by Rex Ryan
Not long after that, Rob and I went to live with our dad. Jim was already in college at the University of Minnesota, and our dad was on the Vikings’ coaching staff as defensive line coach. Jim is smart, too, like my mom. He’s an academic. He got his degree from Minnesota, got his MBA from Notre Dame, and his law degree from the University of St. Louis. He’s a lawyer in St. Louis now. He wanted to be a sportswriter for a while, then he went into the ad business before becoming a lawyer. He’s just a sharp, sharp guy.
Let me say one thing about Minnesota. For my dad, it was a great place because he got a chance to work with Bud Grant, a guy he really looked up to in a lot of ways. People don’t really know this, but Grant was one of probably the three most influential people in my dad’s career: Grant, former Jets coach Weeb Ewbank, and the great George Halas. Obviously, Ewbank gave my dad his first pro job and was a special person. He’s still the only coach in NFL history to win championships with two different teams. He won two NFL titles in the 1950s with Baltimore, including the 1958 title game still known as The Greatest Game Ever Played. Then he won Super Bowl III and put the AFL on the map.
Talk about putting a stamp on history. Ewbank really knew how to relate to players. Ewbank also had a huge influence on my dad’s thinking about how to attack the quarterback. Ewbank used to spend a lot of time devising ways to protect Namath. Namath was the meal ticket, as Ewbank used to say. Namath already had bad knees, so keeping him protected was a must. What my dad realized, like so many others, is that the defense had to attack the quarterback, the nerve center of the offense. That had to be the primary goal, whether it was physically or mentally. The quarterback has to be pressured somehow. And Halas is Halas. You’re talking about one of the fathers of the game. He also meant a lot to my dad because he stood by him.
But Grant was special from another perspective: his sideline approach. Bud Grant was stoic, unflappable, and didn’t put up with any BS. You couldn’t rattle Bud Grant, and he wanted to make sure you couldn’t be rattled. At least that’s how my dad understood Grant, and he understood it right away. My dad still tells the story of interviewing with Grant for the assistant’s job.
He sat down in Grant’s office and then Grant walked in and sat down. Grant didn’t say anything at first and the silence went on and on. Finally, after about five minutes, Grant asked, “You got any dogs?” My dad said yes. Another five minutes went by and Grant didn’t say anything. Finally, he asked, “You hunt with them?” My dad said no. Another five minutes went by and Grant said, “Okay, you got the job.” To this day, my dad thinks Grant just wanted to see if he would get nervous.
As much as people may not believe it, my dad styled himself on the sideline like Grant. He remained calm. Now, people don’t believe that because of the Gilbride thing; they think he was a crazy man, but he was just the opposite. Of course, he would swear in a game and he might give you the kind of answer that would melt you to your kneecaps, but he wasn’t losing his cool. He was just getting to the point.
My dad also met Alan Page, the Hall of Fame defensive tackle, when he was in Minnesota. Page wasn’t just a great player; he was a serious scholar and a gentleman. In fact, he was elected to the Minnesota Supreme Court as a judge in 1992. Page played the first 12 years of his career with Minnesota before finishing up his last three years with the Bears after my dad went to Chicago with coach Neill Armstrong, another Vikings assistant the Bears hired. That association with Page proved vital for my dad.
For Rob and me, moving to Minnesota wasn’t so great. We lived in Edina, a pretty affluent community near where the team trained. It was a nice enough area, but everybody was kind of stuck up and clique-ish. You had the jocks on one side, the druggies over on the other side, and then other little groups. That’s not what my brother and I were about. We wanted to hang out with everybody. It’s like later, when we were in college at Southwest Oklahoma. We played football and then we hung out with all these regular guys. We were both 6-foot-2, 225 pounds at the time. We’d be at the bar on a Saturday night and some guy would look to start something with one of our smaller buddies, and the next thing you know he’s looking at Rob and me. We liked that.
But we weren’t in Edina too long, because at the beginning of 1978, my dad went with Armstrong when Armstrong was hired by Halas and the Chicago Bears. That’s when my dad ran the defense himself for the first time. My brother and I went with him, too, and we all lived in Prairie View, Illinois, which was a lot better for us. We loved it there and we ended up going to Adlai Stevenson High School.
More important for my dad—and eventually me and my brother—that’s when he started coming up with the schemes for the 46 defense, which really changed the game.
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Now, remember that and think about this: In 1981, the Bears were about to fire Armstrong and his staff after four seasons. The team wasn’t very good. They’d gone 30-35 over the four seasons, making the playoffs once and getting bounced after the first game.
Rob and I were freshmen at Southwest Oklahoma at the time. My dad had a friend down there who helped us get going with the football team. Really, I should have probably been playing baseball by that point. I could really pound the ball in high school. But my senior season was bad, because I lost one of my contact lenses and I was afraid to bug my dad to get a new one. I remember just not being able to see the ball at the plate. I know it sounds kind of dumb as I look back on it, but my dad was having a rough time. The 1980 season, which was the first half of my senior year of high school, hadn’t gone so well and then my dad found out he was going to have to get a big section of soft tissue on his back sliced off because he had some kind of growth on it. I just didn’t think the contact lens was that big a deal, comparatively.
Then came the 1981 season, and Armstrong was done after that. I was wondering what was going to happen to my dad. What happened is that he ended up with more leverage than ever before. Here’s how it went: All of the Bears’ defensive players got together and signed a letter asking Halas to keep my dad. Every single one of them. It was Page, the guy my dad had begun coaching back in Minnesota, who wrote the letter and the rest of the guys signed it. So old man Halas (he was 86 by that time) did it. He kept my dad and the entire defensive staff, which really pissed Mike Ditka off when they hired Ditka to replace Armstrong. Here’s Ditka, a Bears legend himself and the first tight end ever elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, having to let my dad run the defense. Ditka tried talking to my dad a bunch of times and my dad never listened. Well, he listened, but his response was usually “Fuck you. I run the defense.”
The simple fact of the matter is that the players believed in my dad. They knew he had ideas that were going to work. Besides all the brilliant concepts that were developed for the 46, the philosophy of the scheme was basically pure aggression. This is what defensive players want. My dad knew it then. I know it now. My brother Jim put it this way: “Dad was always tapped into the mind of the defensive player. Defensive players understand the concept of bend-but-don’t-break and read-and-react, but it’s not what they’re about. The whole basis of a defensive football player is to be aggressive and destroy. My dad epitomized that philosophy when he designed the 46 in Chicago.”
Better yet, the Bears were starting to get the players who could make those ideas work.
Now, before I get to that, let me backtrack a little. The chapter in Jaworski’s book about the 46 does a great job of describing how the defense worked and its impact. I would love to give you a full breakdown on the defense, but I could go on forever. I could write a whole book about the 46 and what it’s done for football, but I’ll just say that if you want to learn more, Jaworski does a nice job of describing not just the technique but also my dad, even if they didn’t get along too well during their one season together in Philadelphia.
By 1981, my dad realized he didn’t have enough good pass rushers on the Chicago roster. Sure, he had a young Dan Hampton and the Bears had just picked up Steve
McMichael that year, but McMichael was an offensive lineman when Chicago first got him. Linebacker Otis Wilson was a great athlete and middle linebacker Mike Singletary was a rookie, but it was more a bunch of parts that my dad was trying to figure out how to fit together. From a traditional sense, the fit wasn’t great.
So what did my dad do? Blitz. If you don’t have guys in the front four who can get to the quarterback on their own, you better find other guys who can get there. At the time, my dad also had Doug Plank, a punishing safety who was the prototypical hitter. Like I said, the defense was named the 46 because of Plank, not because of the formation, like the way the 3-4 and the 4-3 defenses got their names.
What my dad created was a system that required really smart players who could react to all the different offensive sets thrown at them. This took time and there were bumps along the way. At the end of the 1982 season, Vince Ferragamo lit up the Bears for 509 yards, what was then the second-highest total in league history. It was the end of the season and it didn’t go over too well, but the players understood that what my dad was trying to do was going to take some time.
Eventually, the Bears got Richard Dent, an amazing pass rusher the team somehow found with an eighth-round pick, and linebacker Wilber Marshall, a truly great, dynamic athlete out of the University of Florida.
Along the way, Singletary and my dad started to figure things out. It was rough. What most players loved about my dad is that he didn’t BS around. He didn’t just play guys because they were supposed to be good. You had to earn it. Rookies were called “assholes,” and most of the time my dad’s critique of their play was limited to the word “horseshit.” My dad was a man of few words, but they were choice words. Even once you got to be a veteran, the best you’d get from my dad was him calling you by your number, like, “Hey, 51, get your ass in gear.” Once you started making some plays, then he’d learn your name.
Just look at how he treated Singletary. Here’s a prototypical middle linebacker, a guy who went to the Hall of Fame, a 10-time All-Pro and a two-time Defensive Player of the Year. It took Singletary nearly two years to get off the bench and start full-time with my dad. Singletary started most of his rookie season in 1981 and was an All-Rookie player, but my dad was still jerking him back and forth between the bench and the starting lineup until 1983.
My dad spent those two years pushing every button in Singletary’s psyche, needling Singletary again and again so that he’d get every ounce of talent out of himself and become the brains of what was going to be a complicated defense. I know Singletary hated hearing that stuff and he didn’t get along with my dad for a long time. I think he thought my dad hated him, which wasn’t true at all. My dad just liked to challenge him. In Singletary’s rookie year, he was in the game early and made a bad call at the time. My dad pulled him and Singletary spent the rest of the series on the bench. The next time the defense was supposed to go back out there, Singletary went up to my dad and said he was ready to go back in the game.
My dad just looked at him and said, “Son, we’re trying to win this game.” Could you imagine the nerve my old man had? You’re telling a guy as intense as Mike Singletary that he’s not ready to help the team win? Talk about some big stones. But that’s what happens when you grow up in a foxhole. You don’t have time to waste worrying about somebody’s ego. You just have to survive.
Once you earned his respect, he loved you.
Of course, the guy who never loved my dad under any circumstances was Ditka, as I mentioned before. It’s funny, because so many people will tell you to this day that my dad and Ditka are basically cut from the same cloth. Singletary, who ended up being very close to Ditka, used to say how much alike they were. Still, they couldn’t see eye-to-eye. Ditka ran the offense and my dad ran the defense. Ditka always had the basics under control because he had “Sweetness” in the backfield. Walter Payton, probably the greatest running back and guy you’ll ever meet, was Chicago’s running back. My brother and I loved Walter Payton. We studied all the great players. Heck, we knew who Cookie Gilchrist was before we said our first words. In a press conference one time, I said, “Lookie, lookie, here comes Cookie” in front of the New York media and they looked at me like I was from another planet. Then again, they kind of always look at me that way.
Walter was funny. When we were at training camp and I was a ball boy, I used to work with the offense. I was a teenager and he’d joke with me. He’d pull my pants down out on the practice field and tackle me, but he would also show up when we got older at our baseball games. You’d see my dad and a couple of other parents out there in the stands—and then Walter Payton might show up. That’s a pretty neat childhood.
Anyway, back to Ditka. He and my dad just went around and around. It never stopped for the entire four years they were together in Chicago. In November 1985, the championship year, the Bears’ defense was starting to hit its stride when the Bears went to Dallas and just annihilated the Cowboys 44-0. I made the four-hour drive down from Southwest Oklahoma to Dallas to see the game. That was my senior year in college. You know, in college, you see some lopsided games from time to time. Usually that’s where one is from some big school and can recruit and the other team is just picking up a check playing the game, like maybe Oklahoma against McNeese State.
Well, that day in Texas Stadium was as close as you get to Oklahoma–McNeese State at the NFL level. (Unfortunately, so was the ass-whupping we took from New England in the 45-3 Monday Night Massacre.) It was brutal. Dad’s defense was at its best. By midway through the second quarter, the Chicago defense had scored two touchdowns before the offense got in the end zone. The Bears knocked Cowboys quarterback Danny White out of the game twice and rattled backup Gary Hogeboom so bad that he looked like a nervous high school kid. Really, it was almost scary to watch, wondering which Cowboy was going to get hurt next.
The truth is, my dad didn’t like the Cowboys very much. (How ironic is it that my brother is now their defensive coordinator?) It wasn’t so much Tom Landry; it was the whole image of Dallas as America’s team, how squeaky clean they pretended to be and how much they thought they were better than every other team. For a long time, the Cowboys were good; you have to respect that. It’s just like what I said about Bill Belichick and New England the first year I got to New York: I respect them, but I’m not kissing Belichick’s rings. I’m not bowing down to him.
My dad took it a step further. It seemed like he wanted to take a lifetime of frustration out on the Cowboys in that one game, and he pretty much did. By the second half, Ditka was asking my dad to call off the dogs. Enough was enough. After starting his career with Chicago, Ditka had played for Landry and the Cowboys and even got his start in coaching with Dallas. He didn’t like crushing Landry that way, but even when Ditka asked, my dad told him to fuck off.
That wasn’t even the worst moment between those two. After the Dallas shutout, the Bears shut out Atlanta 36-0. Then came the famous Monday Night Football game at the Orange Bowl against Miami. The Bears were 12-0 and going up against the Dolphins and Don Shula, the only team and coach to ever go undefeated, back in 1972. Of course, my dad and Shula already had a pretty good history going by this time. Back in the famous New York Jets Super Bowl win over Baltimore, Shula was the coach of the Colts. Beyond that, my dad was good friends with Ewbank and it was Shula who had taken Ewbank’s job in the early 1960s in Baltimore.
Beyond that, my dad resented Shula more and more because Shula was on the NFL’s Competition Committee at the time. This was just after he had drafted the great Dan Marino, a future Hall of Fame quarterback who was in the early stages of breaking every passing record. In 1984, Marino’s second season in the league, he set a league record with 48 touchdown passes. At the time, that was staggering. Most quarterbacks were lucky to throw half that many back in those days. Marino was in the midst of taking the passing game where my dad was taking defense. Marino and the Dolphins also made the Super Bowl in the 1984 season, eventually losing to San Fra
ncisco.
The problem, at least the way my dad saw it, was that Shula was making it easier to take advantage of Marino’s talent. In 1984, the NFL started enforcing the bump rules against cornerbacks and safeties even more strictly, allowing Marino to have more open receivers. My dad saw right through that and used to tweak Shula publicly every time he could.
Now, in this huge game, here they were again. The atmosphere was unreal. The Dolphins again looked like the class of the AFC going up against the Bears, who were clearly the class of the NFC by this time in the season. This game is not just about the history of the undefeated season (a bunch of the 1972 Dolphins showed up on the sideline to cheer the current Dolphins on). It wasn’t just about the rivalry between my dad and Shula. This was a realistic Super Bowl preview with four weeks left in the season.
I have to give Shula credit, because he came up with a good plan of attack against my dad. More important, it was an idea that is not a part of standard offense to this day. That’s where I say that my dad helped change the way offense was played in the NFL, even though he never coached offense (and didn’t like it much, either). Shula had Marino and the Dolphins come out in a base three-receiver set most of the game, spreading out the Bears’ defense. Until that point, the conventional wisdom of most teams that played the Bears was to keep extra blockers in to handle the vast array of blitzes the 46 defense employed. The problem is that my dad always knew that he could bring one more guy than the offense could block. The other problem is that if the Bears didn’t blitz, the offense had too many guys back in to block.