Chances are you've played sports, at some level, when you were a kid. When you’re a kid playing whatever sports you play, it’s easy to tell who the best players are. They just stand out. Sometimes it’s easy to tell physically.
The 11- and 12-year-old Little League team that sees the 6-foot monster on the other team standing on the mound, throwing gas. The kid's already got a mustache. He’s just different. He’s better.
The son of the coach on the basketball team, a point guard, has the ball on a string, making every play, driving to the hoop, making jump shots. You know he grew up with a basketball in his crib. Maybe he''ll be a college player someday. Either way, right now, he’s just better.
Then you get into high school, and the size gap starts to close. Even those once really big kids suddenly aren’t as big as everyone else anymore. Puberty, growth spurts, weight training, personal coaches, they're all starting to be a part of the equation now. The individual talent can still be wide and, of course, still show up, and you’ll still get the kids who are so much bigger or so much faster, but there aren’t as many of them.
What really happens at that level is the collection of talent that comes together on one team, and you see the disparity between them and other teams. We’ve all been around that Friday night football game where one team is up 45-0 at halftime and there’s a running clock in the second half.
When you get to college sports, that’s when things really start to change.
Let’s focus on football now.
Sure, there are your typical best teams in America every year. They have the wealth, the resources, the coaching, recruiting advantages, maybe even bending a rule or two, let’s be honest. I’m not talking about the power conferences against mid-majors. There are always advantages there, particularly when it comes to budgets. I’m talking about teams in the same conference. For the most part, it’s fairly even. The talent is more dispersed. Each team has the same number of scholarships. One or two of the best players can definitely make a difference, but so does coaching. Nick Saban, Dabo Swinney, Urban Meyer (when he was in the game), a lot of names to choose from as examples.
Coaching matters in college. But it’s a heck of a lot easier when you have some of the best players as a collection on your roster.
But professional sports is where it’s really different. Now, every player on every roster is the best of the best in the world.
It doesn’t matter where they went to college. Clemson, Alabama, Wyoming, or University at Buffalo. If you’re not one of the best, you aren’t making it. With the exception of a couple of teams every year, every single team in the NFL has good players.
Some have a great player - or a few. But even with those great ones, the gap to the next group isn’t very wide. Oh, there’s no doubt the best quarterbacks and having a collection of some of the more superior talent will make a difference. That’s why teams win 13 or 14 games, and win multiple Super Bowls over a period of years.
But on a week-to-week basis, there are always close games between teams you would not think would have them, and always an upset or two. There are always games in which the better talent doesn’t perform above the rest. There are games that the lesser unit on one team rises up and somehow overcomes.
Why is that?
Because professional sports, and maybe football most of all, are about matchups more than anything else. Salary caps don’t allow for teams to have All-Pros at every position. Some teams choose to spend money and resources on one area or position, while others choose to spend them on another. Some teams luck into having the best talent at certain spots, like a late round draft pick that suddenly becomes great. Others draft someone in the first round thinking he’s going to be great, but ultimately he busts out.
That’s why matchups matter. It’s up to a coaching staff to see where their team has the better matchups, and where they don’t. To figure out a way to close the gap in mitigate any matchup advantage they don’t have, while exploiting the ones they do.
If you watched or just dug into Seattle Seahawks the past week, it became more and more obvious the Buffalo Bills matched up well with them.
Their defense is awful. It has been all year. They can’t get a pass rush, and when they blitz to get one, they’re exposed in the secondary. Their head coach, Pete Carroll, said after the Bills won 44-34 Sunday that they did not expect the Bills to completely abandon the run and just throw on them. But that’s exactly what’s the Bills did, because it was their matchup advantage, and knew that was the way to win.
The Bills had a tough matchup against the New England Patriots in Week 8. The Patriots know how to run the ball, and physically. Stopping that is not a strength of the Bills defense. It’s why the game continued to be close at the end.
A few weeks ago, the Bills lost to the Kansas City Chiefs in Orchard Park. They knew they were going against one of the best quarterbacks in the league in Patrick Mahomes, so they tried to stop him. Conversely, the Chiefs realized running on the Bills was a good matchup for them and they had an opportunity to do it. That’s why they kept handing the ball off and were successful.
This past week, way too many people simply dismissed the Bills having any chance of winning because of some down games by them, and the Seahawks’ 6-1 record.
I said all week on the air that I really liked this matchup for the Bills. I thought they could hang with the Seahawks, score points, and have a legitimate shot to win. It’s exactly what happened.
Next week, I’m telling you right now, expect something a little bit different.
The Arizona Cardinals are not the Seahawks. They play the game different, have a different philosophy, and have different strengths and weaknesses. I’ll get more into that as the week goes on. I’m not telling you all this just to sound smart or puff my chest out. I’m telling you because I want you to start doing the same. I want us all to take a lesson from what happened Sunday, and throughout the week.
Here’s your homework assignment for this week: Don’t just look at records. Don’t just look at general statistics. Dig a little bit.
There are hundreds of websites and resources to find out how teams employee personnel and schemes they use. Do they play more nickel defense? Do they spread the field with wide receivers? Do they incorporate their tight ends? How much do they blitz? Then look at the Bills and figure out where they matchup well and where they don’t.
And not just this week against the Cardinals. Try to do it more going forward. Focus more on the opponent. Look for the signs, the tells, what offensive coordinator Brian Daboll and defensive coordinator Leslie Frazier should do to win the game, and what they need to avoid that might play into the hands of the other team.
If you did that last week, you saw it coming on Sunday. You knew the Bills had some favorable matchups and could hang-in with the Seahawks and maybe even beat them.
The Bills have smart coaches. They’re not perfect, they make mistakes, but they understand football is about matchups and they're usually good at figuring them out, both the favorable and unfavorable ones.
Sunday against the Seahawks, they showed why that matters.
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