ARE FOOTBALL PLAYERS JUST MEATHEADS?

January 3, 2014

What Makes a Football Player Smart?

Posted by Nicholas Dawidoff

 

Winning certainly requires imposing your athletic will on an opponent; that part of the game is easy to see. Yet victories also redound to players who can outthink their adversaries. Because there are so few football games in a season, football players generally don’t learn about members of other teams by playing against them, the way baseball and basketball players do. Until they face another team—and, in a given year, they won’t see most of those outside their own division—N.F.L. players are unlikely even to be able to name most of its members. Football players must master the opposition conceptually. In addition to the raw speed and strength that professional football requires, the game involves more mental preparation than any other team sport. In developing a game plan, coaches typically break down everything that happened in the opponent’s past four games to granular levels of “tendencies”—down, distance (to a first down), field position, and time remaining on the game clock. Once assembled, this research fills many pages of the game-plan binders players are given on Wednesday to prepare them for Sunday. (Teams have also begun to use iPads.) The binders are dense with intricate drawings and written instructions. They are often as thick as a left tackle’s fist.
The crucial portion of the game plan is a selection of new plays and modifications to old ones the coaches have created for the current opponent. N.F.L. coaches are deft and obsessive probers of game film; they live to devise. The problem is that there’s a limit to how much fresh information most players can absorb before each Sunday. Marv Levy, who coached the Buffalo Bills to four consecutive Super Bowls in the early nineties, told me he always fell back on something the legendary Notre Dame coaching innovator Knute Rockne once said: “I never ask if a player has the will to win. I ask if he has the will to prepare.”