Fontes had taken over the Lions from Darryl Rogers,
which was like taking over Japan after Hiroshima.
The Lions were a sickly, offensively-challenged
platoon in 1988, when Rogers was given the ziggy in November and replaced with
Fontes, his defensive coordinator.
It was Bill Ford, the owner, who levied the stinging
indictment against Rogers after announcing his cashiering.
“We’re boring,” Ford complained to the media guys.
No one argued.
Fontes had five games with which to prove himself in
1988, the Lions 2-9 at the time of Rogers’ dismissal.
Fontes was saddled with
that tag of “interim,” which was usually code for “After the season, you’ll
never see this chump again.”
But that didn’t stop Fontes from trying his hardest
with his five-game contract.
He brought in former NFL quarterback Lynn Dickey to
work with the offense and impart his pass-happy wisdom to Lions starting signal
caller Rusty Hilger.
The Lions won two of their final five games, and
even though both wins were over awful Green Bay, the Lions played the very good
Bears very tough in Chicago, and it was all enough to show Ford that Fontes
didn’t need the interim label any longer.
Fontes returned Ford’s generosity with a big old
bear hug in front of the local TV cameras and ink-stained wretches.
Not long after being named the real coach of
the Lions, Fontes went to work on that whole “boring” thing that his owner
crabbed about in discussing Darryl Rogers.
First, Fontes drafted a running back, Barry Sanders
from Oklahoma State. As good as Barry was in college, no one could have
predicted the greatness that he would embody for the next 10 years.
His running back in place, Fontes went against NFL
form and decided that he would build an offense not necessarily around the
running game, but around the pass.
A strange idea, indeed, considering Fontes had the
best running back on any college campus in America set to don the Honolulu Blue
and Silver in 1989.
Undaunted, Fontes looked at the Houston Oilers, a
pretty good NFL team, and became enamored with the Oilers’ offense, which
placed one runner in the backfield, four receivers spread out, and which
eschewed a tight end.
Fontes, a defensive coach to the core, thought
through the prism of an opposing defensive coordinator. With someone as dynamic
as Sanders in the backfield, what would be nightmarish?
So Fontes decided to copy the Oilers’ pass-happy
offense, leaving Sanders to do his thing against defenses spread out to guard
against all those pass receivers.
They called it the Run-n-Shoot, and while Sanders
took care of the Run part, the Lions weren’t nearly as good at the Shoot.
Fontes had his receivers, but they weren’t exactly
Pro Bowl in quality, like the Oilers had in Houston. And Fontes’ quarterback,
rookie Rodney Peete, was no Warren Moon of Houston.
But Fontes tried. He did succeed on one point: the
Lions weren’t boring any longer. Peete and the other QB, Bob Gagliano, flung
the football all over the field, with various degrees of success. And Sanders
was a one-man highlight reel; never before did fans ooh and ahh over a
three-yard loss, as they did with Barry.
The Lions scored as never before, but their leaky defense
turned many games into shootouts. Still, the Lions made the playoffs four out
of five years between 1991 and 1995. They weren’t boring, that’s for sure.
The Lions ran various versions of the Run-n-Shoot
for most of Fontes’ tenure as Lions coach (1988-96). Not only were the Lions
not boring anymore, some folks even worried that they scored too fast,
thus not giving the defense time to catch its breath.
The Lions under Fontes had a supreme running back
and a few good receivers here and there but never could come up with “that”
quarterback, the same old refrain four decades running.
Today’s Lions are just a few weeks away from Opening
Sunday, 2012. They are the exact opposite of Fontes’ Barry Sanders teams.
The Lions of today are a premier passing unit, among
the best in the league. And they have more question marks at running back than
the Riddler’s costume.
In the Run-n-Shoot days of the 1990s, the Lions
tried to be a high octane passing team, sometimes at the expense of their best
weapon, Sanders.
If I was an opposing defensive coordinator back
then, I’d have looked to the heavens and said thank you every time Sanders
didn’t touch the football.
It’s called playing to your strength, no matter what
the Pro Football Handbook might say about striking a balance between running
and passing.
The football handbook people are wringing their
hands over this year’s Lions. They look at the running game and worry that it
can’t crank out enough yards to keep defenses honest.
Ha!
With Matthew Stafford throwing and Calvin Johnson
catching, plus all the other competent receivers on the roster, it really won’t
matter if the Lions run the football well or not.
The Lions’ fortunes, make no question, will ride on
Stafford’s golden arm and Johnson’s Velcro hands. They are the best QB/receiver
tandem in the NFL, bar none.
Why force feed a cache of questionable running backs
the football, just for the sake of laying claim to running and passing balance?
It makes no sense.
It makes no sense to suppress Stafford and Co.,
because great players make great plays, whether the other team is stacked to
stop it or not.
The Lions ought to play to their strength. They
ought not to worry so much about running the football.
In a perfect football world, you’d gain four yards
on a first down running play, all game long. But life isn’t perfect, and
neither is any football team.
The Wayne Fontes Detroit Lions force fed the
Run-n-Shoot when they didn’t really have the proper personnel, other than the
best running back on the planet.
The Lions of today would be foolish to run the
football for the sake of running it, when they possess a passer like Stafford
and receivers like Johnson, Nate Burleson, Titus Young and Brandon Pettigrew.
It makes no sense.
1 comment:
nice post
Post a Comment