FLOWERY BRANCH — The Falcons plan to stick to their script in order to find a way to start games with a punch.
The great Bill Walsh pioneered the strategy to script offensive plays to start the game when he was Paul Brown’s trusted assistant with the Cincinnati Bengals in the 1960s and ’70s. At first, it was just a short list of plays before it reached 25 plays and then later was condensed to 15 plays during his heyday in San Francisco.
Walsh’s thinking behind scripting was that he could make more thorough play-calling decisions on the days leading to the game than during the heat of the battle.
Now, most every team in the NFL has some form of a script, including the Falcons.
On Fridays, Falcons coordinator Mike Mularkey meets with quarterback Matt Ryan to finalize the script.
This season, the script has yielded just a field goal on the three opening drives. But since Mularkey and Ryan have been together, the Falcons are 17-6 (.739) when they score a touchdown or field goal on the opening drive off the pre-game script.
Mularkey, who was a ninth-round draft pick of the San Francisco 49ers in 1983, picked up a few things from Walsh during his stint with the team. He would go on to a nine-year playing career with Minnesota and Pittsburgh. “I’ve been around a lot of coaches with the scripting,” Mularkey said. “There is a lot of time put into it.”
In 2008, the Falcons scored eight times on their opening drives and were 8-0. In 2009, the Falcons scored seven times, but were 2-5.
Last season, they scored seven times and were 7-0. This season they made a field goal on the first drive of the season at Chicago, but lost.
At the end of the meeting, the script is a list of 15 plays derived from the study of statistical and probability data compiled from studying the film of an opponent. The numbers should reveal what type of plays work against a defense on a certain down-and-distance range. In addition to studying tendencies and percentages, there is some room for human intuition.
”You have to go off of tendencies based off of what people do,” Mularkey said. “That’s part of it. Then it’s what do we do that they better defend. Then you have philosophies of why you’re doing it in those top 15 plays.”
Ryan looks forward to the script meetings. The goal is simple.
“We want to have a plan before we get into the game,” Ryan said. “We try to play the game mentally on Fridays together. I think that it’s something of great importance.”
Mularkey tries to stick to his script, but he’ll deviate if necessary.
“Sometimes, I go straight through it,” Mularkey said. “Sometimes, I get off of it the second series. Sometimes, I’ll see something the very first couple of plays. ‘Hey, if they are going to do this, we’ve got a better play somewhere else that’s not in [the script].’ It just depends on how the flow of the game is going and how the script is going.”
Ryan and backup quarterback Chris Redman said they were first introduced to scripting plays in college.
“I played in a West Coast-type system in college, and that’s kind of a big part of that offense,” Ryan said. “You are changing your personnel groups and doing some different things. I think that helped me when I came down here.”
During the course of the 15 plays, the offense is trying to learn how the defense will react to different situations and formations. For example, when the Falcons go with four wide receivers, will Seattle try to play man or zone coverage? Will they try to play man or zone when the Falcons have three receivers and flank out tight end Tony Gonzalez?
“Mike [Mularkey] has done a great job of throwing different formations, different personnel groupings, different stuff at them in the first 15, to kind of see how they’re going to play certain things,” Ryan said. “That gives you a real good indicator of what you’re going to see for the majority of the day.”
For the most part, the Falcons plan to stick to their script. “We don’t know any other way,” Mularkey said.
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