|
|
This one will haunt him for as long as he'll be connected with football. Mike Martz has been called a misguided genius, an absent-minded professor, a mad scientist who practices a weird kind of football alchemy, using a formula that only he possesses. But he's never been called gutless. Until now.
That weird bit of strategy he pulled in the dying moments of regulation time Saturday against the Panthers, letting almost 40 seconds run off the clock after his guys had moved to the Carolina 15, did it for him. The explanations he offered for playing for the tying field goal and not going for the win were even worse. Feared a turnover. Worried his quarterback would throw a pick, etc. Gutless? I'm not so sure. Tickets
On the surface, his decision was almost impossible to understand. Given his history, his entire approach to the game, it's even more mystifying. Let's roll the clock back a few years. To Super Bowl XXXIV, Rams 23, Titans 16, Martz coaching the St. Louis offense. The Titans have scored twice in the fourth quarter to tie the game at 16. They've run 20 plays to the Rams' three snaps. The St. Louis defense is exhausted. There's a little more than two minutes left.
The Rams return
the kickoff to their own 27. They want to score, of course, but they've also
got to eat some clock, to give their defense some time to get itself together.
So what does Martz do? He goes for it all on one play -- and gets it. Kurt Warner
to Isaac Bruce for 73 yards and a touchdown, and now, with 1:54 left, that worn-out
Rams defense is on the field again, and the Titans are grinding, grinding, down
to the shadow of the Rams goal, and you know that if they tie the score and
the game goes into overtime the Rams will be in bad shape because their defense
is dragging so badly. But the game ends on the 1-yard line with Mike Jones'
tackle, and the Rams are Super Bowl champs and all that strategic yes-but stuff
is forgotten.
Except by me. I know enough not to start asking nagging questions amid all that
postgame euphoria, like some sour relative at the wedding party, but St. Louis
tight end Ernie Conwell was a guy I used to enjoy talking strategy with, so
I waited till I got him alone in the locker room and gave him my thoughts that
they might have won the game but what Martz did was totally unsound.
"Maybe so," Conwell said, "but you've got to understand what it means to have a guy like that calling your offense. He's bold and unorthodox. He's always looking to go for the jugular, no matter what the book says you should do. So pretty soon you adopt a killer mentality yourself, and you're bold out there. And that's what got us where we are."
How things change. Contrast that with the guy standing on the sidelines last Saturday, blandly watching the clock run down to :03, draining the very lifeblood out of his team. Emotionally, it was a terrible thing to do to his players. I have no confidence in you, he was telling them. I feel that you could screw it up. I won't let my QB throw a pass because it might get intercepted. I won't let my featured back run the ball because he might fumble.
Strategically it was loony, too, because his guys were working against a tired and demoralized Carolina defense that had just suffered through a 15-play drive and then had to take the field again because St. Louis recovered the onside kick. Four plays moved the ball 43 yards, down to the Panthers' 15. There was no pass rush, no life. This was a whipped team. The Rams didn't even have to throw, if Martz was so terrified of leaving it up to Marc Bulger. Marshall Faulk could have run the ball in. But they stood there, as the clock ticked down from 39 seconds, which was the time showing when Faulk was tackled, to 0:03. Unbelievable.
There were other weird things that Martz did in that game, plus an out-and-out screw-up, which came when most of them occur -- at the end of the first half.
The Rams had found a kind of rhythm in the second quarter, scoring field goals on two straight possessions. Then Carolina got off a drive of its own, and it finally ended when a third-down running play was stopped on the St. Louis 27, right after the two minute warning. The field-goal unit was on the way in, and Martz should have called time out and stopped the clock and given his offense plenty of time to get something on the board. But he let the clock run down from 1:54 to 1:12, and it was actually the Panthers who called time out, before they kicked the field goal.
When St. Louis got the ball after the kickoff, there were 58 seconds left, enough time for three meaningless plays.
Here's what I think Martz's problem is: I think he is a terrific game-planner and tactician, in the confines of his office. He can set up plays, design strategy -- do it all, as long as there's no immediate pressure. But I think that once the bell rings, he loses track of the world around him. Wheels go backward. Some fall off. Strange decisions are made. He becomes forgetful. Such things as the clock or down and distance or the behavior of the individuals on the field become blurred. Maybe he remembered that Bulger threw two bad picks in the fourth quarter, and that's the vision that he retains, to the exclusion of everything else.
Put Martz in a computer-football contest or in front of a game board and give him unlimited time to do his play calling and make his decisions, and I think he'd defeat any coach in the NFL. But in the whirling, thrashing frenzy of the arena I think he retreats into a strange, impenetrable world, with its own peculiar brand of logic. Gutless? No, I don't think so. Just distracted.