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In the season's opener against the underdog Buffalo Bills, a team that almost always plays its best against New York, Namath ran a carefully modulated game, passing only 14 times as he set up his running attack. Joe Willie did manage one touchdown strike to Halfback Emerson Boozer as the Jets won, 41-24. Then came the Baltimore Colts —now rivals of the Jets in the Eastern Division of the N.F.L.'s American Conference—who had beaten the Jets four times since the dramatic Super Bowl confrontation. Playing for the first time in Baltimore's cavernous Memorial Stadium, Namath put on the most spectacular aerial circus this side of the Lafayette Escadrille. Against the Colts' touted zone defense, which had yielded only nine touchdown passes in all of the 1971 regular season, Namath completed 15 out of 28 passes for six touchdowns and 496 yds. in the air, the third highest total in league history.* Final score: Jets 44, Colts 34.
The following weekend in Houston, Joe let down slightly, and his teammates sagged considerably as the overconfident Jets were defeated by the fired-up Oilers, 26-20. Even so, Namath completed 18 of 39 passes, two of them going for touchdowns, and picked up an impressive 301 yds. in the air. That brought the Jets face guard to face guard with their toughest divisional foe, the Miami Dolphins, who after three weeks of the season had survived as the N.F.L.'s only undefeated team.
Win or lose, Namath generates more high-voltage excitement than any other player in the game. Indeed he is the sort of thrill producer that the N.F.L. badly needs these days. On the surface (whether it is Mother Nature's or Sudo Turf) the game still appears to be prospering at the brisk pace it set in the 1960s. Baseball may be the national pastime, but pro football has become the national obsession. It is now, according to N.F.L. Commissioner Alvin ("Pete") Rozelle, a $130 million-a-year business. There are 26 teams in the league's two conferences, and Rozelle talks of expanding to such locales as Tampa, Fla., Phoenix, Honolulu and Mexico City. Last year the N.F.L.'s regular-season attendance surpassed ten million for the first time. Psychologists and sociologists by the score are peering into homes to determine the familial side effects on the 30 million-plus Americans who sit glazed before the tube on Sunday afternoons and Monday nights.
During the past few years, a funny thing happened on the way to the goal line: the offensive units got stomped. In 1969, 908 touchdowns were scored in the N.F.L. The number dipped in 1970 to 797 and rose only slightly last year (806). The fundamental reason for the scoring decline lay in the growing savagery and sophistication of football's defensive units.
Years back, coaches began to realize that the way to beat the Johnny Unitases and Y.A. Tittles was not to try and outscore them, but to devise bold new means to stop them. Thus football tacticians developed the zone defense (see diagram next page), a formation of varying intricacy designed basically to provide blanket coverage deep in the defensive secondary and thus rob the offense of its most lethal weapon: the long bomb.