In their Sunday night loss to the Saints, the Buccaneers ran the ball just five times, which set a modern NFL record for the fewest carries by any team in a single game. The primary reason for this was the Saints’ ability to put up all kinds of point on Tampa Bay’s formerly great defense — New Orleans had a 31-0 halftime lead, so at that point, it was going to be about Tom Brady throwing the ball. That didn’t go well, either, as Brady completed 22 of 38 passes for 209 yards, no touchdowns, and three interceptions. Ronald Jones had three carries for nine yards, Leonard Fournette had one carry for zero yards, and backup quarterback Blaine Gabbert was credited with a rushing attempt, but that was actually a kneeldown at the end of the game.
Thus, the three teams that had six rushing attempts in a game — the 2004 Patriots against the Steelers, the 2006 Cardinals against the Vikings, and the 2018 Vikings against the Bills — find themselves relegated to second place in the oddities wing of the league’s history books.
As far as the team with the most rushing attempts in a single game, you’d have to go back to the 1978 Kansas City Chiefs. Now-Hall of Fame coach Marv Levy was in his first year with a team that had gone 2-12 the season before, and he was willing to try anything to get his offense going. Given his quarterback rotation of Mike Livingston and Tony Adams, that was going to involve running the ball.
A lot.
Levy had used the old-school Wing-T at New Mexico in the late 1950s and at the University of California in the early 1960s, but stayed away from it during his time in the Canadian Football League because in the CFL, you only have three downs. But when he became the Chiefs’ head coach, he decided to revise the formation, which includes three running backs: A traditional fullback and halfback, and a “wingback,” a running back who lines up just behind the formation and outside of the tight end. There are different iterations, but that’s the basic idea.
The Chiefs opened their 1978 season against the Bengals in Cincinnati, and it wasn’t as if the Wing-T was a surprise — Kansas City had run it in the preseason, and the Bengals, led by head coach Bill Johnson (who Paul Brown picked to be the team’s head coach over his former offensive coordinator, a guy named Bill Walsh), had studied to try and figure out how to stop it.
Whatever the Bengals tried didn’t work. The Chiefs won, 24-23, running the ball an astonishing 69 times for 267 yards, 26 first downs, and three touchdowns. The Chiefs possessed the ball for 41 minutes and 46 seconds.
Johnson exploded into profanities after the game when asked about the physical nature of the Chiefs’ run concepts, and he said that the Bengals saw the Wing-T coming, but he certainly had no answers for it on the field.
“I’m no defensive expert,” Bengals center Bob Johnson said after the game, via the Kansas City Star, “but it looks to me like their offense was really cleverly conceived. If I was a betting man, I would have lost my bankroll on this game. This just can’t be what our team should be. It was a nightmare.”
“They just came right at us,” Cincinnati middle linebacker Glenn Cameron said. “They were always shifting, and we didn’t shift our defense. We didn’t adjust until the second half, and then, it was too late.”
Levy understood the limitations of the Wing-T, and knew it wasn’t the kind of thing that was going to take over the NFL. It was more like the Wildcat in 2008 — a nice ancillary idea that would work until somebody figured it out. Sweeps and traps were the order of the day, and it was the uniqueness of the concept in the era that gave Levy’s team an advantage — however long it lasted.
“I liked the Wing-T because I knew it, and I feel there is more deception to it,” Levy said. “There are also disadvantages. You don’t have a wide receiver, you don’t spread the field, and they say you can’t come from behind with it. Personnel didn’t have much to do with choosing the Wing-T. You do some unsound things when you try to adapt your offense to your personnel.”
The Chiefs played the Houston Oilers in Week 2, and the Oilers were very aware of the threat of the Wing-T, though as Hall of Fame defensive end Elvin Bethea said, he hadn’t seen anybody running it since he was in high school.
“We’re not going to be like Cincinnati and stay in the same defense all the time, Houston head coach Bum Philips said leading up to the game. “We’re going to make adjustments… They move on the ground and control the ball. Marv has a heck of a plan. I hate to play a guy who believes in something. I’d rather play somebody who bounces around a lot.”
The Oilers beat the Chiefs 20-17, but Kansas City ran the ball 41 times for 261 yards and two touchdowns. One way Houston countered that was to run 41 times as well for 179 yards and two touchdowns. Such was life in the NFL in the 1970s. For the season, the 4-12 Chiefs ran 663 times (second in the league) for 2,986 yards (second in the league) with a 4.5 yards per carry average (second in the league) and 19 rushing touchdowns (fifth in the league. Their passing game was horrid, and their defense was opportunistic but leaky, but the 1978 Chiefs sure could run the damn ball.
Teams don’t really use the Wing-T anymore, though the 2019 Chiefs did explore a variant of the Single Wing in Super Bowl LIV.
Chiefs really took a play Michigan ran in the 1948 Rose Bowl 😯 @Chiefs pic.twitter.com/VE0gvp0VQV
— The Checkdown (@thecheckdown) February 3, 2020
Marv Levy would be proud!
