No geniuses in football

William L. Bryan, Special to the News

Published September 24, 2006 at midnight

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No less an authority than Joe Theismann once said, "Nobody in the game of football should be called a genius. A genius is somebody like Norman Einstein."

Well said, Joe.

On Sunday night, Bill Belichick the Genius and Mike Shanahan the Mastermind matched wits in Foxborough like Spassky and Fischer in Reykjavik or Rommel and Montgomery in Egypt. For all the hype leading up to the game, one might have believed that 400 IQ points were locked in a struggle to split the atom in 60 minutes. Thank God, that wasn’t the case, because that’s not good television.

As deathly boring as the pregame discussions made it sound, I was greatly relieved to tune into the game and find it so pleasantly . . . football. Patrick Chukwurah threw up on the field, and they showed replays. Tom Brady threw at least three temper tantrums, and if you slowed it way down, you could watch him spitting on the refs while he screamed at them. D.J. Williams lit up Kevin Faulk. If you have TiVo, you probably ran all those things back and forth a bunch of times. It was cool.

Genius in football is misplaced. There are certainly geniuses, guys like Albert Einstein, who failed mathematics in the eighth grade, but generally you would start with a person’s education. Every head coach in the NFL has a college degree, which is a good start. Six NFL head coaches, including the Mastermind, have master’s degrees. That’s the good news.

Only three NFL head coaches graduated from elite universities, including the Genius, who has a degree in economics from Wesleyan. Jets coach Eric Mangini, a Genius protégé, also attended Wesleyan, and Bills coach Dick Jauron played his college ball at Yale. All six coaches with master’s degrees received them as graduate assistants for their alma maters, and with the exception of Giants coach Tom Coughlin, who studied education at Syracuse, all of them essentially received advanced degrees in coaching football. Andy Reid’s master’s course at BYU is listed as, and I am not making this up, "Professional Leadership in Physical Education and Athletics."

The fact that three head coaches – the Mastermind, the Saints’ Sean Payton and the Vikings’ Brad Childress – graduated from Eastern Illinois University puts football genius in perspective. Princeton is up on EIU 29-0 in Nobel Prizes. And it’s only halftime. The reason that for so many years color guys wore you out talking about ex-Bills coach Marv Levy’s master’s in history from Harvard was because it was noteworthy.

I am not trying to claim that NFL coaches are stupid. There is, however, an expansive middle ground between stupid and genius that they probably occupy. Calling a 30-yard timing pattern on third down-and-1 is gutsy, it’s fun, and it’s great football, but it isn’t genius. Or mastermindful, as the case might be.

On Sunday night, the Mastermind looked smarter than the Genius, but a monstrous intellect based on the speed of Javon Walker is very likely overrated.