The late Dean Smith really perfected the artform of the four-corner offense in the 60s while coaching at North Carolina. It led to the shot clock. In football, the prevent defense actually, statistically, works most of the time it’s tried, and no one even notices it…until it doesn’t work. And when it doesn’t work, the results are spectacular, like in 2012’s AFC Division championship between the Denver Broncos and the Baltimore Ravens, nicknamed the Mile High Miracle. Denver had the lead late, went into prevent mode, and a rather wild, broken play developed that led to the Ravens tying the game and eventually winning in overtime.

Fans hate these stall techniques, because they want to see competition, not people literally trying to run out the clock in a game people paid good money to see. So the question now becomes, do the sports analogies translate to politics? Does the stall game work most of the time it’s tried, or is there a political price to pay for running and hiding?

The most recent example, before Wednesday night’s GOP debate in Milwaukee, was Joe Biden’s 2020 entire presidential campaign. He campaigned on two planks – I’m just normal Joe (which he’s demonstrated countless times in the days since that there’s nothing normal about him), and I’m not Donald Trump. That was enough for the majority of the electorate in 2020, so much so that he didn’t really come out of the basement too much for months on end. But he did at least debate during the Democratic primaries, and he did debate Trump in the general election.

The former President’s strategy of not participating in the first GOP debate can be attributed to several factors. Nationally, it’s hard to make the claim he’s not leading in every poll by substantial numbers. In state polls, especially the ones up first like Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada and Florida, Trump appears to be coasting to primary and caucus wins. So why put himself in harm’s way, right?

Secondarily, I’m sure the legal counsel representing him in four different jurisdictions on nearly 100 felony counts of misconduct are not just advising, but screaming at him to not go near a microphone or a television camera, or anything that has the capability of recording what he says. That’s probably sound counsel. And with five months to go until the Iowa Caucus, any number of wild cards can enter the equation that would change the dynamics of the primary contest. But will there be a political price to pay for skipping the first debate? Maybe.

The latest Des Moines Register poll has some interesting depth to its top-line numbers. Yes, Trump is well ahead of the rest of the field, at 42%. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is at 19%, but if you look at second and third-choice options, which matter a whole lot in a caucus state, as NBC’s Steve Kornacki reported, Iowa may be a lot closer than at first blush.

DeSantis may not be a lot of Iowans’ first choice, but if the field in successive rounds of caucus voting narrow down, DeSantis gets more of the “Not Trump” vote. In fact, the Wall Street Journal notes that if you add in first and second-choice voters, Donald Trump still holds a lead in Iowa with 63% of the vote. But Governor DeSantis is only two points behind that, holding at 61% with first and second-choice voters. That’s not a very commanding lead with which to employ the prevent defense or four-corner offense.

And that’s the thing about Wednesday night’s debate. With Trump deciding not to engage or participate, he’s abandoning the stage to the top eight Not Trump candidates to fight for what is actually the plurality of the GOP electorate. Remember, Donald Trump may be at 42%, but the Not Trump vote is at 58%. Trump’s arraignment theatrics being scheduled at Fulton County jail Thursday morning very well might strategically bump anything said at the debate off the headlines, but to voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, they take their first in the nation status very seriously, and they pay attention to all of this stuff. As Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds told Shannon Bream on Fox News Sunday, Iowans expect Trump to be there.

So without Trump on stage, the opportunity is there for all eight candidates to make the case for why they should be the best repository for the Not Trump vote, unfettered, more or less, by the circus environment and debate time suck that Trump standing center stage would have presented.

1983’s War Games featured early AI, encased under the mountain at NORAD in a big box called the WOPR. It wouldn’t be a good government/Defense Department thriller without all the appropriate acronyms. When forced to map out all the thousands of contingencies for the results of global thermonuclear war, WOPR comes to the conclusion that sometimes, the only way to win the game is not to play. That, at least for the first debate, and maybe all of them, seems to be Donald Trump’s strategy. And again, it might work. But the game does indeed go on, and there are going to be winners and losers from the stage in Milwaukee, and that ‘Not Trump’ vote will begin, even if it’s ever so slightly, to coalesce.

By the way, just to preemptively call my shot, having written this column the afternoon before the debate, is that Chris Christie will be the proverbial torpedo in the water with the safeties off, to cite another scene from another movie, The Hunt For Red October. His intended target all along was to prosecute the case against Donald Trump. I’m sure there were will be a lot of that, even with the former President in absentia. But with the rhetorical problems of Vivek Ramaswamy this week – wanting to end military aid to Israel in 2028, feeding Taiwan to the CCP wolves in 2028 after we become semi-conductor independent, baiting the Atlantic’s John Hendrickson enough that the raw audio of Vivek venturing off into 9/11 Truther land was released, my suspicion is that Christie torpedo will strike the USS Ramaswamy midships.