It May Be Time to Forget Playcalling Even Being Big Deal

Picking what play to call isn't biggest positive Petrino brings back to Razorbacks' offense

Arkansas Razorbacks offensive coordinator Bobby Petrino at a fall camp practice on the outdoor field in Fayetteville, Ark. / Andy Hodges-Hogs on SI Images

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — The Great Unwashed of fans and media constantly refer to Arkansas offensive coordinator Bobby Petrino as The Great Playcaller, which is silly. Picking the play to call is the most overrated thing in football.

To be fair, it's dismissing the most important aspect in football and taking the credit away from the players. The overwhelming majority of time, the coach that called the play don't even know what's going to happen when the ball is snapped. I've had the coaches tell me that repeatedly for about 50 years or so.

Petrino's strongest point isn't the playcalling. That's the term lazy media people use because they either didn't play football in a very complicated system or simply don't know more than the fans. Bobby is a master at some things, but he's called his share of snaps that fizzled.

No, Bobby's biggest strength is preparation of the offense. The quarterbacks and receivers have to be able to read the defensive keys and everybody be on the same page. The Razorbacks have lost games the last three seasons because KJ Jefferson wasn't very good at reading a defense.

To be fair, I've never heard Petrino brag about his playcalling. He has always given credit to the players, which is where it should go. That's giving the credit where it rightfully should go, which is often ignored because everybody likes to think it's really that simple. In today's world of football with so much pre-snap and post-snap reads taking place, it's not that simple.

Maybe some high schools still call "split left, 42 power on three," which meant the receiver was wide to the left, the quarterback got the snap and handed to a tailback with a fullback leading him over the right guard. It's not that simple anymore.

Coaches know execution is far more important than what is called. Coaches for the Hogs have told me about bad reads making everybody look like an idiot when it came down to one player not seeing things correctly. That's nothing new in football.

"Every play is designed to score a touchdown," Chuck Dicus told "Arkansas Fooball," a sister magazine to "Texas Football" that Dave Campbell started in the 1960's out of Waco, Texas. I'm pretty sure it was due to Orville Henry at the Arkansas Gazette having a hand in that somehow. That comment in 1970 pretty much reinforced what I had heard from coaches for years.

History somehow overlooks why a play looked like a genius call. Most of them are the result of something breaking down somewhere, usually on the defensive side the ball. Sometimes the defense just goes brain-dead and doesn't bother even trying to play correct technique. That's how Ryan Mallett pulled off that big pass just before halftime of the game against LSU in 2010.

In 1974, Ara Parseghian at Notre Dame was cited as a genius for calling a pass to a tight end near the end of the Sugar Bowl against Alabama. On the surface it looked exactly like that. The reality was the Crimson Tide's All-American linebacker, Robin Parkhouse, fell down trying to get out to cover the tight end, leaving him wide open. It happens.

The best coaches had a way of explaining when they didn't work. Bear Bryant was always wanting offensive coordinator Mal Moore to run reverses against defenses accustomed to flowing with the Tide's wishbone in the 1970's. They did against Houston one year after Bryant was on the verge of firing somebody if the reverse wasn't called.

Moore finally call it and it was looking perfect. A Cougars' defender on the backside, though, was give-out from chasing the wishbone and wandered up the field when the started to go away from him. The Alabama receiver ran right into him and the chase ended up in a loss at the feet of Bryant and Moore on the sideline.

"I meant the other way," Bryant yelled at Moore. The best ones have always had the best excuses when things go sideways during a play. The end result is it all comes down to executiion.

That's exactly what Petrino gets by painstaking preparation. It would be fascinating to just sit in the back of one of those meetings and listen to the explanations to the players. Petrino is good at watching film and does it the way coaches used to explain it to young minds of mush in the early 1970's. There are always keys.

Forget all this playcalling nonsense. As Darrell Royal said after Texas' James Street overthrew Randy Peschel in the 1969 Big Shootout when the tight end stuck his arms up and the ball it it, "sometimes you just gotta pick a number." That one broke the hearts of Arkansas fans everywhere and eliminated that shot at winning the school's first national title.

Petrino will have the offense vastly improved over last year. At least now, the offensive coordinator is focused and not off doing goofy things that even included getting into e-mail wars with students after games (yes, that happened last year).

It won't be about the plays he calls during the games. It will be about how he prepares the offense before they even get to the stadium on game days. They will know the keys to read and the best ones for Petrino have been on the same page with him.

Check back with us around October to see if that's good enough for more wins. The fans are expecting that, but the questions are going to be there until we get the answers and it will take that long.

Even when The Great Playcaller was at Louisville, he could not have gone to the Kentucky Derby and prepared a plow mule to win the thing. Whether the Hogs have thoroughbreds or not won't be known for awhile.

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