back to Niagara Falls Reporter main page

back to Niagara Falls Reporter archive

BUFFALO'S OFFENSIVE IMPROVEMENT HINGES ON DOWN-TO-EARTH APPROACH

By David Staba

Whether Gregg Williams cares to admit it or not, he half-corrected his first blunder after taking the head coaching job in Buffalo by dismissing alleged offensive coordinator Mike Sheppard last week.

The question now -- will he finish the job and junk Sheppard's failed offensive system, as well?

There's not much question that Sheppard, a first-time offensive coordinator, was a bit overmatched. Nor does it take great insight to see that the Bills simply lack the personnel needed to run the vaunted West Coast Offense, particularly on the offensive line.

The beef here isn't so much with Sheppard as with the system itself, even if it carries an impressive-sounding title and a lengthy list of credits. The San Francisco 49ers won four Super Bowls using Bill Walsh's version of a philosophy devised by Sid Gilman in San Diego in the 1960s.

Late last century, the Denver Broncos and Green Bay Packers also earned Lombardi Trophies with evolved versions of Walsh's timing- and read-based attack.

Every successful version of the West Coast, from Joe Montana's 49ers to Donovan McNabb's Philadelphia Eagles, has one thing in common -- a quick-thinking, accurate-throwing quarterback.

If you could hang Rob Johnson's arm from Alex Van Pelt's shoulder, you'd have the ideal quarterback for the offense. But you can't and you don't. And if you don't, you'd better find a new way to move the football. As Bills fans learned this year, the West Coast can be just as ugly as any other offense when you lack the proper point man.

Sure, the Bills finished 13th in total yards, one of the most common measures of offensive success. Which proves nothing more than how misleading, or downright meaningless, statistics often prove. An enormous percentage of those yards came in garbage time, when opposing defenses abandoned their original game plan in favor of the always-pliable prevent defense.

When it came to points, the only number with ultimate meaning, only Cincinnati, Dallas, Carolina and Washington scored fewer than Buffalo's 265. The Bills came up with 14 points or fewer nine times in 16 games. They managed more than two offensive touchdowns in a game just four times, and never accomplished that modest feat in back-to-back weeks.

That doesn't begin to approach good enough. And not even Williams, well-versed in the head coaching tradition of finding the positive where it doesn't exist, could argue otherwise.

When he was hired to replace Wade Phillips a year ago, Williams confidently announced that his new team would feature a modified version of Buddy Ryan's 46 defense and a West Coast offense.

Buffalo largely abandoned the 46 after Peyton Manning shredded it in Indianapolis in Week 3. Scrapping an offense in midseason is a bit trickier, but Williams' comments after dismissing Sheppard showed that he might have learned at least one huge lesson from his 3-13 rookie season.

"I want to hire the best person I can hire," Williams said of the process for finding Sheppard's replacement. "Systems just give you a chance to start with handling your personnel. So I am going to look at hiring the best person available that can utilize our personnel the best."

If there was any question that the West Coast is not the best use of Buffalo's talent, 3-13 proved otherwise.

As complicated as coaches and the media try to make it, football is a pretty simple game. Even at the highest level. To reach the sport's pinnacle, you have to run the football.

There has never been a Super Bowl champion that couldn't follow that basic principle. Even each of San Francisco's five title teams could run the ball effectively.

You don't even necessarily need a great running back. Antique Ottis Anderson of the New York Giants gutted the Bills in Super Bowl XXV. Washington's forgettable trio of Earnest Byner, Gerald Riggs and Ricky Ervins did the same a year later. Walsh's first championship team, the 1981 49ers, made do with the small-and-slow duo of Bill Ring and Lenvill Elliott.

These Bills, of course, are nowhere near Super Bowl level. But their very limited success supports the theory. Buffalo's running backs logged a combined 30 carries or more three times all season. Those also happened to be the only three games the Bills won.

Moreover, they have at least two running backs capable of heavy duty. Travis Henry and Shawn Bryson showed that even the Bills' feeble offensive line can eventually dent a defense if the guy calling the plays keeps pounding away.

For some reason, that very rarely happened.

Sheppard, like Joe Pendry before him, talked about the importance of the running game, but couldn't wait to abandon it on Sunday.

"We fell behind," is always the excuse. That makes sense if you're trailing by 20 in the fourth quarter, but once the Bills of recent vintage fell behind by any margin at almost any time, it was empty the backfield and forget the run. Which worked, well, almost never.

Good teams stick with the run, and find a way to make it work. Bad ones give up on it and bury themselves with a flurry of passes that the defense knows are coming. As Williams looks for Sheppard's replacement, a commitment to the ground game should be the first priority.

Opposing defenses could either blitz at will on the occasions that Johnson was ambulatory, or fall back and take away the deep threats of Eric Moulds and Peerless Price when Doug Flutie or Van Pelt took the snaps. That left almost no margin for error, with a single bad throw or dropped pass usually killing a drive.

Buffalo's defense also has a long way to go, but could more quickly carry the offense than the other way around.

The field-position and ball-control edges that come with a commitment to running the ball would make the load an awful lot lighter.


David Staba is the sports editor of the Niagara Falls Reporter and the editor of the BuffaloPOST. He welcomes email at editor@buffalopost.com.