'Flood the Zone' is Our Term.

Get your own lingo, idiots

Thanks for reading The Dope.

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Yeah, listen, D.C., you can’t have Flood the Zone. That’s not yours. Give it back.

“Flood the zone” is a sports term, always was. In football, it’s a pretty basic offensive strategy. A team sends a rackful of receivers over to one side of the field in an attempt to force its opponent to overcommit defenders to that side.

Like this:

Trips right — let’s say two wideouts and a tight end. One man runs a flat route, one a deep out, one a go route. (Short, intermediate, long.)

This flooding of the right-side “zone” by the receivers provokes — or can provoke — a pretty dramatic shift in defensive alignment, especially among weaker defensive teams. It may leave the middle or left side of the field dangerously exposed. So you flood the zone as an offense in order to open up possibilities in a bunch of different sectors of the field, including (potentially) some running or scrambling lanes middle and left.

A better defensive team, one with skilled one-on-one defenders, may just risk man coverage on that heavy side to keep things balanced. But for a team running, say, a single high zone defense like a Cover 3, overloading the one side sort of starts the clock on the chess game that’s about to ensue: shift, adjustment, shift, etc.

Sports term. Flood the zone.

Leave it alone, you wanton political hacks. You can’t have it.

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Oh, sure, various sports have been swiping military terms and making them into sportsy sayings forever and ever. You’ve got baseball hitters and football quarterbacks both launching bombs, and it’s true that many games are won in the trenches.

And yes, a good coach is often warmly described as a field general. He’s probably won a lot of battles from season to season, often by sending his troops on blitzes in hopes of sacking opposing QBs.

(Sacking. Serious war term. It meant plundering and then destroying a town or city, as in, The rustic village was sacked by the invading hordes.)

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If you’re unlucky or on a really bad team, you’ll at some point get blown away by an opponent. (In the military, that means what you think it does: killed by gunfire.) Bad teams can also find themselves gutted, crushed, flattened, slaughtered, massacred — say, this is getting a little depressing — routed, annihilated, thrashed, battered. Even sandbagged is a war term.

Tough business, man.

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With all of this blatant appropriating duly noted, it’s still off-putting to see a perfectly useful sports phrase like “flood the zone” wind up in the sleazy province of political football. (Wait: I just mashed up two very profitable industries.)

Couldn’t the political hacks just call it something else? “Throw everything against the wall” isn’t original, but people would know what the pols meant, and it’s more honest than the more opaque “flood the zone,” at least to my sports-attuned ears.

That would keep the peace. At least until the moment when someone asks me who I’m voting for to win the next game.