And the winner is … “Dial up a blitz.”
That nouveau football cliché beat out such stellar competition as “Take a shot down the field,” “It depends on the spot” and “Shy of the first down” to capture the 26th annual Trite Trophy, as awarded by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Gene Collier.
“Somewhere, somehow, defensive coordinators lost the ability to just call a blitz, order a blitz, signal a blitz, send in a blitz or even just blitz,” Collier wrote. “They suddenly were forced to ‘Dial up a blitz.’ It’s a beauty of a cliche, and it meets our ageless criteria: it’s meaningless, it’s everywhere, and I really, really hate it.
“It’s got multiple malignancies, such as the matter of when you do dial, whom do you call? Second, who dials anything any more? I mean as of, like, 1990, my grandmother and the Yanomamo Tribe of deepest Venezuela were the only people that still had that technology.”