… locating beauty and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to pattern … not a reduction at all, but—perversely—of expansion.
--David Foster Wallace, Infinite
Jest
One of the unique things about football as a spectator sport
is that its non-fluid pace of play offers constant strategic revelations.
Indeed, for the pattern-minded set, the pre-snap read is perhaps more exciting
than the play itself. The utilitarian roots of the game are hewn into language
to this day: offense and defense begin each down in formation and each play is its own collapse toward entropy.
For most football people, formation—the order—is their
defining aspect. You see it in how players are slotted toward one position or
another in their youth (“too short to play quarterback,” for example), and in
how coaches come to build their calling card (“Nick Saban is a 3/4 guy” or “Darrell
Royal was a wishbone guru”). Yet perhaps nowhere in football is there less
reliance on sustained order and more of a philosophical acceptance of
randomness than in the cult of the “air raid.”
On the surface, the air raid offense is a pretty simple and
fairly orthodox system: put the quarterback in shotgun and have him toss the
ball quick to cross routes, screens, and verticals. However, all ordered
systems much collapse, but as the air raid collapses it becomes more dangerous.
In the same way a big box store makes a profit by underselling its merchandise,
the air raid scores points by increasing the number of plays.
It’s a volume business, son, and air raid teams make profit
at the margins.
And perhaps no one in the country has a better feel for the
set, snap, and go tempo of the air raid than the visiting quarterback for Texas
A&M, Johnny Manziel—better known by his nom
de awesome: Johnny Football.
It is when chaos comes that Manziel makes most of his magic
happen. Still clinging to its industrial lexicon, football deems these moments “busted”
plays, and not every player has the wherewithal to ride out the storm. However,
some quarterbacks can. They may scramble for a first down or scat about behind
the line to extend the play or improvise with a receiver to double back on a
route. Rare is the player who can do one of these things routinely. Manziel
does all three.
What is so striking about el corrido del Juan Futol is that
the air raid has traditionally been employed by the “Davids” of college
football. A rundown of the air raid coaches finds them in far-flung outposts of
major conferences like Lexington, Lubbock, and Pullman or small conference
schools in Greenville, Rustin, and Houston, which was the Aggie coach’s last
depot.
Now, though, the ordinate of top-tier Texas prep talent and the
abscissa of high-octane play calls are intersecting in College Station, a
foothold of the premiere conference in college football. Goliath is wearing track shoes, and the Aggies are hitting their stride right when they draw the country’s #1 team—a bruised up lot
who needed a literal last-minute miracle to escape metaphorical death the week
prior. In the showdown between order and chaos, you know who the universe has
sided with since the big bang.
Vegas, however, has
order a two-touchdown favorite at home.
Roll Tide.
