At every level, from a group of grizzled coaches in a meeting room poring over 1,000-page playbooks to the middle-school kid drawing Xs and Os in the margins of his math binder when he should be studying, they’re all searching for it. Hunting for an angle the other guy’s not ready for. In football, you innovate or you lose. You gamble or you go home. And this year, the league’s two biggest dice-rollers happen to be related.
In the lead up to Super Bowl XLVII, the story of Jim and John Harbaugh will dominate all the airtime and column inches that aren’t already being used to lionize or pillory Ray Lewis. But the reason the Harbaughs are facing one another in New Orleans has more to do with their courage in embracing the real-time evolution of the NFL than it does with family values or a coaching legacy passed down from their father. Both Harbaughs put their reputations on the line midway through the season with moves they’d still be explaining to the people who sign their paycheques, were they not now preparing for the brightest spotlight in sports.
And each of those moves enabled a Harbaugh to enter the playoffs with football’s most valuable commodity in his pocket—the element of surprise.
For the 49ers, the move came on Nov. 28, and it echoed around the football world—“We’ll go with Colin,” was all Jim Harbaugh said, and everyone knew what it meant. Now that they’re headed to New Orleans, it echoes all the way back to February 2002, when the Patriots took home the trophy. Harbaugh’s decision to trust the remainder of the 49ers’ season to second-year quarterback Colin Kaepernick was a risk that could only have paid off at the Super Bowl—considering that incumbent Alex Smith took them to the NFC Championship game a year ago, anything less would have been a failure.
For the Ravens, the bold move came on Dec. 10, with somewhat less fanfare and perhaps a bit more desperation—“This change gives us a better possibility to achieve our goals,” John Harbaugh said, announcing the dismissal of long-time offensive coordinator Cam Cameron. Harbaugh’s Ravens were 9-4 at the time but mired in a two-game losing streak, and Cameron’s offence had managed to stay on the field for more than four plays on just four of 13 drives during that Sunday’s overtime loss to the Washington Redskins. Cameron was replaced as the chief play-caller by Ravens quarterbacks coach Jim Caldwell, and though the before-and-after on-field snapshots haven’t been as stark as they have with the 49ers, the change in results has been almost as pronounced.
Welcome to the next iteration of the NFL, where it’s not enough to have a well-oiled offence with dependable players who can execute under pressure and run a full playbook, with a trick play or two thrown in to keep the defence guessing. You still need all of that, but now you also need your opponent to have seen as little of it as possible in advance. The two offences that will compete for the Lombardi Trophy belong to the only two playoff teams to revamp their attack mid-season and render much of the film that scouts had gathered on them useless—completely so in the 49ers case; deceptively so for the Ravens, because Caldwell’s offence might look similar to Cameron’s, but cannot be relied upon to act that way after the snap.
What will determine the victor in New Orleans will be who is least prepared for whom—and the answer to that question might not be evident until after each coach has made his halftime adjustments.
Deciphering the 49ers offence since Kaepernick took over has been, for opposing coaches, an exercise in surreal confusion—like peeling back the first layer of an onion to find an orange, then peeling the orange to get an apple.
Seal off the middle to stop the 49ers’ vaunted ground game? Watch Kaepernick set up in the pistol (a read-option variation of the shotgun, in which the quarterback lines up closer to scrimmage with his running back behind him, then reads the defence and decides whether to keep it himself or hand it off). Back when he was running it at the University of Nevada, they called his favourite play the “samurai”—the now-notorious one he sprung on the Packers, faking an inside handoff then sprinting off right tackle and into an alley that leads 56 yards to the end zone for a decisive touchdown in the divisional round. The Atlanta Falcons coaches no doubt had that very play in mind when they decided to enter the NFC Championship game by using their linebackers to spy and occasionally employing zone blitzes to contain Kaepernick. So naturally, Vernon Davis—who had caught seven passes for 105 total yards in his previous seven games—exploited the mid-level holes for a six-catch, 106-yard performance, and the ground game returned to pounding the inside on delays after Kaepernick suckered linebackers into preventing him from running.
The Niners offence seems so simple that it could have been imported directly from Nevada, and parts of it actually have been (when Jim Harbaugh and offensive coordinator Greg Roman were both at Stanford, Harbaugh sent Roman to learn about the pistol from Nevada coach Chris Ault). But it also gets a little more complex every week. Or, more likely, it has always been this complex, but Harbaugh has been careful to show only as much of it as is necessary to get the job done. There’s a reason the 49ers didn’t run the pistol down the stretch—their playoff spot was secure, and the fewer snaps available for other teams to study, the better.
For most of Kaepernick’s seven regular-season starts, the 49ers used the pistol as something of a specialty formation, the same way a few teams have played around with the wildcat in recent years, primarily as a way to keep the opposition off-balance.
In the divisional round, with the Packers expecting the pistol to be sprinkled in with the 49ers’ usual packages, there it was in all its unstoppable glory. Kaepernick lined up in the pistol on nearly half of the 49ers’ snaps on his way to an NFL-quarterback-record 181 yards on the ground. Packers defensive coordinator Dom Capers was excoriated afterward for a lack of preparation, but he shouldn’t take all the blame—it was him, not the Packers defenders on the field, for whom the 49ers offence had invested energy preparing. They’d taken steps to ensure Capers would be functionally blind when preparing for the full extent of the 49ers’ offence.
This approach isn’t really a super-secret game plan. It’s just a logical response to the explosion in technology and analysis. The more camera angles coaches have on every play from every game; the more full teams of scouts are deployed to any game featuring a potential opponent; the more advanced analytics can grade performances of defences against various formations over time to probe for holes in coverage or blocking—the more the most valuable currency in the NFL becomes the things that don’t exist on the other team’s game tape. As teams perfect the art of preparation, the unexpected is the biggest weapon in the playbook.
On paper, the Baltimore Ravens are one of the most predictable teams in the NFL. For one thing, they’ve had the core of their defence together since back when Tom Brady was still winning Super Bowls. The offence? Well, it could generously be described as “reliable”—in each of the first five years of Joe Flacco’s career, all under Cam Cameron, they’ve finished between ninth and 16th in points scored and between 13th and 22nd in total yards. For this season’s first 13 games, they were on pace to finish in that range again, averaging 344 yards, good for 18th in the league. Since John Harbaugh made the switch to Caldwell, however, the Ravens are averaging 416 yards per game, which would rank second only to the Patriots over a full season. Nothing massive has changed, but all the little wrinkles are different.
The Ravens have long made their offensive hay with the deep ball, but under Cameron, the misfires became glaring—during the regular season, they completed just 12 of 47 pass attempts that travelled more than 30 yards in the air, with 20 of those incompletions coming on overthrown balls. Under Caldwell, Flacco has been trusted to use his receivers to make plays, putting deep passes in places where Torrey Smith and Anquan Boldin can compete with defensive backs for the ball rather than throwing it further than the coverage, which made it necessary for his receivers to gain a step on the defence or let the pass fall incomplete. He’s been trusted to “cut it loose,” as John Harbaugh reminded him at halftime of the AFC Championship game. It’s riskier, but it’s also less predictable—defenders can’t simply rely on matching Baltimore’s wideouts step for step down the field or leaving two safeties deep in a token gesture to ward off long bombs.
But the Ravens’ other surprise under Caldwell is a weapon John Habaugh—much like his brother—has used only sparingly during the season. In the Ravens’ first 14 games, rookie running back Bernard Pierce carried the ball 72 times for 320 yards. In the last two weeks of the regular season and first three weeks of the playoffs, he totalled 63 carries for 381 yards, despite battling a bone bruise in his right knee.
Ray Rice may be quicker than Pierce, but Pierce has the same sort of vision and is a more powerful runner, averaging 2.3 yards after contact this season, good for 11th in the NFL and a full half-yard better than Rice. More importantly, defences can’t focus their preparation on stopping the slippery Rice from bouncing runs to the outside and dancing through the defensive line—they also have to prepare for Pierce coming straight up the middle on any given play, and for John Harbaugh’s tendency to ride the hot hand in his backfield.
The Ravens’ surprises are more subtle than the 49ers’, but they’ve been just as effective—and Jim Harbaugh will have to adjust on the fly to an offence for which he can’t fully prepare. It’s just a happy coincidence that a taste of his own medicine will be fed to him by his brother.
This article originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine.