The Games That Changed the Game

by Ron Jaworski

  Before Carson, most secondary run support came from the safeties, but that changed in Cover-Two. The rolled-up corners made this scheme very effective if the offense ran the ball wide, because tight-covering defensive backs could take away plays designed to bounce to the outside. Cover-Two was even more effective on passing plays. The Steelers had corners who were big, physical athletes. Mel Blount and J. T. Thomas could jam receivers at the line and disrupt their patterns. And this was all perfectly legal. Until this tactic was outlawed in 1978, defenders could be much more physical all over the field. They could ride receivers or the tight end and reroute them anywhere in the pass pattern. This made quarterbacks sitting ducks for the Steel Curtain’s legendary front four of Joe Greene, Ernie Holmes, Dwight White, and L. C. Greenwood.

  Another critical component of Cover-Two was Carson’s deployment of the inside linebacker. Bud realized that with his corners set tight to their opponents and his safeties split, voids were created in the intermediate and deep middle of the field. That weakness was addressed after Pittsburgh drafted middle linebacker Jack Lambert in 1974. With his off-the-charts height and speed, Lambert was the prototypical Cover-Two linebacker, and he made all the difference in Carson’s defense. Teammate Andy Russell claimed that “Lambert was the first linebacker who could blanket tight ends man-to-man, and run with them down the middle.” With Lambert smothering the likes of All-Pros Raymond Chester and Russ Francis, the safeties were free to beat up other receivers trying to make catches.

  Pittsburgh’s safeties were required to be hybrids. They needed range and instincts to defend against the pass, but also the athletic talent to attack downhill, with speed and control to stop the run. This may be why Carson’s Steelers defenses are remembered by many as being big and tough. They were physical, all right, and I still have bruise marks from that ‘75 game as proof! But the reality was that the Steelers of the midseventies were comparatively small for that era, particularly at the linebacker position. Speed and intelligence, more than size, were the strengths of Steelers defenders.

  Being smart was essential for anyone who played Cover-Two. In Bud’s first years, he stressed another new concept called route progression. Carson taught his guys to understand that defense on all pass routes was based on an understanding of where receivers line up. Are they next to the strong-side tackle? Side by side? Inside where the tight end was? Pre-snap alignment dictated post-snap route combinations. Then Bud established specific drop adjustments for the linebackers and the secondary. Angles and spacing were essential to his system, and Carson’s players were drilled constantly to make sure that they were in the right position at the correct distance to cover receivers. The Steelers were especially adept at reading plays before the snap and were rarely fooled by traps or misdirection. Carson also kept them on their toes by changing entire alignments on the fly, sometimes in the middle of games! His players were bright and talented enough to adjust.

  “A lot of times, you didn’t even know what coverage you were going to play when you came out of the huddle,” admitted Tony Dungy, who was a rookie defensive back with the Steelers in 1977, Carson’s final season in Pittsburgh. “It depended on the formation the offense was in, and you had to get those checks on the run. If we could be in a better defense, Bud didn’t want to be stuck in something that wasn’t as good, and he expected us to change it. One of his favorite statements was, ‘I know this is a hard concept, but if we’re smart, we can handle it.’ What were we going to say? That we couldn’t handle it? Nobody would say, ‘This is really too hard, Bud. We can’t do it.’ You would take the challenge because he’d always lay it on that way; that if we were as smart as we thought we were, we could get it done.” This strategy of using “proactive reaction,” virtually nonexistent in the NFL of the early seventies, is widespread in today’s game.

  iven his background, it almost seemed preordained that Leon “Bud” Carson would one day coach in Pittsburgh. This son of a steelworker was born in Freeport, Pennsylvania, about a half hour drive from Pittsburgh’s city limits. He played defensive back for the University of North Carolina, then served two years in the marines. After his discharge, he coached high school ball until his alma mater brought him back as a Tar Heels assistant in 1957. He made another stop at South Carolina before moving on to Georgia Tech in 1966. The next year, the Yellow Jackets put Carson in charge, succeeding college coaching legend Bobby Dodd. Bud suffered through two losing seasons before taking a 9-3 Tech team to the Sun Bowl in 1970. But after slipping to 6-6 with a bowl loss in ‘71, Carson was fired.

  Steelers head coach Chuck Noll quickly contacted Bud to see if he was interested in returning to his western Pennsylvania roots as defensive backs coach. Carson agreed to join the staff, which also included two brilliant football minds in line coach George Perles and linebackers coach Woody Widenhofer. Noll began 1972 as both head coach and defensive coordinator but soon realized he was spreading himself too thin, so at midseason he put Bud in charge of the defense. The ‘72 Steelers went on to win their division, making the playoffs for the first time since 1947.

  Noll and Carson were a perfect football marriage. Chuck was a firm believer in zone coverage, not the predominant man-to-man schemes of the era. “Right after he was hired, Bud met with Noll, and Chuck told him what kind of defense he wanted to play, given the talent we had,” recalled safety Mike Wagner. “Noll’s philosophy was not to try and trick the other team but to out-execute them. Bud stuck to this as well, making changes here and there but not straying too far from his principles. Chuck liked the concepts of Cover-Two and thought this scheme could become the foundation for everything he wanted to do on defense. Before then, I didn’t even know what Cover-Two was. I had never played it in college, although Jack Ham had played some at Penn State. Even if you don’t want to admit that Bud is the father of Cover-Two, he definitely deserves all the credit for refining it and giving it discipline.”

  Players could tell right away that Carson was brilliant. They also recognized he could be a son of a bitch. “Bud was a tough customer; businesslike and to the point,” said Dungy. “He didn’t mind getting on anybody and everybody. He was a great guy to learn from, as long as you didn’t take it personally. In my rookie year, we were playing the Browns. We had the lead when I came in to replace Wagner, after he got hurt. It was a scheme we had worked on in practice the whole week. I messed it up, they scored, and I came back to the bench. Bud said, ‘Coach Noll ought to fire you, but before I let him do that, I’ll cut you myself tomorrow. I’m not going to lose my job because you can’t do what you’re supposed to do.’ If you had feelings that could be hurt easily, you didn’t want to play for Bud Carson.”

  Jack Ham remembers the shouting matches—and there were a lot of them. “To watch us in practice, you’d have thought we were a dysfunctional defense, but out of all that came a solid game plan and a solid defensive football team,” he said. “You’d better have a thick skin with Bud. It didn’t matter if you were an All-Pro or a backup, he’d scream at you. If you got beat physically, that was one thing, but what drove him crazy was if you made a mental error. He’d go nuts. But he was also receptive to other people’s ideas. He wasn’t a my-way-or-the-highway kind of guy. He was confident enough in his abilities as a coach that, if you had something that made the team better, then he was all for it.”

  Because of Carson’s open-mindedness, the Steelers’ defense was the first unit to figure out how to shut down a particular third-down pass play that had been difficult to stop. On third-and-short, offenses would isolate a running back on a linebacker, who was in man-to-man coverage. If the linebacker played too far outside, the halfback would break his receiving route inside—and vice versa. The play almost always resulted in a first-down completion, because the linebacker backed off in a cushion. Since ballcarriers were usually better athletes with superior open field skills, linebackers had to play loose; otherwise, a missed jam could easily result in a touchdown.

  But then Andy Russell
came up with a solution. “I remembered how I’d covered [Baltimore halfback] Tom Matte. He was a good receiver, but he wasn’t any faster than me. So what I did was jump up in his face as the ball was snapped, not allowing him an inside move. Then I’d be able to run with him as I pushed him down the sideline. I thought this might also work against fast backs like O. J. [Simpson], [Ed] Podolak, and Jim Kiick. I explained it to Bud, and he liked the idea. So Ham and I developed a new technique called the ‘hug-'emup.’ When the ball was snapped, it would almost be like a blitz, and the backs would set themselves for a blitz pickup. It turned out this technique worked beautifully. We really stopped them on those third-down plays. The year after I retired, I traveled to lots of stadiums as an announcer for NBC. Coaches would come up to me before the game, asking me if I could teach their guys the hug-'em-up.”

  Because he was so receptive to new approaches, Carson could also be flexible with his own. “Bud would never let an offense dictate to our defense,” said Wagner. “When he put the game plan in, he was constantly changing what we did, given what he saw on film, or what he anticipated the opponent would do. I remember one time before a game, Noll came up to me to remind me of my responsibility in a particular coverage. I laughed and shook my head, telling Chuck, ‘Forget it. Bud just changed it in the tunnel.’ Bud was so intense. He was always trying to come up with a better scheme.”

  Some of that flexibility stemmed from Carson’s own paranoia. “He never wanted opposing coaches to know what we were doing,” said Russell. “He had a real phobia about them being able to anticipate the defenses we were in. Usually an opposing offense would send guys in motion, in the hopes that the defense would switch to a zone. A lot of defenses responded this way back then. Then the quarterback had a better picture of what he was facing. Bud didn’t want us to do that. He wanted us to be able to change every time the offense moved. He wanted us to switch to the defense that would best stop their best play from that specific formation.

  “By Friday, Bud would finally decide on what defenses he wanted us to play. He would give us a bunch of ‘automatic’ checks. So if the other team came out in an I formation, Ham and I would play ‘defense number one.’ If they moved to where the fullback was behind the center and the halfback was to his right, then Bud had us in ‘defense number two.’ If they moved to a split backfield, then it was ‘defense number three,’ and so on. Theoretically, it was possible we could change the defense five times before the ball was snapped. And this had never been done, because in the old days, everybody just checked to the zone. Carson simply would not let them know what we were doing.”

  One time on a flight to Cincinnati for a game with the Bengals, Russell was cramming like a nervous college student, trying to memorize all of Bud’s defensive checks. Road stadiums were too loud for Steelers defenders to rely on hearing the middle linebacker shout out the changes, so the entire front seven had to automatically know how to react to any formation. “We’re standing in the tunnel for introductions,” Russell recalled, “and Carson informs us that he has completely changed the calls. All of a sudden, we’ve got five brand new checks. We start the game with these new calls, which I’ll refer to as the Sunday afternoon checks—as opposed to the Friday afternoon checks.

  “We play the first quarter, and Bud thinks [Bengals offensive coordinator] Bill Walsh is getting a feel for what we’re doing. So he says, ‘We’re going to mix and match. Every other series, I want you to play the Friday checks, then switch back on the next series and call the Sunday checks. Got it?’ Now, I’m not saying we were a bunch of rocket scientists, but if you didn’t have some relatively smart guys on defense, we couldn’t have done this. We got mixed up a few times, but overall we had a pretty good game that day—and I really don’t think anything like that had been tried before. I remember years later being at a party in San Francisco with Walsh. I told Bill that story, and he was absolutely flabbergasted. He couldn’t believe it. Bill said, ‘Now I understand why I couldn’t figure out what you guys were doing!’ ”

  Opponents were constantly frustrated playing against Carson’s defenses. “I saw [Redskins quarterback] Billy Kilmer at a golf tournament, and he gave us a great compliment,” remembered Wagner. “He said, ‘We always know exactly what defense you’re in. We call the perfect play against that defense—and we still can’t beat you.’ A lot of that came from our flexibility. Our playbook was kind of a joke. There was so much Bud taught us on the field that was never written down or diagrammed. You always felt you were better prepared because you had someone like him calling the shots. We loved his philosophy of aggressive play. That was his signature. Bud Carson was a coach who made me better. And he made me realize that the mental aspect was the key to everything.”

  s I’ve said, the foundation of Carson’s defense was Pittsburgh’s front four, and its cornerstone was future Hall of Fame defensive tackle Joe Greene. He was nicknamed “Mean Joe,” but he wasn’t just some mindless monster in the middle of the line. “I was the guy who was communicating the stunts, formations, and whatever we were going to do at that particular time,” recalled Greene. “It wasn’t coming from the sideline. We already knew what our responsibilities were, but they constantly changed, based on sets, formations, and down and distance. When the quarterback would make his call, we could make our calls and be on point instead of lagging behind, playing guesswork with what may or may not be thrown at us. We also had the talent, but the kind of communication amongst us was the key to our success.”

  Because of their skill set, Pittsburgh’s front four could apply sufficient pressure all by themselves. “We’d play a four-man front on first down, which was unorthodox at the time,” said defensive end Dwight White. “We thought we were better than the other teams were—individually, one-on-one. And if we could find a situation where four guys could ultimately end up one-on-one, we did it, because Joe could take up two blockers all by himself. He’s the guy in the middle clogging up everything. Joe took away the whole interior of the offensive line, making the ballcarrier run outside, going toward the sideline, where we wanted him to go anyway.”

  At the other defensive end was L. C. Greenwood, who, according to White, “was more like a basketball player. Out of the eleven of us on defense, he was probably the most mild mannered and aloof to what was going on, but was an incredible athlete. He was fast and had a long reach. People would try to block him, but you could only block half of him, because there was so much of him that linemen almost needed to say, ‘You take this piece, and I’ll take the other piece.’ My disposition was a lot different. I personalized it with the guy in front of me. I’d say to him, ‘You’re going to have a bad day today. You can take this ass whipping any way you want to take it, but you’re gonna take it.’ I probably could have used some anger management counseling. My thought was to just keep coming, with constant pressure. I wanted to keep pounding on you, make you feel that I couldn’t be stopped.”

  The fourth member of the Steel Curtain was Ernie “Fats” Holmes, and had his off-field life taken a different turn, he might have been better than any of them. “Ernie was just as good as Joe Greene,” insisted White. “He just never got the publicity and was a different personality. He was the closest thing to a John Deere tractor or a Caterpillar that I’ve ever seen in my life—he had incredible strength. You couldn’t move the guy, and he had a real nasty personality.”

  White acknowledged the greatness of other famous defensive lines such as the Minnesota Vikings’ “Purple People Eaters” and the “Fearsome Foursome” of the Los Angeles Rams, but he felt the Steel Curtain was unique by comparison: “We were four black players, four guys from small schools with common backgrounds. We took great pride in that because of what was happening in the late sixties in the country. Here are four black cats featured on the cover of Time. I think that was the first time a unit from a sports team was given that type of profile by Time magazine. And it was important to us to be as good as they said we were, because people were
watching us.”

  The front four’s dominance meant that Pittsburgh’s linebackers rarely needed to blitz. “Our offensive linemen wouldn’t dare fire out on play-action, because they were afraid they’d miss a block on Greene and those guys,” said Chiefs quarterback Len Dawson. “Then this allowed their linebackers to drop off, to read a pass play quicker. It all centered on the strength of the front four.” And Carson made sure the communication between linemen and linebackers was constant. “All three of us linebackers talked to the defensive line,” claimed Russell. “We’d say stuff like, ‘Play it with your left shoulder, because they’re going to be running a 17-U'—and that’s exactly what the offense would do. Our line responded, and we shut things down. If you have a sense of what the other team is going to do and react to it quickly, they’re going to have to go somewhere else and do things they don’t want to do.”