Adjacent News

Thursday morning on the campus finds the marching band practicing their cadence somewhere near the chemistry annex, their brass horns catching the weak October sunlight while a heavy dew still clings to the manicured grass of the quad. Students hurry toward early lecture halls with heavy woolen coats zipped to their chins, clutching cardboard cups of lukewarm black coffee that taste faintly of sulfur and institutional regret. Over at the campus radio station, some student disc jockey with a voice like a grinding axle is spinning records from bands that broke up before the Korean armistice, punctuating the fuzz with local weather reports warning of patchy fog rolling in off the river.

Down at the athletic center, the mood is less academic and more logistical. The training staff is working through a pile of medical charts and tape, trying to piece together a roster for the weekend ahead without making any unauthorized requisitions of government property. Down in Starkville, the injury reports are circulating through the press box like intercepted cable traffic regarding the availability of quarterback Kamario Taylor and running back Fluff Bothwell ahead of the upcoming clash with LSU. Reporters lean over gray metal folding tables, muttering into their microcassette recorders while chewing on stale cheese crackers fetched from the vending machine in the hallway.

Yet these physical ailments are merely incidental compared to the moral decay rotting the foundation of the modern offensive playbook. Everywhere a man looks across the conference landscape, young men in bright nylon pants are abandoning the fundamental principles of forward momentum that won two world wars and kept the line of scrimmage secure. Instead of lining up a proper fullback behind center to clear the mud and pave a respectable three-yard lane through the guard gap, these modern tactical commanders insist on spreading receivers all the way to the painted white chalk of the sideline like a string of ill-advised telegraph wires.

General Douglas MacArthur did not clear the Pacific theater so that an offensive coordinator could dial up five-out receiver sets on second-and-long from the comfort of an air-conditioned coaches' booth. It is an undisciplined, feckless scheme that relies on horizontal trickery rather than vertical perseverance. When a team lines up in an empty backfield, they are essentially abandoning their supply lines and leaving their quarterback exposed to enemy fire without a rear guard to absorb the blitz. It violates every tenet of tactical common sense established during the Eisenhower administration.

The local townspeople are growing weary of it, too. At the diner off the edge of campus, over plates of grease-slickened bacon and eggs, veterans of the Eisenhower era shake their heads into their napkins when the evening highlights flicker across the small black-and-white television set mounted in the corner. They remember when football was played with leather helmets and a grim determination to punch the ball up the middle until the opposing tackle's spirit broke entirely. Now we have quarterbacks dancing backward twenty yards before throwing a lateral pass that gains four yards and a reprimand from the statistical clerk.

Therefore, let it be known throughout the conference that this theater of operations requires an immediate and total restructuring of command. We cannot permit these tactical aberrations to continue unchecked while the band plays fight songs to an undisciplined multitude.

Accordingly, this office formally demands the immediate court-martial of any offensive coordinator utilizing five-out receiver sets, ordering their dishonorable discharge to the intramural fields, or calling for a formal return to the single-wing formation by executive decree.