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Edited: To Broncos, Winning is Fundamental

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Contributed by: Mike Woodson on 1/24/2006

Team football and its fundamentals fill the field, to recall vintage Vince Lombardi's advice.

It is hard to occupy a football field with a team that has set its standards for fundamentals higher than all of the other teams. Such a team dominates the field while the opponent fights to stay in the game.

This is a lesson the Denver Broncos will no doubt restudy and reapply to themselves. That's what great teams do, and it is indisputable that Denver is a great team.

The championship team is not only drilled in the fundamentals of blocking and tackling, they are trained better in these than the other teams, to the man. Only one person can have possession of the ball at a time. That means that everyone else has one of two jobs to do during that time: blocking or tackling.

By drilling every team member beyond the other teams' expectations at blocking and tackling, it maximizes every offensive and defensive chance for the team to advance.

The other basics, besides running and passing skills, are ball handling (retaining and recovery) and stealing (including denial). These skills should be drilled almost as much as blocking and tackling, by every team member. It has often made the difference between victory and defeat.

Recruiting new muscle with superconductive nerves is a given. However, when measuring a coach and the players on the field, look to their teamwork and fundamentals in action. But remember, most of us don't understand what it is to be a fanatic in those qualities, much less in football, so we should speak with some humility about it.

In that sense, we the fans have to improve too. What do I mean? We're losing too many professional athletes, actors and everyone else exploited for entertainment value to the marketing cynicism of celebrity.

When we make celebrities of our athletes, we tend to distract them from the games that some would later persecute them for losing. The attitude begins with all the love for the team in the world, but ends with 'show us the money' or 'what have you done for us lately' attitudes. Just like spoiling kids and then condemning them for being spoiled, it is an ugly and ineffective fan philosophy where it is present.

There is a difference between being famous and being a celebrity. The first is incidental to a good job done, and the second is misuse and flattery of a person for money. The 12th man must remember this.

Am I talking too much about fundamentals of football and fanfare? It is because being good in the fundamentals, whether fresh or tired in the first and the fourth quarters, is the measurement of the desire to win, or for your team to win. Perhaps the team is bigger than we think.

Knowing how good the other teams do on the fundamentals from start to finish, and then training above their level is the mile high road. And, physiologically, it is easier to do this at the mile high mark, or above.

For fans, the fundamentals are a respectful participation in the game. For the Denver Broncos, here is a reminder from Vince Lombardi's history, that if a team as low as the Packers could be turned around to successive championships by Lombardi's advice, a team as great as the Broncos can apply the same advice and be even better in its time.

Lombardi set a high standard worth remembering for the rest of us, when he said, "Perfection is not attainable. But if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence." Everyone has the heart potential for this.

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Mike Woodson

Denver

Mike Woodson has posted 36 stories and 0 comments since joining on 1/17/2006. Mike Woodson 's average story rating is 4.55.

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