Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football

by Rich Cohen

  In his first years in Chicago, Buddy was coaching mostly mediocre players. On many afternoons, the Bears were outclassed. It was a moment of asymmetrical despair that led to the 46. Playing on Monday Night Football in 1981, Detroit defeated the Bears 48–17. It was a time for radical solutions. To compete, he had to improvise. “He was experimenting with defenses,” Plank told me. “He was going wild, looking for some way to generate a pass rush. You’d go into a meeting and see a bunch of crazy formations on the board. He’d go through each and say, ‘Okay, here’s what we’re going to try.’ And someone would say, ‘What do you call it?’ Buddy didn’t use X’s and O’s. When he put things on the board, it was numbers. He named formations after the number in the center of the formation. So one morning we go in and sure enough there’s a new defense with my number in the middle: the 46.”

  “Ryan … moved balls-out safety Doug Plank to middle linebacker,” Tim Layden writes in Blood, Sweat, and Chalk. “He called it the 46 because that was Plank’s jersey number, and it would challenge evolving NFL offenses like no defense had before.”

  In the standard defensive alignment, called the 4–3, the center was not covered. This usually allowed him to double-team a rusher. But Buddy moved a linebacker to the line of scrimmage, then shifted Plank into the gap left by the repurposed man. This meant none of Buddy’s rushers could be double-teamed. On a blitz, another linebacker or safety would creep up to the line and hide behind a big defensive end. As a result, there were more rushers than blockers, which is why, in 1985, it often looked as if the Bears had too many players on the field. Buddy called the hidden blitzers “free runners.” “Confuse the offense until they have no idea where you’re coming from—that’s what creates a free runner,” Plank told me. “A free runner is an unblocked defensive player, and he gets to the quarterback so much faster. He doesn’t have to shed a blocker and he’s running full speed. When a free runner hits the quarterback, the quarterback flies through the air.”

  Here’s Ron Jaworski’s jargon-filled description of the 46 defense: “Buddy moved Plank from his safety position into the box, as if he were a linebacker. The other two safeties, Fencik and Fisher, were also sent in at key moments to apply additional pressure. Something was different about the Bears down lineman. The weak side defensive end lined up outside the offensive tackle in a wider pass position, while the other defensive end and defensive tackles set up directly over the guards and the center. This became known as a ‘reduced front’ and it forced the interior offensive linemen into awkward and difficult one-on-one matchups. It became the defining feature of the 46.”

  Here’s how the same defense was experienced by a fan: in fulfilling an age-old playground fantasy, Buddy had decided, fuck it, and seemingly sent all his guys after the quarterback with a simple mission: Nail him.

  There was an inherent weakness in Buddy’s system. Or as the competing coaches put it, “The 46 is unsound.” In overloading the line, the Bears sacrificed coverage elsewhere. Look at film from 1984 or 1985, you see receivers wide open downfield. Buddy’s gamble was that the quarterbacks would be first too hurried, then too terrified, and finally too beat up to find the open men. As with Danny White, they would have just one thought on their mind: get rid of the ball. “The 46 became a fucking nightmare to coach against,” Bruce Coslet, a defensive coordinator for the Cincinnati Bengals in the 1980s told Tim Layden. “It was something nobody had seen and nobody knew how to prepare for it. Buddy changed football with that defense.”

  “Scary”—that’s how Jaworski described it. “Abnormal. Different. It was blitzing. It was chaos. It was impossible to prepare for. Just impossible.”

  The 46 was the logic behind the modern T-formation come full circle: Halas had raised the quarterback to such a place of preeminence, turned him into such a finely calibrated piece of offensive machinery, that he became almost too valuable for the team’s own good. Rather than cover everyone, Buddy would short-circuit the offense by taking out the QB. As the boxers used to say: Kill the brain and the body will follow.

  The 46 defense: The quarterback-rattling alignment as drawn for me by Doug Plank, who explained the mechanics in an accompanying note: “This was the original alignment for the 46,” wrote Plank. “The entire defensive line was shifted down with a defensive tackle playing over the center. The 2 linebackers aligned over the tight end. One of these linebackers always rushed the qb. My position was later replaced by Singletary, and Duerson replaced [Jeff] Fisher. Jeff and I could drop back and play deep 1/2 on some coverages. Jeff and I blitzed, covered outside receivers, and had run support duties. Every assignment was based on what the offense did. If they stayed to block, we would have coverage duties. If the running back ran routes, we would blitz.”

  “Football is chess,” said Plank. “You can capture all my pawns, but if I tip over that king, I win.”

  Plank told me the defense was called the 46 merely because it happened to be his number on the board that morning, but it was more than that. The fact is, Doug Plank, the twelfth-rounder out of Ohio State, the kid recruited by Woody Hayes merely to stick it to Joe Paterno, was Buddy’s ideal player: the vicious, all-out, big-time hitter who made the wheels go round. If you wanted to play on the 46—at first, the formation was not used every down—you had to play with the intensity of Plank. “Buddy loved the way he did his business,” Steve McMichael wrote. “That’s why it was called the 46 defense. It was built around a safety like Doug making plays.”

  Over time, the 46 became something more than a mere alignment of players. It was an attitude, a way of competing. “Attack, attack, attack—that was the mentality,” Plank told me. “You weren’t going to be a friendly dog eating puppy chow. All of a sudden, you were going to be a hungry man looking for meat. Buddy used that defense to change the mind-set of that whole defensive team. He would ridicule and embarrass you until you played the way he wanted you to play. He turned us into an elite group, like the Green Berets. I’m not going to tell you how guys politicked for certain positions on the 46. Because certain positions were given the opportunity to hit the quarterback. And the recognition that you would get from that was like winning the presidential election. If you’re in a room and you have a group of grown men screaming and clapping and patting you on the back, talking about something you did on Sunday, well, who doesn’t want that?”

  The 46 made its debut six days after that terrible loss to Detroit. Ryan felt a special urgency: the Bears were facing the best offense in the NFL. I recommend this game, played Sunday, October 25, 1981, for study by future generations. Here you had the soaring pass-drunk offense that Don Coryell devised for the San Diego Chargers, with quarterback Dan Fouts sending a magnificent array of receivers downfield, meeting the 46 in its first sketchy incarnation. Elegant precision faces the howling mob, eleven brutes with maces and helmets, barbarians wandering in the black forest of Soldier Field. It’s the dialectic of history: when a system becomes arrogant, a competing system will arise to defeat it. “As organized and experienced as that group of players were from the Chargers, they’d seen nothing like it,” Plank said. “Mad dogs. Wild men. Coming from every side. A jailbreak. By the end, Dan Fouts did not know where to look: Should he try to find the open man downfield, or should he simply brace for impact?”

  “It’s hard to overstate how much confusion this caused offensive lines of that era,” wrote Jaworski. “They didn’t know who they were supposed to block, because none of the defenders was where he was supposed to be.”

  It was this confusion, planted in the mind of the quarterback, that made the 46 hum. It was not merely pressure that devastated the offense; it was the perception of pressure. (“The anticipation of what might be coming was just as important as what actually did,” explained Plank.) Even on plays in which the linebackers dropped back, the quarterback, sensing the rush that was not there, hurried himself into mistakes. In this way, the 46 got in the head of the quarterback. In this way, the 46 made even the best QB defeat hi
mself by turning his own anxiety into a weapon.

  The Bears beat the Chargers 20–17 in overtime. For Fouts, it was among the worst games in a Hall of Fame career. He completed thirteen of forty-three passes and was intercepted twice. A casual fan might believe he’d just seen an upset, a fluke, but it was actually the start of a new era. “We were going wild in the locker room,” Plank said. “We were screaming and shouting and all thinking the same thing: My God, this can work.”

  Every week, there was a new feature or trick as players learned the intricacies of the 46: how to cheat, where to fake, when to go full tilt at the quarterback. At first used in spot situations, it became the Bears’ standard defense. It peaked in 1984 and 1985. By then, thanks to draft picks and acquisitions, the Bears had great players.

  It took a particular sort of athlete to excel in the 46. According to Jaworski, the scheme required defensive ends who could beat offensive guards one-on-one; linebackers who, if needed, could cover downfield; and a middle linebacker smart enough to direct the troops, a defensive version of Sid Luckman, “another goddamn coach on the field.” You had to be versatile enough to swap positions in the middle of a play. By 1984, this meant McMichael and Hampton on the line; Dent, who, for about five seasons, was unstoppable; Wilson, who could cover downfield; and Singletary, who was one of the few men other than Plank with the smarts and intensity to command the 46. “Who are you going to double-team?” McMahon asked me. “You got Dent outside of McMichael, you got Hamp. On the other side—who was that other tackle?—Hartenstein? He could hit. You cover every lineman, Buddy just puts the linebackers up on the line of scrimmage. Now you’ve got to pick your poison. Who are you going to let run free? Somebody’s going to come free and the rest are one-on-one. If the ball ain’t gone fast, the quarterback’s gonna get nailed. It was a combination of the system and the players. We had some of the best guys that ever played.”

  In 1985, the Bears deployed the final pieces: Wilber Marshall, a rookie linebacker who was ideally suited for the 46, and Dave Duerson, a third-year safety who played beside Fencik. (The safety is the deep man, the last line of defense.) Space in the lineup had been made by Al Harris and Todd Bell, staples of the ’84 team who held out in 1985. They probably figured the Bears would suffer and Michael McCaskey would buckle. Wait till Duerson gets burned on a few long plays. But the new starters proved perfect replacements, and the Bears just kept winning. Marshall was actually an upgrade at linebacker, but Buddy never accepted Dave Duerson. No matter how well he played, Buddy would tell him that he’d be on the bench the moment Todd Bell returned. “Buddy just absolutely hated my guts,” Duerson said. “I called my dad when I first got drafted and I told him, ‘Dad, I didn’t graduate college to go through this.’ My dad believes every male child should do two years in the armed services … So he says to me, ‘Well, it sounds to me like you’re in the army.’”

  Bell and Harris are a footnote to the Super Bowl—an asterisk, a cautionary tale. As they waited for McCaskey to meet their demands, their team went on a historic run. There was a party, everyone did something, even the offensive linemen got famous, but these sorry bastards missed it. When they returned in 1986, they carried the stink of tragedy. You could not look at Al Harris without thinking, Oh, the poor schmuck. Harris, who began his career with an afro and muttonchops in 1979, ended it with a shaved head in Philadelphia in 1990. Todd Bell, who, once upon a time, seemed certain to enter the Bears pantheon, ended his career on a Monday in Philadelphia in a game against Chicago, in which, as McCaskey and Ditka looked on, he busted his leg and was carried away in agony. He drifted after that, eventually returning to the Ohio town where he had made them ooh and ahh a million Friday nights before.

  Here’s the mismatch that will always exist when a player sits to negotiate with an owner: the teams have the money and the stadiums and the television deals, while the players have only their talent and their youth, which, like everything that matters, is vanishing. If, in the modern NFL, the players make millions—in 2013, the Bears’ average salary was just over $2 million—it’s only because the owners are making billions.

  Todd Bell died on March 16, 2006. He had a heart attack while driving through Reynoldsburg, Ohio. He was forty-seven. “Todd never let 1985 go,” Al Harris said. “He felt betrayed. I had that feeling, too, but after a while, that’s life.”

  The Bell and Harris situation had an adverse boomerang effect on the Bears and its president, Mike McCaskey, who, though he was treated as a hero by other owners for having stood up to the players and won anyway, seemed to learn the wrong lesson. “The precedent McCaskey established can mean only trouble,” McMahon wrote in 1986. “If he believes the Bears—or any other team, for that matter—can afford to let good players not play, for the sake of ‘fiscal responsibility,’ then that creates problems.”

  * * *

  By 1985, Mike Singletary and the other defensive leaders had mastered one of Buddy Ryan’s greatest innovations. He had called it “Automatic Front Coverage,” which Plank shortened to AFC. Buddy drew up a handful of formations—AFCs—each tailored to a particular offensive alignment. As middle linebacker, it was often Singletary’s job to read the offense, identify the play, then, by shouting a code, shift his men to counter. Quarterbacks had been reading defenses for years, changing plays on the fly to create mismatches. Now the defense was reading the offense as it was itself being read. “This meant the Bears could, before the snap, change the angles from which their rushers came and flip what kind of coverage their defensive backs and linebackers were employing,” wrote Jaworski. “This was virtually unheard of back in the eighties.”

  One afternoon, in New England, the Patriots quarterback got to the line, looked at the Bears defense, and changed his play. Then, as soon as the receivers and ends had shifted, Singletary, shouting like a samurai, told the defense what play the offense was going to run and moved his teammates again. The QB, seeing this new alignment, called another audible, which Singletary read and countered. The QB stood horrified, staring into the wild eyes of Singletary, who shouted, “Well, are you gonna change your play or not?” It had a huge psychological impact. It was like the moment in the sci-fi movie when the captain realizes the alien is not merely looking at him, but that he’s actually being scanned. My God, it knows what I’m thinking!

  “Every time the offense moved, we moved,” Plank said. “It freaked the offenses out because if they started a motion from one side of the field to the other, we could go through three different coverages matching them.”

  “You could sense the fear,” defensive tackle Tyrone Keys told me. “Especially when the quarterback shifted and Singletary shifted us right into the strip to where they were going. And you could hear them talking, saying, ‘They know the play, they know the play!’ Singletary was key—he was a coach on the field, and so was Fencik. Did you know that he went to Yale?”

  When I wanted to know what it was like to play against the 46, I would just call a great player of that era and ask, “What’s the best defense you ever faced?”

  Cris Collinsworth, receiver, Cincinnati Bengals: “The 46 in Chicago. Physically they were unbelievable. They could put up points on defense, they could embarrass you. I still think Wilber Marshall belongs in the Hall of Fame.”

  Joe Theismann, quarterback, Washington Redskins: “My God, the 46. Inside you had Refrigerator Perry, outside you had Dent and McMichael. What gets lost is that those front seven guys were really quick—they could beat anybody one-on-one. Singletary in the middle, Otis on the outside, Wilber on the other side. They beat the tar out of us. That defense was really an offensive unit. Their job was not just to tackle or create interceptions but to force fumbles, make plays, and put points on the board.”

  “People were afraid because a lot of guys got knocked out,” Tyrone Keys told me. “I saw Singletary knock out Sammy Winder. Sammy was sound asleep. Like a baby. I saw Joe Ferguson sleeping like a log right in the middle of a football field. I saw Archie Man
ning after his career ended, and he said the reason he quit football was because of what the Bears did to him in ’84. He got sacked eleven times, and if he got sacked eleven times, imagine how many times he got hit! We were vicious, man. Every play was just a race to the quarterback.”

  There were great defenses before 1985 and there have been others since, but none matched the ’85 Bears. In the course of sixteen games, they gave up 198 points, fewer than 13 a game. In the playoffs, they outscored opponents 45 to nothing. There were games in which the other team barely breached Bears territory. “You can come up with comparative stats,” wrote Singletary, “but the best way to tell is to take out the film of any team you want to compare us with: the Steel Curtain, the Purple People Eaters, the 2000 Ravens. Watch them. They’re tremendous. Now put the ’85 Bears film on and don’t say a word. Our film will talk to you. What will it say? You’ll know when you see it, because the film does not lie.”

  Ditka once knocked Buddy Ryan, saying, “On offense, you have to be smart. On defense, you just have to be brutal.” It was a put-down, and it wasn’t true. In Chicago, the innovations, the big strategic thinking, all came on the brutal side of the ball. The ’85 Bears were thrilling on offense but they’re remembered because of their defense. Nowadays, good defensive coaches say things like, “Bend but don’t break.” In 1985, in Chicago, this would have been identified as loser talk. When the 46 played, scoring was secondary—the main task was to break the enemy’s will. If you do that, the rest will take care of itself.

  12

  SHANE COMES TO THE METRODOME

  Ditka and McMahon at training camp in Platteville, Wisconsin, making a strong case for a dress code. July 18, 1986

  Every fan has a favorite game. Mine was played on September 19, 1985, in the third week of the season, the Bears versus the Vikings in the Metrodome, which Mike Ditka, to the annoyance of Minnesotans, referred to as the Roller Dome. The Bears had defeated New England without incident the week before, but Mac had ended up in Lake Forest Hospital, where he spent two days in traction. Fans serious enough to read injury reports would have assumed number 9 wrenched himself while executing like a daredevil. No one played like Jim McMahon. Most quarterbacks avoid contact; McMahon actually sought it out. He loved hitting and getting hit. Ditka described him as a quarterback who thinks he’s a linebacker. At the end of scoring plays, he’d race downfield, twenty or thirty yards, in search of a lineman to head-butt. A football kiss. “No question that he shortened his career because of the way he played,” Ditka said. “He ran, dove, hung on to the ball too long … He had no regard for his body. But I couldn’t change him. It would have ruined him.”