Playing Not to Lose

Pointed threats they bluff with scorn

Suicide remarks are torn,

From the fool's gold mouthpiece, the hollow horn

Plays wasted words, proves to warn

That he not busy being born is busy dying.

-Bob Dylan, It's Alright Ma (I'm only Bleeding)

So let's talk football, at least to start.  On Monday night Alabama and Georgia played in the National Championship of college football.  Despite the fact that I had very little rooting interest in this game other than a vague desire for someone besides Alabama to win, I stayed up until midnight to watch the thing, which took overtime to come to a decision.  The first half looked promising for my vague hope.  Georgia was up at halftime, 13-7, not a huge lead but the game looked like it was going to be a defensive slug fest, and Georgia was well equipped to grind out the clock with an impressive stable of running backs and a typical SEC offensive line of men who ought to all just be named "Bubba."

But they were playing against Nick Saban, who did something at halftime that no one expected: he switched quarterbacks from Jalen Hurts (who had been the starter and played every meaningful down of the season) to Tua Tagovailoa, a true freshman from Hawaii (hereafter simply referred to as Tua). Hurts was the horse that Alabama rode all the way to the championship, a running quarterback who was good at throwing little dunk passes and picking his way down the field.  Alabama has a reputation, going back to before the Saban years of being the sort of team that grinds you down with their size and strength rather than dazzles you with their skill.  Alabama sends a lot of linemen and running backs to the NFL, and only the occasional QB or wide receiver. Hurts fits that scheme, if he is drafted it will probably be as a WR or RB. Tua, however, is a different story, he is a thrower, and by that I mean someone who is preternaturally gifted at slinging that oblong thing we call a football all over the yard.  He looked like a kid (the Hawaiian features made him look even younger than he is), everyone watching wondered what in the world Tricky Nicky could be thinking. It seemed crazy, like the thing no one would do in their right mind, unless Hurts was hurt.

Nick Saban, like many great coaches (Greg Popovich, Bill Belichick, Mike Kryzewski), has this ability to seem like a dull, grumpy, pessimist, but then he comes out with a move like this.  If it didn't work, it would have been madness, but it worked.  Tua had one thing that Hurts did not, the ability to throw the ball down the field (really well as it turned out).  The freshman didn't come in and play flawless football either, he made some pretty predictable mistakes, he took some risks he shouldn't, but he did something truly crucial: he gave Georgia something they were not prepared to handle.

Georgia had come loaded for the typical Alabama assault, Kirby Smart used to work for Nick Saban, he knew the drill and how this was going to look.  He knew that he was going to have to defend the run and the short pass, and so he prepped his team, coached his team, and had them executing well enough to win, until Saban flipped the script.  As soon as Tua took the lid off the defense it was pretty clear that Georgia was going to lose, even when they were up 20-13, I could tell they were doomed, somehow someway.  Alabama had evolved and they did not.  It took overtime to do it, but the decisive plays in that OT were paradigmatic of the whole thing, Georgia played it conservative, kicked their field goal and then Tua came out and got sacked on the first play and threw a beautiful touchdown on the second, game over.  Nick Saban is a genius.

The decision that Saban made at halftime could have gone horribly wrong.  Tua could have come out and thrown interceptions, gotten overwhelmed by the moment and the fact that at 19 he is really just a kid and playing against grown men.  Saban though, knew how to put that kid in the right place at the right time to do something remarkable.  Part of the genius of this move was that people had seen so little of Tua, they maybe only knew that he was a gifted player in High School, after all, you don't get recruited to Alabama from Hawaii unless you're pretty special, and you don't go to Alabama from Hawaii unless you figure you've got a shot at playing there.  That last pass of the game was a perfect illustration of the thing that Tua does so very well, a long throw that hit the receiver in stride, something Hurts just did not seem able to do, and something that Georgia had obviously not considered to be a possibility.

Saban and Alabama are, in most ways, a definitively conservative system: run the ball, play defense, grind it out. But here's the thing that we can learn from this: sometimes conservative isn't going to work and you need to learn how to adapt.  This is true in politics and it is true in the world of the church.  When conservatism stops working you need to be able to change, and change is risky and can seem crazy, until it works.  As a fan of the Philadelphia Eagles phan, I lived through the recent coaching debacle that was Chip Kelly, who had a radical plan about how to play fast and sling the ball all over, pretty much the opposite of Alabama.  As a college coach at Oregon, Kelly's system had been revolutionary and exciting, but he notably did not manage to unseat the Alabama's of the world.  In the pros, his first couple years were thrilling, the Eagles scored lots of points and flashed the idea that this might just work, except it didn't, teams caught on to the shenanigans and then the Birds were a failed gimmick.  If Saban had come into the game with Tua at QB this thing would have gone differently, Georgia was a good enough team to beat Alabama from a talent perspective, but they weren't good enough to overcome the paradigm shift that happened at halftime.

The cycle of things is that innovation happens to address a challenge.  If innovation works, it tends to become entrenched as the status quo.  Challenges to the status quo arise and innovation is necessary again.  The problem is that the status quo can sometime exert a powerful inertial force on innovation (believe me church is the poster child for this problem). Fear of trying something radical and risk averse thinking are sometimes simply too much to overcome (sorry Dawgs).  The genius of what Saban did was that no sane person (Kirby Smart) would have ever expected him to do it, so even if he was aware that Saban had a gunslinger like Tua in his stable, he simply didn't prepare for him to be deployed.

The challenge is to try a new thing, sometimes a shocking new thing, while understanding your roots. Honestly, if Alabama's defense hadn't stepped up and pretty much shut down Georgia at the end of the game Tua would have been chasing ghosts.  Alabama's core identity as a team that grinds you down physically was still there, Georgia started to look tired, started missing tackles and breaking coverage schemes. The uncertainty and fear that came upon the Bulldogs was pretty clear, they started playing not to lose, and that was what doomed them before they even went to overtime.

I think since we have invested so much in the games we play we ought to learn the lessons they have have to teach us.

My eyes collide head on with stuffed

Graveyards, false gods, I scuff

At pettiness which plays so rough,

Walk upside-down inside handcuffs

Kick my legs to crash it off

 Say, "Okay, I've had enough, what else can you show me?"