today marks the first anniversary of the Dolphins' unveiling of the Wildcat offense last year in New England.
Amazingly, some are wondering if the trend has already run its course. See the lead item in today's Ask Mike!, which you really should visit more often to share your questions/concerns. We can always move them over here if they are serious/thought-provoking enough, as we're doing at this very moment!
Not sure if you saw this exchange, the one between Jon Gruden and Ron Jaworski -- who will call tonight's game for ESPN along with Mike Tirico -- but it certainly had me running it back on TiVo when I saw it Saturday night.
Gruden: "Happy Birthday, Wildcat offense. I’ve been here all day trying to get in David Lee’s offense. They kicked me out of the building. They are up to something here. There’s going to be a lot of Wildcat formations here [on Monday night] as it continues to revolutionize the National Football League."
Jaworski: "I love the Wildcat. It’s great. I’m glad Coach Lee is up there working all the plays. Maybe he can give them to the college coaches, because that’s where they work. At the NFL level you must have a quarterback that plays from the pocket. He gets the ball into the hands of his playmakers. He reads coverage, hits them in time, hits them in space. They score touchdowns, big plays. Not the Wildcat. You know that guy, Peyton Manning? That’s who I want to talk about."
Jaworski is very astute. Maybe the best analyst out there (along with Phil Simms and Chris Collinsworth). So does it worry you at all that he is so dismissive of the Wildcat? Or is he just flat wrong on this one?
By the way, in honor of the anniversary, here's what Tony Sparano had to say recently when asked if he feared potential embarrassment when his team broke out the Wildcat with that Ronnie Brown 2-yard TD run on second-and-goal with 2:32 left in the first quarter of a scoreless game. Against a team, no less, that had won 22 straight regular-season games, employs a defensive genius as its head coach and came within 35 seconds of completing the first 19-0 season in league history:
"I don't think so," Sparano said. "I think that had we gone to New England and run two plays of Wildcat and it didn't go well and we would have come back in here [for a news conference], I don't know, I guess I would have gotten beat up for two plays, but it would have been two plays, depending on the look. ... Sometimes people go into the game, they run reverses, do all these other crazy things and take the ball out of the quarterback's hands. That was one of the thoughts. We had specific looks we thought this could be really successful against. When we put it out there and we started to see some of these looks, we thought, 'This is pretty good. This isn't bad. Maybe we can keep going with this a little bit and see where we go with it.' "
