Yeah, “getting lucky” didn’t convey my thought properly.
When someone is passing on you, they’re beating you. When someone is running on you, they’re beating you up.
Yes most of Sports commentary is nonsense and context dependent. Plays that succeed are genius and ones that fail are damning mistakes. That said, “establishing the run” makes sense because you need to keep that threat alive to keep more players up close to make it so your receivers have less coverage. The inverse is technically true but makes less sense to point out because:
- It’s mostly a passing league these days.
- Throwing and catching the ball well are arguably more skill intensive.
I’ve been thinking about this more since my last post.
It occurred to me that the real goal of “establishing the run” (or pass) boils down to gaining the initiative - who’s reacting to who in a strategic football sense.
By that I mean that if a team can establish either the pass or run as *consistently *successful, then the defense is more or less on their heels trying to stop that, while still trying to defend against other types of plays. As you can imagine, doing that successfully is easier said than done.
Similarly, if the offense can’t get anything going consistently, then the defense is effectively dictating how the game goes while they’re on the field.
The reason that the run might be preferable is because it’s physically more demanding, it’s less risky in that a “failed” run play on an established run game is usuallly a smaller than expected gain, while a failed pass play is 0 or worse, and probably most importantly, you can eat the clock like nobody’s business.
My alma mater (Texas A&M) was the master of this back in the 1990s. We’d grind out 20 play drives that would take most of a quarter, and we’d score a touchdown. Then the defense (one of the top flight Div-1 defenses of its era) would shut down the other team quickly, and the offense would come out and grind out another long, grueling drive. We won a lot, but we were spectacularly unspectacular in our play style.
I’ll always remember the Giants Superbowl win over the Bills in 1990 – my first year as a football fan (and Giants fan…good time to start!) – where the entire game plan revolved around long, sustained, clock-killing drives to keep the lethal K-Gun offense of the Bills sitting on the bench.
For that game, establishing the run was of paramount importance, and they did that in spades: 39 rushes for 172 yards, resulting in 40:33 time of possession. (!)
I was thrilled to hear Greg Jennings say that both teams need to establish the run to set up the pass–all of 1:30 into yesterday’s Panthers/Falcons game.