On Taking the Wind

Marty Mornhinweg is not the worst head coach in NFL history.

Deadspin's Drew Magary and Dom Cosentino asserted the opposite late last week, based partly on Mornhinweg's 5-27 record as head coach, but mostly on the HILARIOUS STUPIDITY of taking the wind in overtime.

The article makes a lot of cogent points about the NFL having moved beyond coaches getting "hired to be fired," straight into a swirling vortex of hiring blatantly unqualified candidates to turn around talentless rosters, and poleaxing them if they don't immediately succeed.

As I've written before, trying to catch "lightning in a bottle" is the wrong way to hire a coach. As often as not, the young coach who pretends to have the NFL figured out is found out. (see: McDaniels, Josh).

Mornhinweg, in a way, was the model for this particular way to fail. Not only was he not an experienced NFL head coach, the 38-year-old had never been a head coach at any level. He'd been calling plays under Steve Mariucci in San Francisco for only two years, and the 49ers were 10-22 over that span.

Mornhinweg was hired to be fired, quite literally. As rumor had it, Matt Millen's relationship with Mooch was part of the reason the Ford family entrusted the franchise to Millen. Mornhinweg was basically there to install Mariucci's flavor of the Bill Walsh offense and keep Mooch's seat warm.

On December 31st, 2002, Millen announced that the Lions would be retaining Mornhinweg for a third season. Then Mariucci was unexpectedly let go by the 49ers. Three weeks after the public vote of confidence Mornhinweg was awkwardly terminated; a week after that the prodigal Yooper returned.

Marty Mornhinweg was then, and is now, a gifted offensive coach with a bright future. Mornhinweg did a lot of learning on the job, which included a contrived move-for-move reenactment of a Mike Holmgren training camp tirade-and-motorcycle-peel-out. Lions veterans profoundly did not buy it.

One thing Mornhinweg got right, though—or at least, did not get as wrong as everyone thinks—was taking the wind on that fateful day.

Now-defunct site Football Commentary did a beautiful win-probability analysis of the decision back in 2004. I can't find anything today that backs this assertion up, but my memory is that all 34 points scored in regulation that day had been scored with the wind.

I've talked and written many times about football's hilariously risk-averse culture, wherein even the game's greatest coach is pilloried for maximizing win probability instead of "playing the percentages" when he doesn't get a result.

In reality, Mornhinweg's mistake was accepting a holding call on a 3rd-and-8 incompletion that would have forced the Bears to send Paul Edinger out for a 42-yard kick into the hellacious wind—or even wave the white flag and send out Brad Maynard to punt it away. Had the Lions gotten the victory with that decision, Mornhinweg's outside-the-box decision would have been lauded as crazy-like-a-fox, instead of idiotic.

[Ed.- Per request, I used the Advanced NFL Stats WP calculator to judge this decision. The Bears had a 0.68 WP at 4th-and-8 from the 35, and an 0.62 WP at 3rd-and-18 from the 45. However, this is based on modeled leaguewide historical expectations, and wind into the teeth of which none could score is certainly unexpected.]

Continuing to shame Mornhinweg over that call is stupid and destructive and misses the point: Marty Mornhinweg was a great position coach, hired as a Plan D, and put into an impossible situation. 

Mornhinweg took over a not-talented-enough roster filled with veterans not much younger than he was, a brand-new front office with no idea what they were doing, got saddled with a No. 3 overall rookie quarterback he wanted nothing to do with, then was forced to lie through gritted teeth that he was completely on board hitching his career to Joey Harrington.

Mornhinweg made a lot of mistakes, but taking the wind wasn't one of them. Unlike Rich Kotite or Dennis Erickson or many of the others on the list, Mornhinweg has proven he's a quality NFL coach—and before long, will get another head-coaching gig.

Let's just hope he stays away from motorcycles.

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The NFL Owner Liberation Army

I don’t know if you’ve heard (sarcasm), but the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals granted the owners a full stay of Judge Nelson’s enjoinder of the lockout.

I started out completely neutral in this whole mess; as many have since said, I declared myself “on the side of the fans.”  But as I dug deeper and deeper into the issues, I discovered that the league’s behavior has been, frankly, despicable. Unable to resolve their own differences on revenue sharing, the owners have spent the last four years trying to bring about this day: a judicially-enforced lockout that could last into the season, so they can exert maximum leverage on players. Their goals: to build more ridiculous billion-dollar stadiums, to play more games unnecessarily, to put franchises on other continents, and to bleed every single person on Earth for every cent they’ve got, everything else be damned. That’s what they mean when they say “grow the game,” people.

More interested, intelligent, initially neutral observers have been coming around to my way of thinking. Here's an excellent piece by Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post:

Should you find yourself drifting to the side of the players in the NFL labor dispute, it doesn’t mean you’ve gone all communist. Some fans may feel that to support the players is anti-capitalist, a little too May Day. But there is the spirit of free enterprise, and then there is the spirit with which NFL owners tend to do business. They aren’t at all the same thing.

What’s so American about gouging, price-fixing, and frankly, sucking the life out of fans?

It's an honest question to ask--and Jenkins' investigation into the answer is intelligent, well-informed, and balanced. At least half jokingly (though partly seriously) Tony Kornhieser called her piece "shrew-like" and "hysterical" during a radio show. But if Kornheiser couldn’t have made that crack with a straight face if he’d read Drew Magary of Deadspin fame setting “The Bizarre Cult of Pro-Owner Fanboys” of Pro Football Talk’s readership on blast:

It's like a group of people went directly to their computers after walking out of a screening of Atlas Shrugged. You can find retarded commenters at virtually any Internet forum (why, just scroll down!), but the idea that there are people out there who would like to see the owners succeed in PREVENTING THE PLAYING OF ACTUAL NFL GAMES to spite NFL players strikes me as … what's the word? Oh, right. F***ING INSANE.

[. . .] There's a distinctly political turn to much of these lockout arguments among fans. I guess if you think the players are right (and I do), that makes you a dirty liberal and there can't possibly be a decent case to be made. All unions are bad, which means the NFL players are ungrateful and lazy and deserve to be booted out on their ass because the owners are the beginning and end of why the NFL is successful.

It’s not just the ridiculous comments that are being made over there, or the sheer volume by which pro-owner comments outweigh pro-player ones. PFT has an upvote/downvote system, and they REALLY tell the tale. Check the comments (and votes) on these PFT posts. My favorite, though, is a post called “More Misplaced Rhetoric From De Smith,” which is Florio ripping DeMaurice Smith for his characterization of the state of affairs as the NFL “suing not to play.” The NFL commentariat almost unanimously hailed this post as Florio’s first fair and balanced article on the issue:

theangryrob says:May 18, 2011 9:08 AM

I’m having a hard time rationalizing it, but I kind of thought this was a great, even handed post. I’m strangely pleased and confused at the same time.

So, uh, nice work :D

232 upvotes, 5 downvotes    [Ed.--as of the time of this post]

Look, in a vacuum, there’s no question whose side the fans’ interests align with. The players are the ones we pay to see. The players are the ones whose jerseys we buy. The players are the ones who we see on TV, endorsing products we buy ‘cuz we love them. The players are the ones who are putting their bodies on the line, sacrificing their joints, their backs, their necks, and maybe even their long-term mental health for our entertainment. The players are the ones who come from the same places we come from—neighborhoods, high schools, colleges—and who, within a few years, either come back to those places, or put down roots in whichever city they played.

What is it that makes so many fans root so hard for the owners, then? Men or women, who typically inherited either the team itself, a business empire, a personal fortune, or any combination of the above? Why is it that working fans with mortgage payments and credit card debt are gleefully cheering for the players to be crushed by those same bills as their bosses withhold paychecks? What kind of bizarre Stockholm Syndrome is at work, here?

That’s what’s really happening here: fans are sympathizing with their captors. We’re paying $20 to park, $70 or so a head to get in the door, $7 for hot dogs, $8 for beer, $4 for water we’re not given a cap to so our kids can spill it, and uncountable dollars in jerseys, shirts, pennants, stickers, garden gnomes and other ridiculous merch, and at the end of the day these fans sneer at the players on the field and say “YOU MAKE ENOUGH MONEY! CAVE INTO THE POOR OWNERS! THEIR PROFITS AREN’T GROWING AS FAST AS THEY’D LIKE ANYMORE!” No doubt, when the lockout ends, all these fans will be happily thanking the benevolent owners—and lantern-jawed protector of the game, Commissioner Goodell—for ending they started to begin with.

Let me post-script all this with a few caveats. I do see the last deal as being player-friendly, and I do believe there’s room for fair concessions on both sides. TLiW (and elsewhere) commenter LineBusy has an interesting take exploring just that; you should read it. I do think both sides have grossly disrespected the fans by not resolving this before the expiry of the old CBA; both sides have been planning for THIS day for so long they’ve failed to stop it. However, one side is working men speaking plainly and truthfully about protecting their current and future interests, and the other side is a bunch of fabulously wealthy people in control of one of the most monstrously profitable industries in the world, strangling the golden goose while smiling and saying “We want football, too!”

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