The Games That Changed the Game

by Ron Jaworski

  With so many black athletes playing for Sid, it was no surprise that the team often had trouble getting all its players into the same hotel in cities like Dallas and Houston. The same was true with restaurants and theaters. Jack told me about the time Sid bussed the team to see some action movie the night before a game in a southern city. The players all sat down on the main floor, but then an usher told Sid that the black players would have to move to the “Negro section” of the balcony, which was separated from “white only” seats by chicken wire. Sid went nuts. “We do everything as a team!” he screamed at the usher. “If we can’t sit together, we aren’t staying here!” He then informed all the Chargers—black and white—that they were leaving the theater, and the whole squad got up, marched out into the lobby, and onto the street.

  Moments like this obviously earned Sid a great deal of respect from his players. But they also played hard for him because his innovative coaching tactics made them look good on Sundays. The Chargers won five division titles in their first six years. “You never wanted to let Sid down because you knew he was doing everything he could on and off the field to put you in a position to be successful,” said Mix. “At training camp, you could go by his room at any hour, and you’d see his projector light on, with Sid studying film. He was tough, very demanding. During film sessions, his comments could be brutal, running the action again and again if you missed an assignment. There was always an air of tension at meetings and at practices because of the intensity he brought. If he saw any diminishment in effort, he was on you. It seemed like he had eyes in the back of his head; he could spot a mistake halfway across the practice field and would start yelling. With Sid, you had to be alert, aware, focused—and you had to produce.”

  The Chargers had one of their most productive seasons in 1963, setting team records for points scored and rushing yardage. They’d rebounded from a losing record the year before to go 11-3 and win the Western Division. Up to that point, there had been no AFL playoff games, only a championship match. But in ‘63, my beloved Bills and the Boston Patriots finished the season tied for first, so they had to play each other to determine who would meet the Chargers a week later for the league title. I was there at the Rockpile three days after Christmas—little Ronnie Jaworski in his customary end zone seat, bundled up tight and ready to root on his heroes. It was typical late-December weather in Buffalo: a hard snowfall and below-freezing temperatures. The conditions were awful, and so were the Bills. The Pats crushed them, 26–8, and even after I thawed out at home, I was depressed over the loss for weeks.

  Watching Boston dominate my team so completely, I thought the Pats might have a chance in the championship, even though the game would be played in San Diego. Boston probably had the best-run defense in the AFL, often forcing opponents to throw between thirty and forty times a game. The Patriots also blitzed the most of any team in football, sometimes on more than half of the snaps! Their main weapon was future Hall of Famer Nick Buoniconti, one of the quickest and smartest linebackers who ever played the game. This was, of course, before he was traded to Miami where he anchored their renowned No-Name Defense.

  Boston’s defensive line coach in ‘63 was Marion Campbell, who would later be my head coach in Philadelphia after Dick Vermeil retired. Marion recalled, “In our two regular-season games, the Chargers really hadn’t caught up to all our blitz packages. Nobody really had. Hell, we blitzed a lot because we could get away with it. We blitzed our way to the championship game.” Contributing to the blitz pressure was the Patriots’ outstanding defensive front, featuring Houston Antwine, a six-time all-star and a member of the AFL’s alltime team, along with Bob Dee, Jim “Earthquake” Hunt, and Larry Eisenhauer.

  Eisenhauer had his own nickname—"the Wildman"—for his fanatical playing style, but also for incidents like the time he ran onto a snowy turf for pregame warm-ups dressed only in his helmet and a jockstrap. The Wildman and his Patriots teammates played hard on and off the field. “After we beat the Bills, we got back to Boston and had a fabulous party. I think it went on for two days,” Larry recalled. “We had a mediocre record, but here we were one game away from our first league championship. Because our weather in Boston was so bad, and since we had no indoor practice facilities, we flew out to San Diego three or four days before the game. Well, San Diego is a great area with the beaches and all the other places to go. Maybe we got a little distracted.”

  There was no way that Sid Gillman’s team was going to be distracted. They had already lost two title games to the Houston Oilers in 1960 and ‘61, and Sid wasn’t going to let that happen again. But how would he get more production out of his offense? During the regular season, the Patriots had played competitively in two close losses to the Chargers, holding Sid’s squad to just 97 rushing yards and a total of 24 points. The answers would come from perhaps the finest game plan Sid Gillman ever devised. Sid even gave it a name, as he did with all his game plans. He called it “Feast or Famine,” because he knew that either Boston’s blitzers were going to pile up sacks, turnovers, and negative yardage, or his Chargers were going to beat those blitzes for big plays.

  Even late in his life when I knew him, Gillman had a flair for the dramatic. He loved Hollywood films because, growing up in Minneapolis, his father owned several movie theaters, and free admission wasn’t Sid’s only fringe benefit. When he got older, Sid seized the cans containing newsreel films as soon as they arrived each week, cut out the college and pro football game footage, then spliced the reels back together while keeping the football footage for his own library. This practice was highly illegal, but somehow Sid pulled it off. The newsreel companies never discovered that their films had been tampered with.

  For the Boston Patriots, Gillman had far more complex trickery up his sleeve. Remember Tom Bass, the Chargers assistant that Sid instructed to pick the brain of a college math instructor about geometric angles on a football field? In 1963 Bass was still at San Diego State, working for a rising star in the coaching ranks named Don Coryell. Tom would be hired for the Chargers backfield coaching job a few months later, but for the AFL championship he was a press box guest at Balboa Stadium. From that vantage point, Bass witnessed what he considers “the finest example I have ever seen of one team totally destroying another team’s character. Sid took Boston’s greatest strengths and turned them upside down. The 1963 AFL Championship is a game any coach or fan should study to see what perfection is on a football field.”

  I had only hazy memories from watching the game as a twelve-year old, so when I took my first look at the coaching tape, I was expecting to see a wild aerial game with exotic gadget calls. What I got instead was a fairly basic passing attack that included some of the same bread-and-butter plays Sid had us run with the Eagles nearly twenty years later! The plays themselves weren’t exactly groundbreaking, but Sid’s timing in calling them and their pre-snap design were revelations. Sid Gillman used his team’s passing history—what the Patriots expected to see—to set the opponent up, then destroy it with his running game. A game that was predicted to be close was decided in its first nine minutes.

  Watching from my parents’ house outside Buffalo, I had no idea that the Chargers-Patriots game was nearly postponed. “The original players’ shares were about to be reduced because the league decided to put the game on local TV, even though it wasn’t a sellout,” Ron Mix recalled. “Our cut was based on tickets sold, so the smaller gate receipts meant guys on both sides would be getting a lot less. I had meetings with Patriots player rep Tom Addison throughout the week, and both of us talked to our teammates about the possibility of going on strike. We hadn’t even formed an official players’ union yet! Obviously Sid wasn’t too happy with me about this, especially during a time when he wanted his team to give its complete focus to game preparation.”

  Fortunately, a compromise was reached the Friday before the game. The league agreed to pay out shares based on what they would have been if Balboa Stadium was close to a sellout. Nearly fifty
years later, Mix laughed about the entire episode. “It’s comical to think about how hard we were fighting over what was really nothing but chump change. But none of us made much money in those days.”

  Being distracted by the player share dispute wasn’t Gillman’s only worry. The centerpiece of his game plan, Keith Lincoln, was hardly the picture of health. “I drove to the game with my wife and told her I was feeling flu-ish,” he recalled. “I felt a little bit off and was concerned whether I’d have enough stamina to play the whole game.”

  Before the first quarter was even completed, it was the Boston Patriots who felt like throwing up.

  Chargers Series No. 1

  1st Quarter: San Diego 0, Boston 0

  San Diego began the game’s opening drive on its own 28. Paul Lowe and Keith Lincoln were split in the backfield, with quarterback Tobin Rote under center. Tight end Dave Kocourek lined up adjacent to left tackle Ernie Wright, with split end Don Norton in the slot and flanker Lance Alworth to his outside (the slot being the gap in the offensive line between the tackle and the customary receiver on that side). Sid called this his “east” formation, because it put two wide receivers on the right (or east side, as if you were looking at a map), and it made Kocourek the weakside receiver. This forced Patriots safety Ron Hall, whose regular assignment was covering the opponent’s strong side, to rotate over to where San Diego’s two wideouts were aligned. The problem for Hall was that he normally covered slower tight ends, not speedy receivers like Alworth or Norton. Mismatches like this would hurt the Patriots all day.

  The aggressive Boston defense was eager to make an impact right away, so it stationed outside linebacker Jack Rudolph on the line of scrimmage, head-up on Kocourek—and put the other outside backer, Addison, directly over Norton. Rote could clearly see that a blitz was coming, the first of what would be numerous Patriots “red dogs” (the common term for blitzing with a linebacker in the 1960s). Following the snap, nearly the entire Patriots seven-man front went straight for the quarterback. Rote faked a toss to Lincoln and faked an inside trap to Lowe—two fakes on the first play!—then drilled a swing pass to Lincoln on the right side of the field. Both Addison and middle linebacker Buoniconti took the bait on the trap and charged toward Lowe, leaving Lincoln open to pick up a dozen yards.

  This first call was Gillman’s philosophy in a nutshell. Years later, veteran San Diego sportswriter Wayne Lockwood wrote a terrific magazine piece on the ‘63 championship game plan, and in that story Sid told him, “You’re not just looking to see where you want to throw the ball or run the ball. What you’re looking for is reaction and over-reaction from the defense. The reason for that is I want the big play. I don’t want the little play, the average play. I want the big play.”

  Sid didn’t have to wait long for the Chargers to bust one. On the second play of the game, with the ball resting on the Chargers’ 40, Boston brought an eight-man front that included all three linebackers and Hall from his safety position. Once again, both wide receivers lined up on the same side, but this time on the left. Lowe ran in motion to their side, wreaking havoc in two different ways; Addison ran with Lowe, away from where the play was eventually headed, and Lowe’s movement also caused itchy defenders Rudolph and defensive end Bob Dee to go offside. As they jumped, Lincoln ran an inside trap, with left guard Sam DeLuca pulling behind center Don Rogers. Rogers buried defensive tackle Jesse Richardson, and with Addison following Lowe, there were no second-level defenders left in the middle of the field. Even with flu-like symptoms, it wasn’t hard for Lincoln to run through open space for a 56-yard gain before being tackled inside the 5.

  In their two earlier meetings, San Diego hadn’t put either of its backs in motion, deciding it was better at that time to rely on them as pass blockers instead of challenging Boston’s rugged run defense. Not today, as far as Sid Gillman was concerned. “Motion, movement, and a lot of traps,” he said. “That’s what we figured could beat them. We’d fake the toss and run the trap inside.” The Chargers would come back to this frequently, and blitz-crazy Boston got torched almost every time. “Having our backs in motion was a new look for them,” recalled Lincoln. “I think it really confused their linebackers. It gave us just a split-second where they’d freeze and gave us the opportunity to hit them quick.”

  Two plays later, Rote dived in on a quarterback sneak, and San Diego had the early lead. After the Chargers defense limited Boston’s attack to a net of minus 5 yards on its first possession, Gillman’s offensive unit took over at its own 41.

  Chargers Series No. 2

  1st Quarter: San Diego 7, Boston 0

  The Patriots defense began the drive with another blitz, but this one got the results its coaching staff was accustomed to seeing. Outside linebacker Rudolph lined up with his hand on the ground, making him a defensive end on the right side. In the middle Buoniconti blitzed the inside (also known as the “A-Gap,” the space between the center and the right guard), giving Boston a six-man rush. Buoniconti was successfully contained, but tight end Kocourek failed to block Rudolph, who dropped Rote for an eight-yard loss.

  The Patriots had all of thirty seconds to enjoy their defensive success. The spot of the sack placed the ball in the middle of the field between the hash marks, and Boston chose to line up a conventional four-man front. On second and 18, Paul Lowe simulated an inside trap, drawing attention from part of the defensive line. Buoniconti ignored Lowe, blitzing the backfield and colliding with left guard DeLuca. That was too bad for Nick, because the play was a toss outside to the left, with Lincoln running behind Ernie Wright. Wright weighed 270, a pretty good size for an offensive tackle back then, but he sure didn’t run like a guy that big. Defensive end Larry Eisenhauer remembered just how quick Ernie was on this play. “The two best tackles I went up against in the AFL were Jim Tyrer [who played for the Kansas City Chiefs] and Winston Hill [of the New York Jets] because they had quick feet. But Ernie was just as fast as they were. He could lead the sweep as well as a guard.”

  Lincoln was about to electrify the crowd again, but Wright was the true hero of the play. Pulling out on the perimeter, Ernie steamrolled Rudolph with a block that got Lincoln free on the edge. What made the block even more impressive was that Rudolph wasn’t really Wright’s assignment on the play. But with Rudolph heading his way, Ernie had no choice but to take him out. After Rudolph went down, Wright threw another block on Patriots defensive back Dick Felt, leaving no one to stop Lincoln as he broke free for a 67-yard touchdown run. “Our basic play was the outside toss—our key play, the one we dared you to stop,” said Gillman. “We had so much speed with Lincoln and Lowe.”

  The game was barely four minutes old, but already Lincoln had racked up 123 rushing yards on just two carries. The Chargers had scored on their fourth and sixth plays from scrimmage to take a two-touchdown lead. The Patriots answered with their first score of the game, a 7-yard run from Larry Garron, set up by a long pass reception from Gino Cappelletti. Maybe most important, the four-minute drive gave Boston’s defense a chance to catch its breath and try to figure out a way to slow down the Chargers.

  Chargers Series No. 3

  1st Quarter: San Diego 14, Boston 7

  From their own 27, the Chargers ran two plays that picked up only 4 yards. Faced with their first third-down situation of the game, the Patriots’ defense played the percentages, anticipating a pass. Both their scouting reports and firsthand game experience verified that for most of the ‘63 season, “pass-first” San Diego usually threw on third-and-long. Well, Sid crossed them up again. He guessed correctly that Boston would be blitzing its front, while the secondary was in “man free” coverage—that is, three defensive backs playing man-to-man on the two wide receivers and tight end, with the free safety available to help where needed. Gillman put Lowe in motion, and Rudolph ran with him step-for-step while leaving his assigned spot. After the snap, Lincoln ran an inside trap, following guard Pat Shea, who sealed off Eisenhauer. Lincoln burst through Rudolph’s vacated
area for an 11-yard gain and a first down.

  Lincoln’s gain resulted in the ball being spotted on the left hash mark, which gave the Chargers plenty of room to operate on the right side if they chose to run their next play in that direction. Sure enough, Rote dialed up a play called “Toss 78 Y-Man 0”: a pitch to Lowe running behind pulling right tackle Ron Mix. “We liked Ron Mix out in front,” said Sid. “If you couldn’t lead our toss, you couldn’t play for us. Nobody could lead that play better than Mix.” There’s no finer moment to illustrate why the man nicknamed “the Intellectual Assassin” was the first AFL lineman inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Mix blasted cornerback Bob Suci so hard that he shoved him almost 10 yards down the field, clearing the edge for Lowe. Slot receiver Don Norton eliminated Addison to get Lowe clean on the corner. Then Mix finished his work by blocking the stumbling but still upright Suci a second time. Lowe then ran between the last two Boston defenders to complete a 58-yard touchdown.

  The Chargers were blessed with terrific talent on their front line, but they were also well schooled by a guy named Joe Madro, a little genius who was with Sid every place he was a head coach. Tom Bass learned their system after joining the Chargers. “The two of them devised at least three different ways to attack every hole in the line. Ace, deuce, trey, jack, queen, and king were the names Sid and Joe used.