit.
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Alabama football represents one side of a split in the current thinking on the direction of the sport. The split involves the age-old argument of progress vs. tradition; of old vs. new. In an age of Honey Boo-Boo, Alabama football is Masterpiece Theatre.
On one side of the ledger are teams like the Oregon Ducks, a program that changes uniforms with the same frequency a teenage girl changes her mind. The Ducks have made a tradition of having no tradition; of recruiting small, fleet athletes and sending them flying all over the field in a frenetic spread offense that leaves opponents gasping and grasping at air. Oregon outruns and outscores its opponents, racking up style points on the scoreboard and on the Nike fashion designers’ drawing boards.
Plenty of schools are embracing this new path. Louisiana Tech has cracked the Top 25 with gaudy passing numbers, and head coach Tony Franklin isn’t shy about taking on Nick Saban in the debate over which philosophy is better. As we noted Tuesday, Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy still holds a grudge over a cloud-of-dust team getting a shot at the title over his Greatest Show on Dirt.
The trend toward high-octane offense tracks with another trend in college football best embodied by the aforementioned Quack Attack; the single-use, attention-grabbing uniform. Nothing holds the attention of those East Coast pollsters staying up late to watch the Ducks like chrome helmets.
On the other side of the divide are teams like Alabama. With the exception of a few nods to modernization of safety equipment and more advanced cloth blends, the Crimson Tide are wearing basically the same uniform design they were in the 1950s.
Also stuck in the sock-hop days is the strategy employed by the Tide’s head coach; clock control, ground-and-pound offense, along with stifling defense that keeps the opposing team in front of you and keeps the scores in the single digits.
It’s boring to the short-attention crowd. It’s not trendy or flashy, or prone to jack up individual statistics in pursuit of a high draft selection and a nice signing bonus. What it is, is wildly successful when the last game of the season is played.
Sports journalists jockey to present this dichotomy in new ways; the hidebound South vs. the progressive Northwest; East Coast vs. West Coast; the past vs. the future. There’s the charge of an SEC bias among the pollsters. There are even those that bring race into the matter, the way we bring race into every discussion in this country.
But Louisiana Tech’s Franklin hit on the truth in his attempts to garner press time by keeping Saban’s name in his mouth.
“Obviously if you can line up and you’ve got better players than everybody else and play great defense and eat clock and win as many games as you can, that’s a great way of playing football, too. The problem is, 95 percent of us don’t have that type of talent to do that. … That’s the trap that Coach Saban would want everybody to fall into because, the reality of it is, he’s going to have better players most of the time.”
Franklin admits there is only so much talent to go around, and that an aerial attack is one way to counteract a lack of depth and of players that can run the kind of schemes Saban employs.
There are 120 FBS football schools in the United States, all trying to field a team that not only wins games, but also creates fan interest, thereby generating revenue. Even in a world of 24-hour per day sports coverage, teams are competing for a finite pool of TV dollars and fan attention, and need flash to get their share. it’s not really about whether passing is better than running or old school is better than what’s new; it’s about market share.
Unless and until Oregon and Alabama match up on the field, they are products competing for your consumption. Some people like flash while others like substance, and it’s a fun debate to have in the meantime.
Perhaps a showdown in Miami will settle the argument.
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