The pencil-necked geeks of pigskin have a poster boy, and his name is John Clayton.

 

Clayton covers the NFL for ESPN. He’s fairly knowledgeable about the Who’s Who of the NFL: who’s coming, who’s going. Who cares?

 

Because when it comes time to actually analyze the sport, Clayton’s insights are somewhere between bemusing and bereft of common sense.

 

We had the grave misfortune of catching Clayton in an interview on ESPN radio before the playoffs started. Didn’t catch the name of the hosts or the show … just that Clayton was on the line. We wanted to put something together immediately after we heard it, but it kind of fell through the cracks. His "analysis" struck us as off-target then. It's pure comedy in light of recent events. (By the way, are we the only ones who notice a remarkable resemblance between Clayton, top photo, and Mr. Mackey, bottom photo, from South Park? We’re guessing the answer is no.)

 

In any case, here are some quotes from Clayton’s pre-playoff interview, mmmkay? Add him to the list of people to ignore the next time you’re looking for analysis. We offer a lengthy response to one of his comments here, but the others need little explanation. What we can't capture is the true smugness with which he speaks. Attitude works when you're correct. It's high comedy when you're wildly off-target.

 

Question: Should teams rest their players or try to keep their momentum going?

 

Clayton: “It’s more important to keep players healthy. It’s a players' league.”

 

Cold, Hard Football Facts: Well, we discussed this a week before the Clayton interview, and the Cold, Hard Football Facts were rather resolute in their conclusion: It’s clearly more important to have momentum going into the playoffs than it is to rest players.

 

Indy provided a textbook example of this phenomenon in action. The Colts rested for an entire month. Then, in their first so-called meaningful game, they went down in spectacular fashion, like a gridiron Hindenburg.

 

Now, obviously, resting can have its benefits. If you lose your star QB, for example, that ain’t good. But holding out players because you fear they may get hurt is essentially playing defeatist football. The big difference is that a team will be harmed if it takes off too much time. It may be harmed if someone gets hurt. Hey, you might get run over by a bus today. That doesn’t mean you should become an asocial leper who never ventures out into public (that’s OUR job!) just because somethig might go wrong. The world is full of pitfalls. You can’t insulate yourself from them. The same goes for coaches and football teams.

 

To use a concrete football example: It’s like the team in the tie game that takes over the ball with a minute left in its own territory and then runs out the clock to play for overtime. It's playing not to lose. But it’s such a common practice that, you might remember, broadcaster John Madden suggested New England employ this strategy in Super Bowl XXXVI when it took over the ball on its own 17 with 81 seconds to play and no timeouts. The coach who runs out the clock in this situation isn't playing smart football. He's throwing away an opportunity to win.

 

The coach in this instance who elects to play defeatist football is concerned that something MIGHT go wrong. Our quarterback MIGHT throw an interception. We MIGHT fumble the handoff. While turning to inactivity as a salve for an imaginary wound, the coach is literally costing his team an opportunity to win the game. And, as we all know, opportunity doesn’t knock too often.

 

The irony, of course, is that all those same things can go wrong in overtime, too. So, if you’re going to run out the clock in regulation, you might as well just do it in overtime, too. It makes as much sense.

 

The bottom line is that passivity is never an answer, whether it’s the end of a game or the end of a season for a playoff-bound team.

 

Now, as for Clayton’s insistence that it’s a “players' league,” he could not be further off base. It is, in fact, a coaches' league. It’s a systems' league. It’s management’s league. As cold as it may seem, the combatants themselves are merely replaceable plug-and-play pieces.  

 

Seattle, for example, won its first playoff game in 21 years last weekend … with 2005 NFL MVP Shaun Alexander sitting on the bench.

 

Joe Gibbs has won Super Bowls with three different quarterbacks. He did it with superior coaching, a superior system, superior management. Those are the pillars of NFL success. It's why Gibbs can take 12 years off from coaching football, win a few titles in another sport and then, in just his second year back in the NFL, bring a marginally talented team to the second round of the playoffs. No quarterback has won Super Bowls with three different coaches. It's doubtful any ever will.

 

The same coaches appear in the postseason year after year. This season:

Three Super Bowl-winning coaches have lost in the postseason this year. All three lost to other coaches who have won Super Bowls. Three-time champion Bill Belichick lost to two-time champion Mike Shanahan. Three-time champion Joe Gibbs lost to one-time champion Mike Holmgren. One-time champion Jon Gruden lost to three-time champion Gibbs.

 

The results are obvious and overwhelmingly conclusive: Good coaching matters in the NFL. It matters more than anything else.

 

Finally, we know it's a coaches' league because each year, at the end of the season, the champion is awarded something called the Lombardi Trophy. It's not called the Starr Trophy.

 

In a coaches' league, you would expect nothing less.

 

***

OK, enough of that. Most of Mr. Mackey’s other key comments stand on their own and need little explanation from us. Remember, these jumped out at us as unusually ignorant before the playoffs started. They're comical today. But hey ... Clayton is the reason we've devoted a couple of years to debunking the notion of the "fast track" of a dome, which we've done this week and earlier this season.

 

Back before Super Bowl XXXVI, which pitted an outdoor team, New England, against a dome team, St. Louis, Clayton predicted a 40-point Rams blowout because the Super Bowl was being played on the "fast track" of the Louisiana Superdome. A simple look at the St. Louis schedule that season would have revealed that both its losses that year came on the alleged "fast track" of a dome.

 

Clayton, it seems, is simply one of those tools who gets all starry-eyed over dome teams, even though dome teams are generally weak and spineless and habitually underachieve in the postseason. Some people will never learn.

 

Clayton: “Seattle is a flawed team but will sneak through the NFC and get blown out by the Colts.”

 

Cold, Hard Football Facts: Yeah, Seattle's so flawed that it went 13-3 this year and cruised easily in the divisional round without its top player.

 

Clayton: “(The Colts) are much better now against 3-4 defenses. All their games will be in a dome.”

 

Cold, Hard Football Facts: Hmm ... don't need to go there.

 

Clayton: “The Colts are two touchdowns better than any team in football.”

 

Cold, Hard Football Facts: Yeah, in October.