A novel notion of "balance"

[Laurence Horn]

On Jan 12, 2014, at 8:56 PM, Victor Steinbok wrote:

> I thought about that possibility but
>
> 1) the usual use of "balanced attack" in the context of American
> football is the relatively similar distribution between pass and run
> 2) the Patriots have used three or four running backs regularly for the
> past decade--the names have changed, but not the scheme

But they've been known as a passing team forever, until this season when they were reliant on rookies, little guys (Amendola, Edelman), and especially Gronkowski, who then lost his season to ACL/MCL surgery, so they've remade themselves as a running team.  So just as we can describe Denver as having a balanced passing attack (a record-settling passing team not dependent on any one or even two receivers), we can describe the Pats as having a balanced running attack.

> 3) if they normally use four running backs (which I agree that they do),
> it is unusual to have two featured to this extent (balanced would have
> been 18, 10, 10, 4, or something like that)

> 4) 24 and 14 don't look particularly "balanced" even though both are
> unusually high for 1st and 2nd most on the team, respectively (see (3)
> and (2) above)


Not really; remember that was this one game (and if I'm right, that game hadn't even been played at the time of the article); throughout the season as a whole, the division of labor has been spread pretty evenly among Ridley, Vereen (when he recovered from an injury), and Blount, and occasionally Bolden.


LH
>
>
> In any case, I did not want to make it about football so much as just
> pointing to a grabbing headline that gave potentially questionable
> information.
>
>    VS-)
>
>
> On 1/12/2014 1:51 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>> On Jan 12, 2014, at 1:11 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>>
>>> At 1/12/2014 12:50 PM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:
>>>> I thought the "balance" referred to the substitution of runners: Ridley had
>>>> 14 carries, nearly as many as the leading Colts rusher, and Blount had 24.
>>>>
>>>> It is rare that the second most frequent rusher has as many as 14 carries.
>>> Dan has information I didn't, and associates "balance" (correctly, I
>>> take it) with the runners rather than the runs.
>>>
>> And going into the game (when I assume this was written), the reference would have been to the fact that the Patriots regularly use three running backs in significant ways--Ridley [their original started, who was benched for a while because of fumbling problems], Blount [who has emerged recently], Shane Vereen [who plays on third down and catches a lot of passes]--and a fourth running back, Brandon Bolden, has played a bunch too.  An unusually balanced running attack, in other words.
>>
>> --LH (in Pats' country)
>
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