by Ron Jaworski
Steelers linebackers were coached to “get depth,” which made it hard for a quarterback to make out what was going on downfield. They were taught to keep running underneath with the inside receiver, whoever it was. The longer the quarterback held the ball, the deeper the linebackers could drop. The idea was to keep the quarterback from completing passes to the inside; make it hard for him to read the progression. “In those days, it was legal to reroute wide receivers,” said Russell. “You couldn’t hold them, but you could put your hands on them until the ball was in the air. We spent probably ninety percent of our time rerouting receivers, not letting them go where they wanted to go. You don’t see so much of that happening today. Linebackers now pretty much blitz or they drop back to a zone, but don’t do the funneling we did back in those days.”
Outside linebackers Ham and Russell were each blessed with unique talents that were deeply appreciated by their position coach Woody Widenhofer. “Jack could have been a professional racquetball player,” he contended. “He was that fast. Ham was the best player I ever coached. Russell was the smartest.” Ham concurs. “I probably learned more football from Andy when I first came in the league,” he said, “than all the coaches I had throughout my career.”
During the first two years of Carson’s tenure, the middle linebacker was a plugger named Henry Davis. “Henry was an underrated linebacker,” recalled Russell. “He had a great season in 1973 and made the Pro Bowl. When this rookie linebacker Jack Lambert came to camp in ‘74, nobody thought he’d take Henry’s job.” But in an early exhibition game against the Eagles, Davis suffered a serious concussion and never played again. Lambert ended up starting the entire season. Carson had been incorporating Cover-Two principles when Davis was playing in the middle. “But Lambert just played it much better,” observed Ham. “Henry was a solid linebacker, but the passing game was not his forte. Henry would knock your helmet off and was big on physical play, but this scheme required a lot more of the middle backer.”
At first glance, Lambert wasn’t the usual NFL man in the middle. “He looked more like a defensive end that needed to put on weight. He looked out of place,” stated Greene. “But then you started to watch him play. He had the ability to be in the right spot all the time. He had to call the signals, and he had to make the checks; and this was a rookie doing this. And I don’t know if he brought that tough attitude with him or if it just started to come out. But that attitude was definitely a big part of his success, because at six-four, two hundred eighteen pounds, as an inside backer, he doesn’t pass the eye test. But he could play.”
With Lambert’s arrival, a good Steelers defense became one of the finest in league history. “Everything changed for Bud with the arrival of Jack Lambert,” declared Wagner. “He was the salvation, the messiah. Jack could stay with almost anyone. If that tight end was running down the field, Jack was with him—huffing and puffing, but he was there. Jack’s height and ability to get downfield deep allowed the safeties to come pounding in there, to beat up the guy trying to catch the ball.”
Almost from the first day of training camp, Lambert’s singular talents were evident to Carson. “Bud had me do things that middle linebackers had never done before, mainly in pass coverage,” he recalled. “He had me covering tight ends man-to-man, covering halfbacks in a spread formation. He had us doubling wide receivers. Things like that were unheard of back when [Ray] Nitschke, [Dick] Butkus, and Willie Lanier played.” All three of these players are in the Hall of Fame, but none of them had anything approaching Lambert’s foot speed. A few years later, Carson told a reporter, “Joe Greene was the cornerstone, but Jack Lambert was the catalyst. I’m not sure we ever would’ve turned the corner had Lambert not come to this football team.”
Fans too young to have watched Lambert in action know him primarily from iconic NFL Films footage, growling at teammates with a mouth of missing teeth, while knocking runners and tight ends into next week. He was a tough customer, and I was certainly wary of him whenever my teams played Pittsburgh. But there was more to him than physical toughness. “People think his success was based on all that macho stuff, but that had very little to do with it,” said Russell. “He had superb techniques. He knew an offense’s tendencies, played them well, and was always in the right place at the right time. The guy had the brains to back up his bravado.”
Beginning in ‘74, Carson placed the responsibility of changing defensive checks on Lambert’s shoulders. “It was up to me to make the calls and signals to my teammates,” he explained. “That’s kind of like being a quarterback on offense. Between Ham, Russell, and myself, we made very few mistakes out there. We were well prepared. We knew our assignments. If we did make a mistake—and we did from time to time—we never made it again.” Each of the three linebackers also excelled in the classroom. “Games are won on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays,” said Ham. “Those meetings were not the place where you’d take a nap. Maybe we weren’t members of Mensa, but we were pretty smart guys who knew what was happening. Sometimes coaches would help you from the sidelines, but we were perfectly capable of making adjustments on the field ourselves. You combine the talent we had with the ability for our guys to disguise our coverages, and you’ll make a lot of plays.”
Ham and Lambert knew the indicators that could help them avoid being fooled by play-action fakes, and they were happy to share other trade secrets with their teammates. These included reading tackle traps and detecting how the depth of a pulling guard would reveal whether the play was going off tackle or around end. “When a tight end moved a yard outside of formation, Ham explained to me why that would help me predict what kind of pass was coming, and where he was going,” noted Wagner. “These guys watched film over and over, looking for stuff like this, and that’s what they found: things the average player didn’t see.”
By jamming receivers at the line, Pittsburgh’s corners also made life easier for the safeties. This allowed Wagner and Glen Edwards to drop from their normal areas, which disrupted a quarterback’s timing. “We had our corners carry the receivers to the fade area, normally a void area where people tried to attack, where the safety couldn’t get to the sideline,” explained Widenhofer. “Carrying the receivers to the fade area gave our safeties time to recover to defend any Go route,” which set up Edwards and Wagner perfectly. “My interception totals jumped after Bud got there,” Wagner boasted. “I played one of those years with a broken thumb and dropped quite a few because of that. Otherwise I might have had twenty interceptions!”
After Carson’s arrival, the Steelers annually finished among the league’s best in team interceptions, even though the franchise’s eventual all-time leading interceptor was still learning how to play within Bud’s system. “Mel Blount was one of the greatest physical specimens I’ve ever seen,” claimed Lambert in a 2001 interview with NFL Films. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d give him a couple of weeks to get in shape, he could go out and probably play right now. The guy could run like a deer. He was almost as big as I was, playing the cornerback position, but he was about ten times faster than I was.”
Unfortunately, Blount’s natural talent had him believing that he could get by simply on size and speed. During his first few seasons, he often strayed from the demands of Carson’s system. “There were a couple of occasions where Bud was highly critical of Mel’s mistakes,” Russell remembered. “Bud basically said, ‘If you’re not going to do what I’m telling you, you’re going to have to sit.’ ”
Early in his career, in a game against the Dolphins, Mel was schooled by Hall of Fame receiver Paul Warfield. “Paul beat him for three touchdowns in the first half, and Mel was in tears,” said Russell. “He was shocked. This was impossible! Here was a big guy who ran a 4.4, was a superb athlete, and Paul was turning him inside out. Well, Mel had to learn. It takes a while to understand what you can get away with in the NFL. Bud was constantly telling Mel what he should and should not do, and sometimes Mel just got stubborn with him.”
Blount’s
independent streak was a real obstacle for Carson, because Cover-Two could not succeed with freelancing cornerbacks. “The problem was that J. T. Thomas and Mel wanted to play man-toman on every play,” admitted Wagner. It took a while for the two of them to realize that they would do much better if they bought into Bud’s scheme. “With Cover-Two, you had guys who could make tackles at the line of scrimmage,” explained Dungy. “Pittsburgh forced the wide receivers to have to block these big corners, as opposed to just being wide receivers out there running pass routes. So it changed the way people could attack. Mel was six foot three and two hundred fifteen; J.T. was six foot two and two hundred fifteen. You tried to draft guys like that who could hit and liked to hit, because they were going to make seventy-five to a hundred tackles a year. They weren’t just going to be cover guys.”
The corners’ massive size was a major problem when other teams tried to run the ball. Bud was always looking for ways to take the best opposing players out of the game, and that’s exactly what Cover-Two achieved on rushing attempts. Part of Carson’s genius was forcing receivers to block big defensive backs. They couldn’t simply run them off. Wideouts now had to run laterally, and most of them weren’t such wonderful blockers to begin with. Either way—run or pass—Blount and Thomas spent most Sunday afternoons during the seventies flattening receivers into hamburger patties.
Peter Giunta served on Bud’s staff with the Eagles in the early nineties and went on to apply many of Carson’s concepts as an assistant coach with the Jets, Rams, Chiefs, and Giants. “Bud always said, ‘Never pass up an opportunity to hit a receiver.’ He liked Cover-Two because you could hit receivers right from the line of scrimmage. Then the linebackers could hit the tight end to reroute him to where Lambert was. People were not used to seeing teams playing what Pittsburgh did, which was a huge advantage. When you’re doing something different from what’s going on in the rest of the league, that makes it tough. And he’d mix up the coverage so offenses couldn’t detect a pattern; give them different looks.” Carson had his defenders sit back seven or eight yards so that quarterbacks couldn’t tell if they were in Cover-Two or Cover-Three. “There weren’t as many offensive formations, and teams didn’t go to three and four wideouts on plays,” explained Giunta. “So there weren’t as many disguises back then. The offensive looks didn’t change that much, which made it easier for the defense to make its calls.”
Once the corners effectively jammed the receivers, Cover-Two’s second-level defense asserted itself, taking the tight end or a releasing back out of circulation. “Lambert wouldn’t stay with the tight end from start to finish if he ran a vertical seam route,” explained Ham. “He’d pull off, and if I did my job and flattened the tight end to slow him down, it then took him a moment to take another step upfield. That was enough time for Lambert to be sitting deep enough in the middle. Now the tight end is no longer a factor, and the safeties can move over to the receivers, because there’s nothing really threatening them in the middle of the field.”
During the late sixties and early seventies, the zone defenses typically had three guys playing deep. When Carson came in, he focused on the rerouting system, supplemented by Cover-Two, which was a zone-man combination. “The idea was that the quarterback wouldn’t have much time to throw anyway,” said Russell, “so every potential receiver could be covered in those zones. Carson’s theory was, ‘If you can make them punt, you’ve done your job. You don’t have to be a hero with an interception.’ Rerouting was done in man-to-man, even if we did have deep guys playing zone. It was a matchup zone. If a man came into your zone, you didn’t back off—you covered him right away.”
Carson viewed defensive play in much the same way that Sid Gillman visualized offenses: through geometric principles. “For Bud, the whole idea was that it’s a game of angles,” said Wagner. “If you got deep enough, the quarterback would be more reluctant to throw that far, because the angles were different. NFL passers are all about who can fire that sideline route, the comeback, the fifteen-yarder into the seam. You get your hands on the receiver, give him a little shove, and that makes it a much tougher throw for the quarterback.”
Cut down the angles, Carson believed, and you eliminated the bread-and-butter routes most comfortable for quarterbacks. “What we did was take away the window to the curl route,” said Widenhofer. “We would squeeze that to where the action was. We had landmarks for the safeties on the field. The corners funneled one receiver inside, while the linebackers funneled others outside. This way, the safety could help out on either receiver, because he didn’t have as much ground to cover. We were lucky, because the players we had not only executed our schemes but also understood them and why we called them.”
Small wonder then, that Pittsburgh’s Cover-Two produced on-field results and off-field awards. “In 1976 we had four Steelers from our secondary voted to the Pro Bowl,” recalled Wagner. “I’m not sure that had ever happened before.”
ittsburgh’s fiercest rival of the 1970s was not a divisional opponent but a team that played its home games more than two thousand miles away. From 1972 through 1976, the Steelers and the Oakland Raiders faced each other in five straight win-or-go-home playoff battles. “It was almost like the Steelers and Raiders were in the same division, because we met them so often in the playoffs,” observed Tom Flores, Oakland’s receivers coach during that period. “It was an incredible rivalry because it was the same guys basically playing year in and year out. You’ll never see that again, with the way free agency is and the salary cap. They had Noll, and we had [head coach] John Madden and pretty much the same assistant coaches all through the seventies. And there were only seven coaches back then, too. So the philosophies of the teams did not change.”
Neither did either team’s attitude toward its opponent: Both maintained a healthy mix of disdain and respect. “Just about everybody hated the Raiders,” admitted Joe Greene. “The Raiders were at the front gate of the AFC for so many years. Anybody who won the conference championship had to go through [owner] Al Davis’s team. In my heart of hearts, it was teams like the Raiders that made us a good football team, because they’d beat your ass.”
Oakland had fans all over the country, and the emerging Steelers hungered for the success that would bring them a national following too. “During the seventies, they were always the marquee team in Monday night games,” stated Dwight White. “Nobody ever went to bed early the nights the Raiders played. They always mounted comebacks, found a way to win. They were our equals, the closest thing to us. And psychologically, most football teams want to beat the people that are the closest thing to you, in order to prove to yourself that we’re on top.”
Jack Lambert wouldn’t have minded squaring off against Oakland every week. “Undoubtedly, the most fun I’ve ever had in my life was playing against the Raiders,” he said. “To me, that was what football was all about. They didn’t whine. They didn’t cry. They came out and knew it was going to be a bloodbath. It wasn’t tricky football, like playing the Cowboys. They came out and said, ‘We’re going to run right here. Try and stop us.’ We had guys on our team that were just as nasty, if not nastier, than some of those guys on their team, and they did some pretty nasty things out there. But I still respected them. I thought the world of [Raiders quarterback] Kenny Stabler and a couple of the other guys that played on their team. I got a chance to meet them at the Pro Bowls and find out that, hey, these are pretty good guys.”
Among the Raiders, the feeling was mutual. Running back Pete Banaszak believes that “even with all the bitterness of the rivalry, the guys I have been best friends with since I retired are the Steelers from that era, like Ham, Russell, and Greenwood. I respect them more now than I ever did,” he said, “because they were competitors like us. When I have my golf tournament today, I make sure the first guys I invite are those Steelers players. We were obsessed with competing with them. I love watching old film of those games. I still get goose pimples when I see them.” More than thirty-fiv
e years later, John Madden still couldn’t believe how fortunate he was to be part of the rivalry: “When you look back at the games we played with Pittsburgh, it was just thrilling, simply because you were involved in it, remembering all those guys that are in the Hall of Fame who played in those games and made them so great.”
You know a rivalry is intense when events away from the action become part of the story. “We were playing them in Oakland one time, and the Steelers had the ball,” remembered Banaszak. “[Center] Mike Webster came out of the huddle, bent over to make the snap, but then told the ref he needed to switch to another ball. When the ref asked why, Mike showed it to him. Apparently the Raiders’ equipment staff had written on the laces, ‘Fuck you Steelers.’ “ Before one playoff game at Three Rivers Stadium, Al Davis accused the Pittsburgh grounds crew of purposely icing up a previously dry field to slow down Oakland’s faster receivers. “Something weird always happened to us when we went to Pittsburgh,” Banaszak continued. “One year, our tight end Bob Moore got beat up somewhere and came back to his room with a black eye. Another time, the night before our game, the fire alarm in our hotel suddenly went off at one-thirty in the morning.”
But no planned pranks could surpass the damage in the ‘72 playoff game, when Pittsburgh running back Franco Harris made his famous (or dubious, if you ask Oakland) “Immaculate Reception.” With the Steelers trailing, 7–6, in the closing seconds of the game, Raiders’ defensive back Jack Tatum got in front of Terry Bradshaw’s desperation pass. The ball caromed right into the arms of a happily surprised Harris, who was behind the action. The rookie caught it, then ran 42 yards for a come-from-behind touchdown, giving the franchise the first playoff victory in its largely sorry thirty-nine-year history. Many historians still regard Franco’s freak catch as the most famous play in the annals of the NFL. It certainly ranks that high in Pittsburgh!