| Aktungbby |
09-25-23 10:59 AM |
In todaze W.S.J.! THe maul vs the 'tush push'!!
Considering that I ran rugby 4-man'lineout' plays in intermural touch-football from the QB position with myself as the overlap fifth-man for the TD...50 years ago; the NFL is beginning to catch on: https://images.wsj.net/im-855236/?width=1278&size=1
Quote:
The NFL play that torments the brightest defensive minds in football these days hardly resembles a football play at all.
Popularized by the Philadelphia Eagles and Jalen Hurts, it’s a twist on the traditional quarterback sneak. Only instead of the quarterback lunging forward solo, he gets some extra muscle from his teammates pushing him from behind to bulldoze through the line. The short-yardage ploy was so effective last season, as the Eagles successfully converted 92% of their sneaks en route to the Super Bowl, that the NFL considered banning it.
But the actual solution for it might not lie in the rulebook. As it happens, there’s another game with an oblong ball in which shoving a ball carrier through a fearsome tangle of enormous bodies isn’t a controversial new play.
It’s basically the entire sport. This ancient game is called rugby, and the best teams in the world are in France right now pummeling each other into the turf at the 2023 Rugby World Cup.
To outsiders, rugby may look like a lawless riot that involves running, kicking and lots of flattening of people. But no sport is more advanced when it comes to the art of stopping a ball carrier in his tracks, and to those familiar with rugby’s rules, the short-yardage play that has confounded the NFL doesn’t look foreign at all. In fact, it’s so routine they even have a name for it: a maul.
The mechanics of a maul are essentially the same as the NFL tactic that has become known as the tush push. The player in possession of the ball is surrounded by teammates who bind their arms together and drive him forward as one tightly packed unit, while a swarm of opponents desperately tries to prevent them from gaining territory. The main difference in rugby is that the players are crazy enough to attempt this without pads.
Those with experience stopping a rugby maul suggest some unorthodox strategies that defenses could employ to negate the effectiveness of the Eagles’ sneak: Binding arms together before the snap. Moving laterally as a unit to plug holes in the line. And forgetting everything you know about traditional defensive line technique.
Scott Henderson is the head coach of the Eagles, but he leads a different flock of birds. He coaches the USA Rugby Eagles, the country’s national rugby team, and he says that defensive linemen who are used to working individually need to behave as one to counter the collective force aiming to push them backward. “Make it a stalemate,” Henderson says. “The way you might do that, in rugby anyway, is you bind [arms] and now it becomes four legs pushing together instead of two.”
Rugby has been played since 1823, when an English schoolboy decided to pick up a soccer ball and invent a new way to experience pain. In the two centuries since then, the sport has figured out that the key to defending a maul is to halt the ball carrier’s momentum. To do that, players interlock their arms, dig in their heels, and construct what is effectively a wall of gigantic humans.
Unlike football, where each defensive lineman is on his own trying to beat one of his offensive counterparts, rugby relies on pack behavior—scrums, rucks and mauls all see players bind themselves together and move as one collective unit. That technique is crucial to stopping a collective push by the offense, whether the ball has laces or not.
While there have been cries to make the rugby-style play illegal in the NFL, the rulebook actually gives defensive players an advantage that they’re not currently exploiting. Offensive players are prohibited from linking their arms to block. But there’s no specific rule stopping defensive players from doing so in order to create a wall of their own. The only reason NFL defenders haven’t done so is that this notion is completely antithetical to typical defensive line play. Pass rushers and run stoppers normally operate with the aim of winning individual matchups against an opposing blocker to get into the backfield. Against the tush push, though, there’s no time for that—as soon as the ball is snapped, the quarterback is thrusting forward. The goal is simple: don’t get pushed backwards.
“There are rules about the offensive line pre-binding, but there’s nothing to say the defense couldn’t,” says Dan Lyle, a former captain of the U.S. rugby team. “You could play a five-man defensive front, three linebackers, and you pre-bind and fill the gaps. One man goes low, one fills the hole. You’re thinking about the defense of this as a team.”:yeah:
Lyle, who was once offered a contract to play tight end for the Minnesota Vikings, has another unconventional suggestion for stopping the Eagles’ sneak. This one involves wrestling a giant amorphous blob. When Lyle played for the U.S. team under former coach Jack Clark, the squad practiced mauls by performing something known as the amoeba drill. It called for the defenders to link arms and move quickly from side to side, to learn how to move effectively as a unit in reaction to the different surges that the attacking team might make.
“You’ve got to try to manipulate the amoeba,” Lyle said. “You’re going to have to fight through two to three layers before you reach the center, or the ball carrier. But the No. 1 thing is you’ve got to try to disrupt it, stop it at the source and prevent it from shifting from one hole into another.”
To be sure, linking arms on the gridiron to try and push back a heavily armored, 300-pound offensive guard is as untested as it is risky. But whether the defensive linemen literally bind together or not, the principle behind it applies: they should ignore the usual spacing and cram together as closely as possible.
Clark, a member of the U.S. Rugby Hall of Fame, says one way to think of the problem defenses face in these situations is that the offense is jamming an immense amount of power into a narrow doorway. Unlike other plays, where a runner might bounce toward the outside, the quarterback is quickly diving forward backed by the might of teammates behind him.
“The only way you’re going to resist that is to mirror that in reverse,” Clark says.
That means matching muscle with muscle. He advises that the defensive linemen should line up much closer than they’re accustomed and concentrate their power in those doorways to exploit how this is the rare play where they know where the ball carrier is going.
These ideas might seem novel inside professional football, a sport where the idea of a linebacker trying to leap over the line to stop a quarterback sneak is considered cutting edge. But there’s one rugby insider who’s especially motivated to help NFL defenses figure this play out.
Mike Tolkin coached the U.S. team at the 2015 Rugby World Cup, and his suggestions include undercutting the offensive linemen, using their leverage to halt the offense’s momentum and deploying a linebacker to tackle the quarterback if he goes airborne. Even more than other rugby coaches, Tolkin may have spent a little extra time thinking about this conundrum.
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Essentially, I consider Amerikan football, both NFL and Collegate level, to be an extremely dangerous game; with fatalities for profit at the expense of player's brains due to helmet on helmet mayhem & violence and heatstroke resulting in CTE damage and dementia...all to sell beer. I forbade all my nephews to play it...The one with a college scholarship to play All American Lacross still got a concussion! Rugby is the safer game. https://images.wsj.net/im-856218?wid...05861664712778 https://nccsir.unc.edu/wp-content/up...L-public-1.pdf
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