College football isn’t pro football, and vice-versa. They aren’t the same thing. Yet, we have seen college concepts flow into the pro game more and more in recent years.
Kliff Kingsbury has been hired as an NFL head coach. The Tennessee Titans used the wildcat multiple times in the playoffs and threw touchdown passes from that formation in the playoffs. The Baltimore Ravens and Carolina Panthers trusted the running ability of gifted quarterbacks, Lamar Jackson and Cam Newton, to produce great regular seasons. Baltimore went 14-2 this past season. The 2015 Panthers went 15-1 and made the Super Bowl.
Patrick Mahomes came from the air raid at Texas Tech to become a genuine NFL superstar. He has won an NFL MVP Award and is poised to collect more in the future. He just broke a 50-year Super Bowl drought for the Kansas City Chiefs.
We have also just seen Joe Brady move from the New Orleans Saints to LSU to win a national championship, and then go back to the NFL with the Carolina Panthers as the league’s youngest offensive coordinator under a head coach, Matt Rhule, who has spent the past decade coaching various college teams.
There will always be huge and defining differences between the college game and the pro game, but the notion that college offenses are gimmicky or “can’t work in the pros” is an old, outdated notion today. Innovation is innovation, and recent years clearly show that adopting concepts prevalent in college doesn’t hamper an NFL offense; if anything, such openness improves NFL offenses. Having the right personnel is the true challenge.
With all of this in mind, as the lines between the NFL and college football become more permeable, not less, what can (should?) Wisconsin football learn from the Super Bowl LIV matchup of the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs? Football people of all kinds, at various levels, ought to study why NFL teams succeed or fail. What is the lesson of this season’s pair of supremely successful teams?
For Wisconsin, at least, the lesson is that there is more than one way to achieve a goal and attain greatness.
Yes, Wisconsin has an identity, a Plan A. That Plan A is to kick the snot out of the opposing team, punishing it with physical football which displays stamina and staying power. Wisconsin believes in strength and consistency, executing simple plays reliably and repeatedly, to wear down the opposition and break its will over 60 full minutes. It’s a great Plan A. The formula works. The results in the Barry Alvarez era under several coaches speak for themselves.
Yet, as we have discussed in previous columns over the past few weeks, the many towering feats over the past 30 years of Barry Alvarez football (as coach or as athletic director) in Madison have not led to a single appearance in a national championship game or (more recently) a College Football Playoff semifinal.
None of this means Wisconsin football is failing to meet its reasonable standards. Failing to make the playoff is a genuine FAILURE of a program at Ohio State, but not Wisconsin. For the Badgers, the failure to win the Big Ten West and reach a good January bowl game is a true failure to meet reasonable standards. Let’s not pretend Wisconsin and Ohio State have the same standards, or should be judged the same. They don’t have the same standards, and they shouldn’t. Wisconsin football IS succeeding in a broader sense.
The point of mentioning that UW hasn’t yet risen to the national championship/playoff stage is simply to note that there IS a higher plateau this program can reach. The program is succeeding, but it is succeeding as a second-tier program. Ohio State is a first-tier program.
If this Super Bowl has a lesson to convey to Wisconsin, then, it is that if the Badgers want to reach the next level and become an Ohio State-quality program, they can’t just have a Plan A. Having a Plan A and a Plan B, with players who can implement both plans, not merely one, is necessary to get to the top.
Start with the San Francisco 49ers. This is the team cut from Wisconsin-style cloth. The Niners knock the stuffing out of opponents. They are nasty, physical, and overpowering. The ability to dominate an opponent without passing the ball very much is the Wisconsin dream. The 49ers lived that dream against the Green Bay Packers. They also dominated the Minnesota Vikings with their defense. The Niners imposed their Plan A, and also got lucky that they never faced the New Orleans Saints or Seattle Seahawks, their tougher NFC matchups. They didn’t need their Plan B very often in 2019, but when they had to use it, they had it ready.
See their 48-46 win in New Orleans against the Saints.
Had the 49ers lost that game, New Orleans would have been the top seed in the NFC. The 49ers would have had to play a wild card game and go on the road. The script would have been flipped in the NFC. On a day when San Francisco’s defense wasn’t on its game, Jimmy Garoppolo was able to win a shootout against Drew Brees in the Superdome.
Most of the season, Plan A worked, but when the 49ers needed Plan B, it was there.
Now, look at the Chiefs. Kansas City did not overpower its opponents. It outscored them. The Chiefs trailed by 10 or more points in both of their AFC postseason victories. They did play a strong smashmouth second half against the Titans this past Sunday, but they couldn’t have played that way if they hadn’t first dug out of two separate 10-point deficits: 10-0 and 17-7.
The Chiefs had to score big to win their playoff games. Their defense was not imposing. Unlike the Ravens, they had a passing game they could lean on with receivers and skill people who were supremely skilled. The Chiefs manifested the alternate stylistic path to the Super Bowl, cutting against the NFL’s generally conservative culture. The Chiefs are the spiritual successors of the Bill Walsh 49ers, the 1999 “Greatest Show On Turf” St. Louis Rams, the 2006 Peyton Manning Colts, and other NFL teams which — while certainly able to hold their own in the trenches — won less with brute force and more with devastating finesse.
The 49ers are the Plan A brawlers who punch you in the face like Mike Tyson and knock you out right away with no pretense. Yet, they had the Plan B when they were pushed by a strong fighter in that road game against the Saints.
The Chiefs are the Plan B team which used an alternative fighting style and won with a combination of speed and skill. Yet, once they erased scoreboard deficits in their two playoff games, they were able to show they could get in the mud and physically subdue their opponents in a Plan A fashion.
Two different types of teams are in Super Bowl LIV, and they showed two different ways to get there. Most of all, though, the 49ers and Chiefs were multi-dimensional. One way of doing things did most of the work for them, but other ways of proceeding were needed at certain times, and both teams were able to display those added characteristics when they had to.
Wisconsin football has its Plan A. It works. It is tested. It is true. Developing more Plan B coping skills is where the Badgers need to improve… if making a playoff semifinal is a legitimate goal in the future.