The Games That Changed the Game

by Ron Jaworski

  Copyright © 2010 by Ron Jaworksi

  Introduction copyright © 2010 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by ESPN Books, an imprint of ESPN, Inc., New York, and Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The ESPN Books name and logo are registered trademarks of ESPN, Inc. eISBN: 978-0-345-51797-5

  www.ballantinebooks.com

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  v3.1

  STEVE SABOL

  president, NFL Films

  Football may be a team sport, but it is a coach’s game. Although Plato compared the human soul to a chariot pulled by the two horses of reason and emotion, coaching in the NFL is mostly a one-horse show. It is obsessed with reason, with rational calculations, with game plans and play sheets. For nearly a century, professional coaches have been designing different ways to arrange eleven men on a field, either to advance or stop the ball.

  Today the coaches in the NFL are the most progressive leaders in sports. They are constantly innovating and embracing every new technology. Football changes more than any sport we have. It was Richard Nixon’s favorite sport; it was Hunter S. Thompson’s favorite, too. Football coaches will try anything—the good ones will for sure. They’re gonzo. Hank Stram once told me, “I’m a coach of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.” Great coaches can do with their players what a magician does with a deck of cards: shuffle the familiar into unexpected patterns.

  This book is about seven coaches and seven games in which their innovative game plans not only decided the outcome but also transformed history, because they accelerated in a matter of hours the usually longer evolution of strategy and planning. Football will always be a game of blocking and tackling, as Vince Lombardi once made quite clear. But, as this book points out, it’s also a game of imagination and ingenuity.

  I will not go into the details of each game because the gentlemen who have researched and analyzed them—my friends Ron Jaworski, Greg Cosell, and David Plaut—have already done so. All of us who watch Monday Night Football know that Ron Jaworski understands and explains the game at a level of detail never before reached on television. Perhaps even more important is his ability to make others understand the game as well. For more than two decades, Greg Cosell has clarified the nuances of NFL strategy as creator and executive producer of the ESPN NFL Matchup program. Sports Illustrated’s Peter King calls it “the one pregame show that should be essential viewing for the real fan.” Dave Plaut has worked with me at NFL Films for thirty-five years. He has won numerous Emmy awards for both writing and directing. His knowledge of the league’s history is encyclopedic.

  There is no inevitability to history; someone has to seize and turn it. In the following pages, you will read about men who met the challenge of the present, and in so doing shaped the future. These seven memorable games are the wildfires of NFL history—the embers of which continue to burn far beyond the original blaze.

  Foreword By Steve Sabol, president, NFL Films

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  Sunday No. 1 Sid Gillman’s Vertical Stretch

  BOSTON PATRIOTS VS. SAN DIEGO CHARGERS, JANUARY 5, 1964

  Sunday No. 2 Bud Carson’s Cover-Two Defense

  OAKLAND RAIDERS VS. PITTSBURGH STEELERS, DECEMBER 29, 1974

  Sunday No. 3 Don Coryell’s Roving-Y

  OAKLAND RAIDERS VS. SAN DIEGO CHARGERS, SEPTEMBER 14, 1980

  Sunday No. 4 Bill Walsh’s West Coast Offense

  NEW YORK GIANTS VS. SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS, JANUARY 3, 1982

  Sunday No. 5 Buddy Ryan’s 46 Defense

  DALLAS COWBOYS VS CHICAGO BEARS, NOVEMBER 17, 1985

  Sunday No. 6 Dick LeBeau’s Zone Blitz

  BUFFALO BILLS VS. PITTSBURGH STEELERS, JANUARY 9, 1993

  Sunday No. 7 Bill Belichick’s “Bull’s-Eye” Game Plan

  ST. LOUIS RAMS VS. NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS, FEBRUARY 3, 2002

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix: Box Scores

  he research and writing of The Games That Changed the Game took place over a three-year period. Thirty-six years of my firsthand experiences in the National Football League, as a player and a broadcaster, along with targeted film study, are the primary information sources for this book. I studied coaching tape from the seven featured games, as well as more than two dozen additional games relating to each chapter’s subject matter. Where available, the network broadcasts of the selected games have also been viewed, along with all existing footage of those games, as shot by NFL Films cameramen.

  In the following pages, I have made a number of educated guesses and observations, based on my coaching tape breakdowns. To substantiate the accuracy of my evaluations, I also contacted those who have knowledge of—or were directly involved with—the chosen games. More than sixty interviews were conducted with current or retired coaches and former players. Information and quotes from well over a hundred additional interviews were derived from transcripts and produced programs housed in the NFL Films archives.

  still remember it, still feel it, though I never saw it coming—the hardest hit I ever took in a football game. It was late October 1980, the season that our Philadelphia Eagles team went to the Super Bowl, and we were playing the Chicago Bears at home. We’d called a pass that required a five-step drop, plant, and throw. Unfortunately, Chicago’s secondary had covered all my receivers, so I was forced to hold on to the ball a few tenths of a second longer than normal. Defensive end Mike Hartenstine got a good running start and drilled me in the back. My neck snapped, then my knees buckled. I landed facedown on that horrendous Veterans Stadium turf, the league’s worst playing surface; nothing more than a slab of dull green-colored concrete.

  Back then, team medical staffs weren’t as cautious about concussions as they are today. I was helped to my feet and actually returned to the lineup, a little woozy but still capable of running the offense. After another pass play broke down, I scrambled and got whacked again, this time by safety Doug Plank—a guy you’ll be hearing more about later. His tackle wasn’t nearly as vicious as Hartenstine’s, but it finished me for the day. I was rushed to Paoli Hospital.

  The Hartenstine hit was so vicious that when I arrived at the emergency room, there was already a doctor waiting for me, one who wasn’t connected with the team or even the hospital staff. He turned out to be an off-duty neurologist who had seen the tackle on television while watching the game at home. He had jumped in his car and drove to the hospital immediately, figuring I’d need his help.

  When I watched the play on TV the next morning, I realized why that neurologist had raced down to the ER. I had no idea the blow had been so brutal. Getting hit is part of the game, so when you get clobbered, you just get up and keep going. It wasn’t until I looked at the replay that I could see the full impact of that collision and realized I was lucky to still be in one piece. And after studying the coaching film a few days later, I completely understood not just how it happened but also why it happened the way it did.

  ame film is the great truth teller. Every play puts responsibility on the athletes on the field—eleven on offense, eleven on defense—and all must do their jobs in order for the play to be successful. The only way to accurately see and evaluate each player’s performance is to watch what is referred to in the coaching profession as the “All-22” tape. In these tapes, every player is visible, and they are filmed from both sideline and end zone angles. If you study and interpret them correctl
y, they reveal everything. With few exceptions, television coverage doesn’t show this wide angle, so it can’t fully reveal the design of the play or the scheme. To truly understand what is happening, the All-22 is the best way to assess NFL plays and players. Ask any sleep-deprived coach, or any player who has missed his assignment and gotten chewed out for it in a film session: The “Eye in the Sky” doesn’t lie.

  Football is a chess match, with moves and countermoves. You’re constantly challenging the opposition, trying at all times to be at least one step ahead of him. You would love for every offensive play you design to score a touchdown, but it doesn’t always work that way. In fact, it rarely works that way! An offense will run plays that you know aren’t going to pick up much yardage, but you have to run them to set up another play for down the road. You run certain plays to see how the defense reacts. You show certain formations to help a quarterback understand how defenders will align against that formation. How do they adjust to a particular motion? Do they increase the number of defenders up front? Do the safeties drop deeper? What are they doing against a specific motion, formation, or player? The offense makes its move; the defense reacts.

  When you look at coaching film (and people still do call it that, but with today’s team cameras, the accurate term would be “coaching tape”), what you see over time are repetitive plays. It’s important to recognize them and the patterns they indicate. Let’s take the blitz, for example. As a quarterback, I would study a 10-play package of my opponent’s blitzes, always looking for pre-snap indicators, alignments, or movements made before the snap that would tell me what they’re trying to do. It’s impossible for defenders to mask their intentions long enough; eventually, they’ll tip their hand. If the quarterback is patient enough and has studied thoroughly, he should have a good idea of what’s in store.

  But the guys on defense are pretty smart too. The quarterback has to be sure his opponent isn’t playing mind games by disguising intentions with misleading looks. Defenses have certain fronts they’ll blitz from, where the ends, tackles, and linebackers set up, and how the positioning of the secondary ties in with these fronts. And if the quarterback has done enough repetitive studying, he will recognize their camouflaging tricks and be able to react instantaneously on game day.

  Because of modern technology and the large size of NFL staffs, teams will break down their opponent’s previous four games into a variety of categories. Players and coaches will spend hundreds of hours preparing for Sunday’s game. While the coaches draw up the game plan, players follow a regimen that is both physical and mental. Players know going in that they’re going to get hit, so they combine film study with daily practice, running, weight lifting, and treatment for the bumps and bruises they already have. They have to gear up equally for both the physical and the cerebral aspects of the game.

  Preparation for my television work on ESPN requires a totally different mind-set from what was required during my playing days. There isn’t a Mike Hartenstine lurking outside our broadcast booth ready to knock me down twenty times, so I don’t have to worry about that problem anymore. And I don’t put in as many hours as the players do. But I do watch tape, and a lot of it—maybe twenty to twenty-five hours per week. The more you watch, the greater an understanding you gain of what teams are trying to accomplish. When I make a comment on Monday Night Football or the NFL Matchup show, it’s based on rigorous study. When I break down a play, I try to gear my comments specifically toward what I saw on tape earlier that week. Before kickoff, I’ve already formed in my mind a template of what I expect to see, so when it happens on the field that Monday night, I’m already familiar with the teams’ formations, motions, and personnel packages. From tape study, I have a better understanding of what kinds of plays will be called and the goals each team seeks to accomplish.

  In recent years, fans have become sophisticated and want to learn more about the intricacies of the game. Now, I don’t mean this disrespectfully, but even the most dedicated fan could never understand football at the same level as the players and coaches who make their living at it. It’s simply impossible. As much as I have learned through my own film study, it doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what players and coaches consider as they put their game plans together and prepare for specific situations. If Joe Fan watches the first quarter of action and then declares, “This is what they’re doing,” that’s only an educated guess at best. Heck, a lot of times the players themselves aren’t always sure what their responsibilities are. You can diagram a play, practice it all week, and all of a sudden face a different look during the game, and an adjustment must be made on the fly. In their own postgame critiques, coaches aren’t always completely sure what happened until they ask the player. “What call did you make in the offensive line? What did the quarterback tell you in the huddle?” Nothing is ever 100 percent certain in football—not even in the minds of the coaches and the players, let alone the fans. And the truth is, it’s only getting more complicated.

  From what I’ve observed, today’s game is a hell of a lot more complex than it was when I played. The biggest change I’ve seen since 1973, when I entered the NFL, is the deployment of personnel packages. My first few years as a Los Angeles Rams quarterback were a stroll in the park compared to what today’s quarterbacks face. Back then, the same eleven guys played defense, the same eleven on offense, and there were almost no substitutions. Any deviation from that approach came as a complete shock to the opposing team. A perfect example: Our Rams team was playing the Miami Dolphins in the Orange Bowl, and L.A.'s coaches put a wide receiver named Ron Jessie in the backfield as a running back. Miami’s defense was so stunned that it was forced to call a time-out, as if to say, “What do we do? There’s a receiver in the backfield, and he shouldn’t be there!”

  All we did was take our regular back Jim Bertelsen out of the game and replace him with Jessie, who went in motion prior to the snap. This seems simple enough to anyone today, but back then this baffled the Dolphins. And bear in mind that this wasn’t some run-of-the-mill team we were playing. This was the famous “No-Name Defense” made up of guys like Nick Buoniconti and Dick Anderson, many of the same players who’d won back-to-back Super Bowls in 1972 and 1973.

  Today defenses must be ready for exotic personnel changes on every snap. Defenses of old were four down linemen, three linebackers, and four defensive backs. Now you can have three linemen, five linemen—or no linemen. You can have two guys with their hands on the ground or four with their hands on the ground. One play later, you get no one with his hand on the ground! You can have five defensive backs or six or even eight! That’s twenty-first-century football.

  he National Football League is ever changing. And these changes don’t just happen year to year or even month to month; they occur every week! When I start looking at tapes of last Sunday’s games, I almost always spot something I haven’t seen before: a new scheme, design, or concept. I have incredible respect for the men in the coaching profession, guys who are constantly looking for an edge, a different way to win. And when somebody comes up with something new—a little twist that leads to a big play—word travels fast. In the coaching world, innovators are the ones who win “street cred.” I talk to a lot of people during the season who’ll say, “Boy, did you see what so-and-so did last Sunday? That was an amazing scheme!” And when coaches receive calls of congratulations from friends and colleagues the Tuesday after a game, that’s the highlight of their week. Getting approval from within the coaching fraternity is the highest honor they can receive.

  More and more, such innovations are necessities, not luxuries. The pace of today’s NFL demands it. The players are better than ever: bigger, faster, more explosive. And, as the game matures, pro football is becoming a more wide-open, pass-first game, because that’s what the fans want to see and that’s what the league mandates through its rule changes. In my rookie year, it was perfectly legal for a defender to beat the hell out of a receiver 20 yards downfield. N
ow if a linebacker’s fingernail touches someone after five yards, he gets a flag.

  I’ve been connected with the NFL for over thirty-five years, and in that time I’ve seen teams that can play the most primitive football and be very successful doing it. Why? Because their personnel is better. They could line up and win simply by physically overwhelming their opponent. That still happens nowadays when elite teams go against the weaker ones. But overall, today’s teams are more competitively balanced, thanks—among other things—to free agency, the salary cap, and improved scouting. And because the talent differential is so razor thin, most successful clubs have to work hard to develop schemes that give them the advantage.

  The truly great coaches beat their opponents with design. They don’t necessarily need the biggest, fastest, or strongest players—although that always helps! But when they don’t have those personnel advantages, the brightest coaches can win because they have confidence in their ability to construct plays or defensive schemes that create crucial mismatches. This is the underlying strategy in today’s NFL. It’s how games are won or lost, and it can be more important than having the best players. Games aren’t always won by the more talented team; they are won by the team that recognizes favorable matchups and exploits them.

  travel a great deal for my work, and sometimes I reach a point during flights when I just can’t read anymore or stare at my laptop. During those times, I shut my eyes and go over the key concepts I will want to stress in a future Monday Night Football broadcast or TV program. On one particularly long and boring flight, I began cataloguing some of the coaching innovations I’d noticed in recent games. That got me to thinking: What have been the major strategic concepts of the last fifty years that helped the NFL evolve into the game we see today? Who created them? When did they take place? Why did they happen at that particular time?