A Bit More on OLs and RBs

Tom Landry’s storied career ended after the 1988 season. Jimmy Johnson inherited a team that lacked talent and had gotten into a losing rut.

But Jimmy also inherited LT Mark Tuinei and LG Nate Newton. They had started both 1987 and 1988 together. Dallas had a star RB in Herschel Walker in those years. While he was productive (1,514 yards in 1988), those were some empty yards. The team won 3 games and was 21st in the league in scoring. You know how even the worst team in the NBA is going to have a leading scorer…that’s what Walker had become by then. He could fill up the stat sheet and even have some great moments, but he wasn’t a guy you built an offense around.

Fast forward to 1992 and 1993. Emmitt Smith was in the prime of his career and running like a mad-man to the left side. Smith was the epitome of the RB you build an offense around. The Cowboys key play was called Load Left. Smith let Tuinei and Newton pave the way for him on run after run. While Tuinei and Newton were the left side on some crappy teams, they were also the left side on a team that won 3 Super Bowls in 4 years.

Newton used to joke that he didn’t become a Pro Bowl player untill Emmitt Smith arrived. Newton said he was the same guy the whole time, but with Smith running that somehow made him into a star blocker. That’s over-simplifying things a bit, but you get the point. The right RB can make his blockers look like studs.

Another sign that points to the value of someone like Smith…he held out in 1993 and Dallas went 0-2 without him, scoring a total of 26 points. They had the OL, Aikman, Irvin and Novacek. But without Smith…the offense was completely different. Unfortunately he returned and the team went 12-2.

Thinking about Herschel also made me remember 1994. He and Vaugh Hebron were the 1-2 punch at RB to begin the year. Walker didn’t even have 100 yards total after 3 games. The Eagles then had a bye week. Out of that they went to SF, where a rookie named Charlie Garner made his debut. He was 16-111 with 2 TDs in that game and gave the running game a spark that made it look totally different than it had in years. A RB with speed and moves? Freaky Friday.

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I mentioned Bill Callahan in yesterday’s post. I didn’t realize that he had moved on to WAS. That’s bad for Dallas and good for the Skins. Callahan is one of the better OL coaches in the league. He knows the running game.

Dallas replaced him with Frank Pollack. He might turn out to be a terrific OL coach, but he doesn’t have the experience and track record of Callahan. It will be interesting to see if this is a move that will hurt Dallas more than they know.

Pollack was the Assistant OL coach for the Texans for several years. They had a terrific run game in that time so he might turn out to be a good hire for Dallas.

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Mark Saltveit, the Chip Kelly guru, has a good piece on Kelly.

This is Mark and Ross Tucker discussing/writing about Kelly and some of his ideas. Good stuff.

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The Unknown Side of Sports Science

Today we’ve got a guest column from Mark Saltveit, the Chip Kelly guru from Oregon. Mark wrote about Sports Science and took a look at an interesting question…are there consequences to all the benefits the Eagles get from that program?

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By Mark Saltveit

There’s a guy in Atlanta who hotwired his kitchen stove so that he could make a proper pizza using the self-cleaning cycle, which gets you up to 800-900º instead of the usual 525º. He melted down a couple of ovens in the process, but today Jeff Varasano’s restaurant is rated as one of America’s “elite 8” pizzerias by Rachel Ray.

Chip Kelly is doing something similar with the Eagles, reinventing the entire training process with amazing results, and it’s hard not to be excited by what he’s getting out of his players. But as injuries pile up, it might be wise to ask whether he’s melting a few ovens himself.

Veteran cornerback Cary Williams got a lot of ridicule for complaining that practices are too hard, and he deserved it. (He apologized yesterday for going public, but didn’t disavow his comments.) Chip Kelly is not the first coach to push his players hard, and he’s not the first one to win by doing it.

Williams’ griping just sounds like excuses from a 29-year guy who seems to have lost a step, and wasn’t that great to begin with. (Nnamdi Asomugha was 30 when his skills quickly deteriorated.) Williams gave up the two longest receptions in Sunday’s game against Washington, and didn’t even practice much last week; he was limited with a hamstring injury. So why was he so tired?

Cary is almost guaranteed to be a free agent next spring. Besides his declining performance and what Chris Wesseling calls “jabbering,” his contract balloons to $8 million in 2015, and the Birds can definitely do better in the free agent market for that kind of money. It’s hard to understand what he thinks he’s accomplishing by announcing that he can’t handle rigorous workouts. It just makes him sound old.

So Cary Williams’ complaints seem pretty worthless. And yet, maybe we should take a breath and ask whether the Eagles’ cutting edge sports science program might be pushing players a bit too far.

Williams’ specific arguments don’t make any sense – not only are the Eagles 3-0, but they’ve outscored opponents 74-24 in the second half. Cary claims that the Birds “have no legs” at the start of the game. Where do they get new ones during halftime?

Against Washington, the defense faced 45 first half snaps, but at the end of the game safety Malcolm Jenkins (26) and slot CB Brandon Boykin (24) ran around like excited toddlers and shut Washington down.

But let’s face it. The whole point of sports science is getting more out of players, and it’s possible that the Eagles are taking too much out of them. The team was remarkably free of injuries in 2013 – according to Football Outsiders, they had the second lowest total of Adjusted Games Lost at 33.6, and nearly half of those were due to Jeremy Maclin’s ACL tear in training camp.

This year, however, has been a disaster. By the end of the Washington game, Philadelphia was missing three of its top four inside linebackers and four of seven offensive linemen to injuries.

Because the Eagles are venturing into unexplored territory with their heavy practice reps, year-round (voluntary) training and sports science, they should reconsider whether pushing players to the extremes of their ability is leading to injuries or shortening careers.

Chip Kelly had great success at the University of Oregon with his fast tempo and sports science approach – a combination of old-fashioned good nutrition and hydration with high-tech monitoring and workout machines. But college rosters are twice as big as those in the NFL, and the Ducks used extensive rotation (especially on the defensive line) to keep players fresh.

Just as importantly, college players are young. The Ducks didn’t have any 30-something veterans to keep healthy, but the Eagles have 12 (almost one-fourth of the roster). The average age of the injured offensive linemen (Kelce, Mathis, Barbre and Tobin) is 28, and it’s fair to wonder if Sports Science director Shaun Huls needs to dial down his program for the viejos. Then again, the injured ILBs are 23, 23 and 25. So perhaps age isn’t the issue.

At his press conference Monday, Chip Kelly noted that the Eagles monitor each player and individually tailor their training on a daily basis. In fact, this is the main point of the elaborate machinery used in the sports science program – not to build strength and quickness faster, but to gauge player’s recovery from traditional workouts. (They also fill out a daily questionnaire about how they feel and report any soreness or injuries.)

If you listen closely to players’ comments about sports science, the word “recovery” comes up again and again. Eagles cornerback Nolan Carroll recently told Tim McManus of Birds 24/7 that

We have a whole staff dedicated just to getting us to recover. Every single day when we come in here in the morning, we have assessments that we do to monitor how our body is feeling from the day before and I think that’s something that no other team in the league is doing right now. It helps us as far as eliminating injuries that most other places you wouldn’t be able to recognize until it’s too late.

Last year, Jenny Vrentas of Sports Illustrated’s MMQB described several of the machines that the Eagles have invested in, from the OmegaWave machine to Polar Systems’ heart monitors. She wrote that

“The Polar system generates post-workout recovery reports, with a timestamp for when an athlete can next handle more training. … And the Omegawave system uses an electrocardiogram transmitter and a pair of electrodes that tap into the central nervous system to measure stress, fatigue and capacity for aerobic or anaerobic exercise.”

The Eagles are very tight-lipped about the program, but competitive runner Susan Legacki reviewed the OmegaWave system last year for Lava Magazine, and gave a great description of how it works.

Each morning the machine gives you scores in five categories: cardiac readiness, resting heart rate, stress, recovery pattern, and adaptation reserves. The last two scores in particular tell you whether you can handle a high-intensity workout, or should back off to prevent injury.

In Legacki’s case, the machine helped her train through (and heal) a foot injury coming off of one race and building up to another. Mostly, it tempered her burning desire to get back training with a caution that injury risk was higher than normal on two of the five days.

So, in theory, the sports science program is designed precisely to avoid workout injures and should help players, not hurt them. And yet, a source in Nike’s research department told me that the Omegawave – which has been available since the late 1990s — has never really caught on, in part because there is no solid evidence that it works as advertised.

I’m not saying that this is some kind of Flowers For Algernon-type deal, where the same technique that improves ability leads to quicker deterioration. But the Eagles may be putting too much stock in unproven technology, and the size of their injury report is some real-world data that should make them be cautious moving forward.

Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t Maybe it works for most players, but not for everyone. We just don’t know.

There is another, more subtle possibility. The sports science program may lead to injuries precisely because it works so well. I’ll explain.

Much has been written about how stretching before exercise does not actually prevent injuries, in part because the increased flexibility allows athletes to extend themselves further, and because stretching appears to mask muscle pain.

In a similar way, sports science may be the victim of its own success. Players can do more, and with the excitement of the game and the rewards for elite performance, they may be pushing their bodies further than is wise, into dangerous territory.

Consider the screen pass to Jeremy Maclin Sunday, an 80-yard touchdown brought back to Washington’s 40 due to an illegal block in the back by Eagles center Jason Kelce. The penalty obscured an incredible sprint by Kelce. At 6’3, 295 pounds, he was running neck and neck with speedy WR Maclin (6’0, 198) sixty yardsdownfield from the line of scrimmage.

That is phenomenal athleticism, and I have no doubt that sports science helped make it possible. But Kelce left the game just after halftime with a sports hernia that will likely keep him off the field until December. The exuberance of an emotional game and his ability to run faster and longer than anyone else his size may have led him to literally bust a gut in the pursuit of victory.

Is sports science leading to injuries, or simply allowing players to push themselves further, into the red zone? We simply don’t know. It’s way too early to say.  But as impressive as the results of Chip Kelly’s programs have been, the Eagles need to be cautious about how hard they push their players. They don’t have that many ovens left on the roster.

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Mark Saltveit is the author of “The Tao of Chip Kelly” (Diversion Books: 2013) and the upcoming “Controlled Chaos: Chip Kelly’s Football Revolution” (Diversion Books: Nov. 2014).  He writes regularly about health and science for the Oregon Bioscience Association, and about football for Philly.com, BleedingGreenNation.com, IgglesBlitz, and FishDuck.com.  His work has also appeared in Harvard Magazine and the Oregonian newspaper.

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