TendenciesWhat a team or a player does in certain situations -- what Holmgren worked on as a young assistant -- always has been fascinating, and teams react to it in different ways.
In Denver, Mike Shanahan took the information a step further, establishing a routine that has been copied in Houston by Gary Kubiak, the Broncos' former offensive coordinator: The training camp schedule is dictated by the previous season's situations.
Kubiak explains it this way: "We go back and look at our season, and we look statistically at how much time each phase of the game took, what percentage. Let's say we were on the goal line three percent of the time. Then, three percent of training camp is going to be devoted to the goal line. We reset all our practice schedules to coincide with how much time we were spending on that phase of the game."
Holmgren says he's not much of a stats guru, but earlier in his career, he was. He focuses first on interceptions, something he got from his NFL coaching mentor, the late Bill Walsh, with the San Francisco 49ers in the 1980s. Few things ever bugged Walsh more than a quarterback throwing an interception.
It's no coincidence that Joe Montana and Steve Young, the 49ers' Hall of Fame quarterbacks, were two of the hardest-to-intercept passers in NFL history. But it is the weirdest of coincidence that it's necessary to go to four decimal places to separate their interception percentage. Montana's interception percentage was 2.5783, Young's 2.5789.
"Interceptions come in all degrees and sizes," Holmgren said. "Just the number itself can be misleading at times. That was a big one with Bill. I look at what happened."
In 1989, when Holmgren became offensive coordinator of the 49ers, he decided to study every interception Montana, who already had won three Super Bowls, threw in his entire career. When Holmgren put the information together, he realized that about one-fourth of Montana's interceptions came on a single play.
Montana liked the play, a vertical stretch route down the middle of the field, because it appealed to his gambling instinct, Holmgren recalled. Walsh had liked it, too, but Walsh retired after the 1988 season. So Holmgren went to George Seifert, Walsh's successor, and they agreed to remove the play from the playbook.
As it turned out, Montana had his best season in 1989. He set a league passer rating record, since broken. He threw only eight interceptions, the lowest total of his 49ers' career, and had his highest completion percentage, 70.2. The 49ers rolled to their fourth Super Bowl victory.
San Francisco probably would have won it all that year, even if Holmgren's statistical study did not remove that one play from the offense. But ...
"If you can change the behavior a little bit with arguably the greatest quarterback ever, then numbers can make a difference," Holmgren said.
Statistics, of course, don't always tell the whole story.
In 2001, when New England won its first Super Bowl, the Patriots ranked 19th in the NFL on offense and 24th on defense. They ranked near the bottom of the league in yards per pass attempt and in getting their quarterback sacked. They ranked near the bottom of the league in field position after kickoffs, giving their opponents a 3.1-yard edge. They did rank among the league leaders in red zone defense, but the rest of their numbers were mediocre.
Which only proves that a Tom Brady, like Montana and the other greats, is much more comforting to a coach than a glitzy stat sheet.
