Tua Recited A Play Call For The Media Then Asked Them To Repeat It Back To Show Just How Ridiculously Tough Calling A Play Can Be

Matt Fitzgerald8/17/2023 11:00 PM

Football coaches eat, sleep, shit, breathe, etcetera the sport. With those countless hours they spend grinding tape, constantly evaluating players inside and outside their building and trying to have a life outside the lines, they apparently have zero point zero seconds to dedicate to a simplified play-calling system.

Granted, not everyone in the NFL runs a variation of the Kyle Shanahan offense like the Miami Dolphins and Shanahan descendent Mike McDaniel do. What I'm always confused by is why these universally acclaimed schematic geniuses can't make it easier on their quarterbacks. Why make Tua Tagovailoa spit out a bazillion-word play call?

Giphy Images.

If Mike McDaniel's love language to his most important player is length of play call names, he is a sadistic son of a bitch. To those of us outside the building, Tua might as well be speaking in tongues. Now, you can do a fair amount of football studying on your own if you're a media member (though you won't catch the vast majority of beat reporters who have the incredible luxury of focusing on one single team caught dead doing that).

No matter what sort of independent education you give yourself, nothing could prepare you for digesting all that material in a phonebook-thick playbook, deciphering pre-snap what a defense is doing, making sure all 10 other guys are lined up properly before the play, process correctly when the picture changes post-snap, and avoid getting clobbered by somebody who might weight almost two of you.

I realize there's the shortcut of putting wordy plays on a wristband so that a play-caller can just say a number into the QB's headset. Still, the guy under center has to rapid-fire spit that shit out before breaking the huddle with possibly a million other things going on in his head. I refuse to believe there isn't an easier way to do this. The Shanahan coaching tree contingent should do an offseason retreat and bang out some fresh, truncated terminology.

One of the biggest shortcomings during McDaniel's otherwise pretty stellar rookie season as an NFL head coach was getting the play calls in on time.

Gee, I wonder why the fuck that was! I'm sure Year 2 will be smoother simply with a smart guy like McDaniel getting better at game/clock management. Still doesn't take away from the fact that the egos of NFL coaches won't make room for a simplified call sheet.

I don't know the solution. Maybe AI will come up with something. Or, how about a futuristic/possibly sci-fi dystopian idea? With the perpetually exploding revenue in pro football, some sort of digital interface could be plugged into a retractable helmet visor, where coaches could literally dial in a play to a display screen for all 11 men in the huddle to see.