SPIRO: Rugby can learn a lot about rugby from gridiron

Back in the 1960s when a M.Ed student at the Catholic University of America, Washington DC, I spent a memorable New Year’s Day in my bath watching all the college gridiron bowl games across the nation, starting in Florida and ending late at night in California and Hawaii.

My team then was Notre Dame and it was going through one of its golden periods of dominance. Matching Notre Dame was Alabama, the Crimson Tide, coached by the mighty Bear Bryant. And Ohio State, coached by Woody Hayes, who believed in the confrontationist style of ‘four yards and a puff of dust’.

There were few blacks in the Notre Dame squads and none, up to 1970, in the Alabama squad. In professional gridiron, at this time, no team had ever fielded a black quarterback.

The quarterback for Alabama between 1962 to 1964 was Joe Namath, a snake oil slick passer who exuded charisma and the expectation of success. With Namath’s gun-sharp passing game and feisty, all-knees and elbows, untiring kids from the hard scrabble country of the Texas, Bryant moulded an Alabama side that won three Sugar Bowls in four years.

About eight years ago, my son Zolton Zavos, a publisher of The Roar, married his American wife and gained a father-in-law who is a diehard Alabama supporter. On New Year’s eve, Zolton rang up from Florida and told me to be sure to watch the play-off between Alabama and Ohio State, with the winner going through to the final to play Oregon for the title of number one college team in 2014.

With my favourite side languishing in the rankings, I decided to support Alabama, as much as tribute to Zolton’s father-in-law than anything else.

Alabama’s coach Nick Saban had a 84-5 winning record with the Crimson Tide coming into this play-off match. His side was expected to win and started in a way that seemed to ensure that this was certain to be the outcome by racing away to a 21-6 lead.

But Ohio State hung in, got a couple of lucky breaks and then made some sensational plays just before and just after the half-time break and not long into the second half established a lead that it held to the end.

Given the chance of winding down the clock or putting the game out of Alabama’s reach with an audacious play, Ohio went for the big play. And pulled it off.

While I was watching the dramatic game and listening to the terrific analysis from the commentators I found myself taking notes about how rugby could learn from the methods of gridiron, on and off the field.

The presentation of the game, for instance, was spectacular with both the huge squads pouring out on to the field, like red-hot lava in the case of the Crimson Tide, in what was called The Rush.

And then there was the waving of coloured handkerchiefs, the bands in the stand, the marching bands on the field at half-time, the cheer leaders doing their tumbling and the chanting. In a less spectacular manner, we had this crowd enthusiasm in France during the 2007 Rugby World Cup.

One of the aspects of rugby in Australia that distresses me the most is the traditional rejection of any attempts to liven things up during the match with high-energy music, bands, chanting and so on. Waratah crowds at the SFS have often seemed to be funereal in their silence.

Admittedly, in the win-ugly era there was little for supporters to get enthusiastic about. But the silence I reckon encouraged the rigor mortis style of the win-ugly era.

As a school kid in New Zealand I was brought up to yell and applaud during the match, and not to treat the game as a sort of orchestral occasion where applause came only at the end of the piece. As in the jazz tradition, we would do the school haka when the first XV was on attack or when it was on deep defence.

During the 2011 Rugby World Cup it was noticeable than even men and women of a certain age, as All Black supporters, entered into the spirit of the occasion and got their faces painted and performed the haka, yelling out surging choruses of ‘Black, Black, Blaack!’ especially during the New Zealand-Australia semi-final.

I have seen, occasionally, a similar sort of gridiron-style enthusiasm for the team among Waratahs and Wallabies supporters. A classic example of this came in the dying moments of the Wallabies-All Blacks Test at the SFS, the first under lights there and on a Tuesday night, when George Gregan launched himself into rugby history with his famous tackle from behind to knock the ball out of Jeff Wilson’s hands just as the All Black was in the process of winning the Test for his side.

I remember Wallaby supporters all around me near the media box, standing on their seats, and screaming out: ‘Defence Wallabies, defence, defeence!’ The noise was chaotic and over-whelming. The dramatic moments of play on the field were made all that more emotional and exciting with the enthusiasm of the crowd.

The challenge for ground managers throughout Australia in 2015 and beyond is to create this sort of passion from the crowds, the way the gridiron managers do, in the Super Rugby season, and then for the Tests. This is possible even in laconic Australia, as the soccer crowds following the A-League have shown.

The commentators during the Alabama-Ohio match made a lot of the fact that both teams were using ‘rugby style’ tackles, with players using their arms to lock around the legs of runners to bring them down rather than using the body-dive at the legs (often ineffective) to cut down the runner.

It has taken gridiron a long time to twig to this more effective way of tackling and apparently the leader in this change were the Seattle Seahawks.

Gridiron, or american football, is one of the many distinctive off-shoots of the game played at Rugby School under the original rules of 1846. We have the rugby, rugby league, soccer (association football), Sevens Rugby, League Nines, touch and various forms of handball.

The gridiron line of scrimmage is essentially the rugby lineout, without the ball thrown in.

The forward pass, brought in by Walter Camp to take some of the thuggery out of the football played in the United States in the 1880s and 1890s, is a steal from the soccer passing game with an offside line that becomes extinct once the ball is snapped.

Camp also introduced the notion of downs into gridiron, the insistence that the team in possession must make 10 yards in five sets of downs or give up the ball. Rugby league, a continuous stop-start game like gridiron, once had unlimited downs, like rugby, if possession was retained. But now has adopted the gridiron system.

These various forms of football have lessons for the other forms, and this is especially the case for rugby learning from gridiron. There are several reasons for this. One of them is that the elements of rugby and gridiron are in their essentials quite alike. The object is to force the ball across a try-line by running or catching balls lobbed in goal.

The more important reason is that coaching has been the bedrock of the gridiron system. More brain power has gone into thinking about how to successfully attack and defend in a gridiron match, given the code’s popularity throughout the USA for well over 100 years, than any other sport, with the exception perhaps of chess.

The lessons learnt from all this coaching and thinking about the gridiron game should be picked up by rugby coaches.

Bear Bryant finally started a black player in 1970. In the Alabama-Ohio play-off, both starting quarterbacks were black, and most of the players on the attacking and defensive squads were black, too.

I ask this question of Australian rugby: why is Jim Williams the only Indigenous player to play in the forwards for the Wallabies? And why was Mark Ella dropped from the captaincy of the Wallabies by Alan Jones?

Has there been a stereotyping of Indigenous players in Australian rugby, during their careers and after it along the lines of the gridiron stereotypes that were in play in the 1960s?

Is Australian rugby making enough, too, of the increasingly large Pacific populations choosing to live here?

The essence of the gridiron game is that the attacking side will have a set play and the defending side has to work out what this play will be, and then come up with an answer to it, if possible.

Rod Macqueen developed a similar system of patterned sequences of play for the Brumbies and then for the Wallabies. Macqueen used to walk his Brumbies through his orchestrated series of plays at the beginning of a new season before allowing them to increase the tempo of their running of the plays until they could do them at full speed during a game.

This is exactly what Knute Rockne did when he was coach of Notre Dame in the 1930s when his back field, The Four Horsemen, destroyed oppositions season after season.

But since Macqueen left the Wallabies there has been throughout Australian rugby, at the national and Super Rugby level, a lack of innovation and method in playing style. Even one-off tricks and ruses seem to be beyond Australian teams.

When the Wallabies played the Barbarians at Twickenham some weeks ago, it was the thrown-together Baabaas who provided a couple of new tricks. One was a five-metre penalty where the kicker with his back to the opposition try line lobbed the ball over his head for a charging forward to almost score with the snatch. The other was a quarterback-type throw from a lineout to spring the far winger free for a run to the line.

Imagine if all those gridiron coaches were set loose to work out killer plays from lineouts, especially now that lifting gives the throwing side the obvious advantage to gather possession of the ball.

I liked the way, too, both Alabama and Ohio ran plays against the flow of play, pulling guards to one side and then running the other way. When will rugby teams bashing away near the opposition try line pull a similar sort of ruse?

Defending rugby sides, too, could learn from the gridiron mantra that ‘you stop a drive by driving in low, it’s all about leverage’.

Running backs in gridiron, too, are taught to attack the gain line with ‘square shoulders’. How good would Matt Giteau have been if someone had drilled this simple (but not simplistic) principle into his consciousness at an early age.

Ohio’s attack depended a great deal on a wide receiver, Devon Smith, a player with pace, great hands and athleticism on the ground and in the air that was exceptional. Smith leaps seven foot and more as a high jumper. He has a special workout regime that emphasises his leaping and speed skills. We are talking about drills that do not involve gym work.

So as a final point to rugby coaches throughout Australia, at all levels of the game, including the Wallabies, heed this plea.

Spend more time with the players outside of the gym working on their skills and, just as importantly, on thinking out ways to fool oppositions with ruses and special plays that owe more to brain power than to brawn.

Gym work must be only a means to an end, not the end itself, which too many professional rugby players believe it is.