Blanchette: NFL’s top defense claims to keep it simple

PHOENIX – One head coach is a world-class grump, the other has a surfeit of zen. Throw in their outsized reputations and there’s barely room enough in Super Bowl XLIX for the both of them.

But since it wouldn’t be a Super Bowl without excess, this game has a third.

However, the Atlanta Falcons can’t name Seattle Seahawks defensive coordinator Dan Quinn as their head coach until a winner is decided on Sunday evening at University of Phoenix Stadium. As NFL rules go, this is probably more necessary than the one that results in a grown man saying “I’m here so I won’t get fined” 29 times in a row.

But the Falcons will and Quinn will be gone, and for the second time in three years, the best defense in pro football will have to find another chief strategist to confound the offensive savants and gurus of the NFL.

May we suggest dipping into the Pop Warner ranks. According to the Seahawks, this stuff is so simple a child could do it.

“Maybe three base defenses, maybe four nickel defenses,” linebacker K.J. Wright said. “Then he turns us loose.”

If this is true, then apparently we’re to pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

We have been pretty much brainwashed over the years to accept that the devising and tweaking of plays and schemes in the grand science of football requires the most gifted minds across multiple generations. Quantum physics is tough, sure, but it’s not Cover 2.

Now along comes the team that has led the NFL in fewest points allowed for a third straight season – not done since the old Purple People Eaters of Minnesota in 1969-71 – and those in the know are telling us there’s next-to-nothing to it.

“Really, teams know what we’re doing,” Wright said. “It’s so simple they can’t not know.”

Fewer schemes, Quinn noted, “allows you to be kind of freed up mentally. It allows you to play even faster. There’s not another check. There’s not another alert. One of the things we say is it’s not what we play or what we call. It’s how we play it. There can’t be so many checks that you’re not just getting your cleats in the grass and getting after somebody.”

And then he says this: “It is 100 percent about the players.”

At which point, another assumption collides with an unlikely truth. If it’s about the players, you’d have to think the Seahawks have stockpiled nothing but first- and second-round draft picks out there, mixed in with some free-agent All-Pros.

Except we know all too well that the defense is manned by low-rounders – Wright (fourth), Richard Sherman and Kam Chancellor (fifth), Byron Maxwell (sixth) – and undrafted free-agents like Michael Bennett.

So the genius is in identification, projection and development, apparently – and then getting the hell out of the way.

Or as Quinn put it, “Featuring what guys do best.”

That can be as simple as sticking with a four-man rush without much blitzing because you have confidence that, in time, Bennett and Cliff Avril will bring the heat. Or it can just mean letting an attitude like that of safety Earl Thomas carry the day.

“After he dislocated his shoulder (in the NFC title game), he came back and hit (Eddie) Lacy as hard as he could with the same shoulder,” Quinn said. “I think that play sums up the intensity that he has because the natural thing would be, ‘Okay, I’m going to hit this dude with my other shoulder.’ It was just the opposite. It was, ‘I’m going to stay true to who I am.’

“We try to celebrate that uniqueness with him. He’s such a competitor. If 10 is the high, he’s an 11. He comes to walk-through with a mouthpiece in.”

That kind of toughness mirrors the gristle of Quinn, an old Division III defensive tackle who likes to don thick arm pads in drills and do battle with his linemen.

He was on staff when Pete Carroll first arrived in Seattle, departed after a year to coach the defense at the University of Florida, then was quickly invited back when defensive coordinator Gus Bradley was named head coach at Jacksonville. It took all of a year for Quinn to become a coveted head coaching prospect himself.

And yet down in Jacksonville, Bradley – the last hot property – is 7-25 after two years. Only four NFL coaches in history were worse after two seasons, and none got a third.

Bradley’s problem: He didn’t get to bring Earl Thomas and the fellas with him.

Quinn has the same problem. Atlanta was 32nd in total defense in the NFL this year. If the Falcons are keeping it simple, it’s simply bad.

Back in Seattle, they’ll find another defensive savant. He’d be well-advised not to outsmart himself.