The Three Battles of Wanat

by Mark Bowden

  Mudd had been around the NFL long enough to know that a new idea, even a great one, would be a hard sell. Football is a conservative sport. “It was like suggesting a different route home to someone who has been commuting the same way for years,” Mudd says. “They’ll say, ‘I don’t want to go that way.’”

  At first Mudd’s teams practiced the silent snap count reluctantly and used it sparingly, so the timing of the offensive linemen was off as much as it was on. But by the time Mudd started working with Colts linemen in 1998, charged with protecting Manning, the league’s number one draft pick, he believed the silent count was more than just expedient. It was actually a better way to snap the ball.

  What convinced him was left tackle Tarik Glenn.

  A coach with a great idea is nothing without a great player. Glenn was the genius Mudd had been waiting for. “He was the best,” Mudd says. “The best ever.”

  A first-round draft pick in 1997, Glenn spent his first year discovering that blocking NFL defensive ends was hard under ordinary circumstances, and when he couldn’t hear, it was nearly impossible. Manning arrived the following year and was understandably frustrated when defensive ends kept hitting him like freight trains from his blind side. Mudd remembers hearing the quarterback chew out Glenn on the sideline during one game and stepping up to defend his tackle. “Tarik can’t hear you,” Mudd told Manning.

  “Well, he should be able to hear,” Manning complained. “It’s not that loud.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Mudd said.

  “Well, [tackle Adam] Meadows can hear!”

  “You are not in charge of deciding what Tarik can hear and what he can’t hear!” Mudd told him.

  Mudd prevailed on his skeptical coach, Jim Mora, to let him drill the players on the silent count at every practice. If deaf kids could do it, Mudd told the players, pros could too. And he was right. In time Manning became a fervent convert.

  “I was wrong, and Howard was right,” Manning says. “It was my responsibility to make sure all the linemen could hear me, and it was especially difficult for us because we were using a no-huddle offense most of the time. The silent count solved a lot of problems for us.”

  The Colts got good at it. Glenn got very good at it. He learned to time the count to the swivel of his head. It was like a dance move. “It made a huge difference,” he says. “It gave me time to face the task at hand. It’s all about timing, and pretty quick I could just feel it.” In fact Glenn started getting off the snap so fast that refs flagged him, claiming he had jumped too early. Mudd defended him. “He would send a man to the league office and have them review it,” says Glenn. “After a while they started to see that I wasn’t offside. Coach Howard didn’t just come up with the silent count; he sold it, to the team and then to the league.”

  Soon Manning and Saturday were using the silent count for every snap on the road, and they even used it in their own domed stadium when things got too loud. Manning by then was famous for gesticulating and shouting instructions from the backfield before the snap of the ball. With the silent count he didn’t have to worry about inadvertently triggering—à la Baab—the snap. Once he had things set the way he wanted, he would tap or signal Saturday, and the silent count would take over. “He could also do more to manipulate the defense with his leg, given that they had to anticipate the snap so much more intensely,” the retired center recalls.

  Manning noticed another advantage. “Our timing got so good with it,” he says, “we were getting fewer offensive penalties on the road than at home.” The silent count was not just a remedy for the noise problem; it was also a secret weapon. During Mudd’s twelve years in Indianapolis, his offensive line allowed fewer sacks than any other in the NFL, even though Manning’s offense relied on passing. The Colts won the Super Bowl in 2007.

  In the highly competitive world of the NFL, anything that works is quickly adopted leaguewide. As Mudd recalls, the first team to pick up the silent snap count after Indianapolis was New England. Then came Pittsburgh. Coaches would call Mudd to ask about the count. That put him in a tough spot, because the Colts had come to regard it as a prized secret.

  George Sefcik, the Falcons’ offensive coordinator, called after Indianapolis gave his team trouble in the Georgia Dome in 1998. “Are you guys using a silent count?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” said Mudd.

  “Well, how do you do that?”

  Mudd was torn between his loyalty to the Colts and the kinship he felt with other longtime pro coaches—and he was damn proud of what he had done. “OK, there’s a rhythm that the center has after the quarterback taps him on the ass,” he told Sefcik. “You guys will have to figure out the rest. I don’t feel comfortable telling you every little part of it.”

  The Falcons figured out enough to use the count against the Vikings in the cacophonous Metrodome in the 1999 NFC title game. “My gosh,” Sefcik told Mudd afterward, “that is the most incredible thing.”

  Some found it hard to believe how often the Colts used the snap. Mudd got a phone call one day from Juan Castillo, who was then coaching the offensive line in Philadelphia. “I know you do the silent count on every snap, right?” he said. Mudd confirmed it.

  “Well, Brad Childress [the Eagles’ offensive coordinator, Castillo’s boss] doesn’t believe you do it every snap.”

  “You have that son of a bitch call me,” said Mudd, “and I’ll tell him.”

  Today every team in the NFL uses the silent snap count. Many centers signal its start by turning their heads to the side once or twice, but the basics are still the ones Mudd put in place in 1998 with the Colts.

  Moments of true vindication in a man’s life are rare, but Mudd’s came at a 2006 meeting of the NFL Competition Committee. He had been asked to attend as a consultant on a proposed rule change having nothing to do with the silent snap count, but during the session Jeff Fisher—who was then the Titans’ head coach, and whose entire career as an NFL defensive coach (1985–1994) had been square in the sack-happy era—launched a sustained objection to the growing use of the silent count. Fisher complained that the count was giving offensive linemen—here it came—an unfair advantage! When the center lifted or turned his head to signal that the silent count had begun, Fisher argued, he violated the rule against linemen moving before the snap of the ball.

  “The rule says that the center has to come to a complete stop for a full second before the ball is snapped,” said Fisher. He went on about it for some time, making the same point: it wasn’t fair!

  Eventually Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren, an old offensive coordinator, started chuckling. “Jeff, when are you supposed to go on defense anyway?” he asked.

  “Well, they are drawing us offside, and they are not supposed to,” argued Fisher.

  “Jeff, when are you supposed to go on defense?” Holmgren repeated.

  “They are not coming to a full stop!”

  “Jeff, when are you supposed to go?”

  Finally Fisher conceded, “When the ball goes.”

  Howard Mudd’s revolution was complete.

  Complaints like Fisher’s didn’t go away immediately. The next year the NFL circulated a memo instructing centers to stop moving their heads a full second before snapping the ball. Otherwise refs would flag them for illegal motion. It sounded like a small thing, but the Colts had perfected the rhythm of the silent count and did not want to mess with it. So they ignored the memo. Refs found the new rule too difficult to enforce, and it went the way of flags for excessive crowd noise.

  It disappeared by acclamation.

  The Hardest Job in Football

  Atlantic, January/February 2009

  If you were one of the millions of Americans watching NFL football on Sunday afternoon, September 21, 2008, you might have caught the humdinger of a finish in the New York Giants–Cincinnati Bengals game. At the two-minute warning, the winless Bengals were up by four points, but the Giants were threatening: they had the ball inside the Bengals’ ten, poised to sco
re what looked like the winning touchdown.

  Most of the people who witnessed this seesaw battle were watching it on CBS. The capacity crowd in Giants Stadium was 79,276 that afternoon, but was less than 1 percent of the game’s total audience. More than any other professional sport, football is primarily a television show. Many die-hard fans have never even attended a contest in person. For them, a football game is something that unfolds on their screen in a smooth and familiar way, so commonplace that few give it a second thought. The broadcast arrives in their living room, packaged in stereo sound and in full-color high definition, shown from continually shifting angles, from stadium-embracing wide shots to intimate close-ups, all of it smoothly orchestrated and narrated, and delivered up as though from the all-seeing eye of the supreme NFL fan, God Almighty.

  But let’s give it a second thought. Consider for a moment the complexity of a mere snippet of what you might have seen on the tube that Sunday afternoon:

  In the seconds between the return from the two-minute-warning commercial break and the snap of the ball to Giants quarterback Eli Manning, as play-by-play man Greg Gumbel quickly oriented the audience—It has been a dandy here at Giants Stadium. Two minutes to play. Bengals by four. Giants at the six-yard line. Second and goal. The Giants have one time-out remaining—the following scene-setting images flashed past in rapid succession:

  • A high, wide shot of the stadium and the walls of cheering fans.

  • Bengals quarterback Carson Palmer watching anxiously from the sidelines.

  • Bengals coach Marvin Lewis looking perplexed on the sidelines.

  • Giants coach Tom Coughlin, head down, talking intently into his headset microphone.

  • On the field, a close-up of Bengals middle linebacker Dhani Jones pointing urgently to his teammates and shouting, positioning them for the snap.

  • Manning shouting and gesturing behind center.

  • Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress lined up in the slot, poised, looking back toward Manning.

  • A wide shot showing the complete line of scrimmage as the ball is snapped and the play begins.

  Roll back to the beginning of this brief sequence, and here is how it sounded inside the windowless production trailer parked outside the stadium, where two rows of technicians sat beneath the glow of a hundred TV monitors, twenty screens across stacked five deep. Staring at this wall were three men: producer Mark Wolff on the left; technical director Dennis Stone on the right; and between them the show’s impresario, its director, Bob Fishman, known as “Fish.”

  Just before coming back on the air after the commercial, the crew counted down in unison:

  “Five!”

  “Four!”

  “Three!”

  Wolff shouted, “Fish is going to cut some shots!”

  “Two!”

  “One!”

  “Aaaand go!” shouted Fish, a wiry man wearing faded blue jeans, a loose-fitting long-sleeved cotton shirt, and a headset clamped over a baseball cap. He was leaning up and out of his swivel chair, choosing shots and barking orders, arms elevated, snapping his long fingers loudly with each new command. “Go fan shot! Ready four. Take four! Ready eight. Take eight! Ready one. Take one! Ready twelve. Take twelve! Ready five. Take five! Ready three—ready two. Take two! Ready three. Take three!”

  Camera three, which Fish returned to just before the snap of the ball, offers a wide angle from above that’s used to frame the play. In this case, with one eye on the play clock, Fish sneaked in one last scene-setting image—Burress lined up and looking back toward his quarterback—before returning to the wide angle as the ball was snapped.

  This was just thirty seconds. The entire broadcast would last more than three and a half hours.

  If the production crew of a televised football game is like a symphony orchestra, Bob Fishman is its conductor. He sits front and center in the dark trailer, insulated from the sunshine and the roar of the crowd, taking the fragments of sounds and moving images and assembling the broadcast on the fly, mediating the real event into the digital one. He scans the dizzying bank of screens to select the next shot, and the next, and the next, layering in replays, graphics, and sound, barking his orders via headset to his crew, plugging into a rhythm that echoes the pulse of the game.

  Every bit as much as the athletic contest on the field, this is a performance, an improvisation, a largely unheralded art form peculiar to the modern age. Wolff is in charge of the broadcast; Gumbel and analyst Dan Dierdorf are its voices and faces, but their work exists to complement the show Fish orchestrates onscreen. Having once seen him in action, having peeked behind the curtain in the Palace of Oz, I can hardly watch any other sporting event on TV without picturing this frantic, sinewy fifty-nine-year-old calling shot after shot after shot, half sitting and half standing, the dervish behind the professional program smoothly unspooling in your living room and in your brain.

  Recently, some cable and satellite companies began offering viewers a chance to, in effect, direct their own experience of a game by selecting camera angles, isolated shots, and replays as they wish. This may satisfy a few eccentric fans who prefer, say, to watch a middle linebacker’s–eye view for an entire game, but it suggests a failure to grasp the level of difficulty involved in what happens in that production trailer every Sunday. The television crews don’t just broadcast a game; they inhabit it. They know the players, the teams, the stats, and the strategies. They interview players and coaches the day before the game. They brainstorm, anticipate, plot likely story lines, prepare graphic packages of important stats, and bundle replays from previous contests to bring a sense of history and context to the event. They are not just pointing cameras and broadcasting the feed; they are telling the story of the game as it happens.

  And at the center of their effort is the director, Fish, who seems a more agreeable version of the finicky, exasperated comedian Larry David, whom he resembles, right down to the Curb Your Enthusiasm logo on the baseball cap he wears pulled down to his eyebrows. He peers out at the world through wire-rimmed glasses; plays guitar in a group of aging rockers; and loves to talk music, film, politics, journalism … but mostly, he loves to talk sports. He has won eleven Emmys, and justly so: for those who regard Sunday afternoons in football season as sacred, Fish is nothing less than a high priest.

  His camera operators revere him. Out of Fish’s earshot they have nothing but praise for him—and this from men (and one woman) with the blue-collar workers’ hearty, time-honored disdain for the boss.

  “Most of them are assholes,” said one, sitting at a round table with four fellow operators, who all nodded in agreement.

  “Fish is the best,” the same cameraman explained.

  “He appreciates what you bring to the job,” said another.

  “Suppose a defensive back makes an interception,” said the first. “At some point, I know, they are going to want to come back to a close-up of him. So when I know they are on another shot, I’ll use those seconds to start panning up and down the sidelines, looking for him. Fish knows what I’m doing. Another director might say, ‘We don’t need that now,’ and they wouldn’t say it nice, either. I’m thinking, No shit, but you’re going to ask for the shot in forty-five seconds, and you’re going to get pissed off if I spend fifteen seconds panning around looking for the guy.”

  “He never gets excited,” says another, “and he has this ability to see everything. If you have a good shot, he not only notices it; he uses it. Other directors might say, ‘Wow, that’s really nice,’ and never work it into the broadcast. Fish pulls the trigger.”

  The first major event Bob Fishman directed was the Apollo 17 moon launch on December 7, 1972, when the assigned director fell ill and Fish was the only CBS employee in the NASA press grandstand with a Directors Guild membership card. People noticed that he was good at it. He shifted from news to sports in 1976, and since then he has conducted basketball, football, baseball, auto racing, and Olympics events, as one of a small cor
ps of specialists who assemble and deliver the programs for which the networks pay billions.

  Fish grew up in the Virgin Islands, part of a Jewish family that owned a big vacation hotel, a sports-crazy kid with no local teams to follow. For him, pro sports have always been synonymous with television, and like any sincere professional, he cares a great deal about the medium’s aesthetics and standards. Nothing annoys him more these days than broadcasts—he mentions the name of one rival network (Fox) with particular disdain—that exhibit a faddish desire to neglect on-the-field action for reaction shots from the crowd. He cites with particular horror one NCAA playoff game on ESPN when the director routinely cut away from the court after a basket was scored to show fans’ reactions, and thus missed a historically well-executed full-court press.

  “There were seven steals!” he says. “Seven! Five of them resulted in baskets!” The team repeatedly stealing the ball was Kentucky, “and everybody knew that they always applied a full-court press after a basket! The steals were critical to their success in the game, and the audience didn’t even see them!”

  It was love at first sight when television met football for the first time, in 1939, in a game between Fordham University and Waynesburg College. Even though there was only one camera, mounted on a platform on the sidelines, the magic was apparent. Fans at home enjoyed a view comparable to that of a coach on the sidelines, and potential sponsors quickly realized that just as baseball came with built-in commercial breaks between innings, football afforded commercial opportunities between quarters and during time-outs.

  Nineteen years later, when almost fifty million people, the largest crowd ever to witness a football game, watched the Baltimore Colts beat the Giants in overtime for the 1958 NFL championship, NBC had four cameras trained on the field, and a fifth pointed at an easel with cards reading “First Quarter,” “Second Quarter,” etc. Slow-motion replays and isolated shots were still in the future, but by then the sport and the medium were effectively engaged.