Just how good will the Blue be? Don’t ask me

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/07/2010 (5637 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Whenever I am asked in the off-season or at the onset of training camp to predict the success of the football team I’m on, I always grimace and try to defer the answer until the regular season begins. No matter how competent the schemes may be that you are working with and how athletic and specialized the personnel may be, you just can’t tell what you have in your locker-room until the lights go on for real for the first time and everything and everyone is unleashed under meaningful conditions.

The reason that few can pick paper champions in football with any regularity is part of the peculiarity of the sport. With 24 starters on offence and defence, you would think you could just plug in the best 24 players at their respective positions and you would win a lot of football games, but that isn’t necessarily so because of all the intangibles.

Players need to be able to communicate well with each other on the football field — a skill that is often overlooked. They need to complement one another and anticipate what each will do. They have to trust one another to be responsible to fulfil their assignments on any of a hundred different plays and they sometimes need to swallow their pride and submit or compromise to what is in the best interest of the group. This is why a collection of 24 players that are well-regimented in the concept of teamwork and uniformity will beat a group of 24 individual all stars any day of the week.

Further complicating the estimation of unproven teams from the off-season to the regular season is how these players fit into their respective offences and defences. You can have the most effective offensive scheme in the league and the stingiest defensive blueprint this side of the Berlin Wall, but if you have the wrong players in the wrong places and are not using their talents effectively, your schemes will be limited or negated.

Additionally, even at the most game-realistic, up-tempo and fast-paced practices, the conditions are still not comparable to what happens in a game. You can scream "full-speed, full-contact" in practice until your face turns blue but it will still not come close to game speed. Throw in varying numbers of rookies that often do not even resemble themselves, good, bad, or ugly when the whistle blows for real, and even the longest of training camps will not provide good insight to regular-season success.

So it is the compilation of these three factors that makes guesswork in the off-season much more hit-and-miss than anyone realizes, and why many of us like to save our opinions until we can watch it on film against verifiable opponents under verifiable conditions.

But now that we have beaten a credible opponent at home, scored 49 points and given up 29, what can we infer that we didn’t know in the pre-season? Probably not as much as you would hope. Yes, it would be fair to say that after one game we have effective offensive and defensive schemes at our disposal and currently have enough pieces and players in the right places to operate them to a degree of success, but it was still only one game.

One game cannot tell you the identity of an offence or defence. One game cannot tell you how your players and playbooks will match up against seven other opponents and how durable they will be. One game cannot tell you how injuries and adverse situations will affect the team, and most importantly, one game does not tell you whether your team can or will be consistent, week in and week out. I would say it takes at least to the quarter-mark of an 18-game schedule to fill in all the blanks about a franchise that has undergone a significant overhaul, and to determine what the personality and characteristics of it will be for the stretch run. Let’s just hope it’s as promising as it seems right now.

Doug Brown, always a hard-hitting defensive lineman and frequently a hard-hitting columnist, appears Tuesdays in the Free Press.