by Ron Jaworski
Of course, none of this happens without a smart, tough quarterback—and in Fouts, the Chargers had someone who fit the bill perfectly. “Dan Fouts had cool, steel-like nerve and courage,” stated Bill Walsh, who coached Dan in San Diego during the ‘76 season. “The great ones can function in that storm of people coming after him. He took a lot of beatings, a lot of pounding, but continued to play, hurt or otherwise. He played more physical football than anybody on his team, including the linebackers, because of all the contact he absorbed. He was the complete forward passer; every element of the passing game was at his command. Dan was not the most gifted athlete to play the position, but hard work and efficiency in his movement more than made up for it.”
You know Dan today as a TV analyst, which seems natural, given his lineage. Fouts has been around pro football most of his life. During the fifties, his father, Bob, was the radio voice of the San Francisco 49ers—a job that enabled Dan to be a Niners ballboy at an early age. He chose the jersey number 14 because that’s what Y. A. Tittle wore when he played for San Francisco. Later on, Tittle’s successor, John Brodie, took Dan under his wing, teaching by example the mental toughness that was required to be an NFL quarterback.
Fouts learned those lessons well, but he was also a born leader. “Dan used to wear this hat during the week,” recalled Bauer. “It said ‘M.F.I.C.'—Mother Fucker in Charge—and he was definitely that. He was the smartest, toughest quarterback I’ve ever known. He was always prepared, knew the game plan, and when you got in that huddle, you’d sure better know what you were doing. If the coaches made a mistake, they weren’t immune, either. Fouts would come at you. You were held responsible for being prepared.”
Opponents also feared Fouts—for entirely different reasons. “You could not take a play off against him, he was so good,” praised Dolphins defensive back Glenn Blackwood. “Fouts never eyeballed a receiver; he never tipped you off. His greatest ability was his command of the field. He knew where the holes were, and he put the ball on the money.”
Statistically, the ball most often ended up with Joiner, the most technically sound of the Chargers’ receivers. Charlie had actually started in the pros as a defensive back with Houston, but he got flattened by Broncos running back Floyd Little during his rookie year. After being carted off the field, Charlie made an immediate career change—to wide receiver. He prospered with the Oilers and Cincinnati Bengals before coming to the Chargers in ‘76. “When I went to San Diego, I was entering my eighth or ninth year and thought I was almost at the end of my career,” said Joiner. “But Coryell’s offense fit me so well that it really turned out to be the beginning my career. I played nine more years after that. For me, it was the best offense in the world.
“My job was to make sure that I could keep a safety out of the action to give those other receivers a chance to catch it and turn it up-field. We always knew there was no particular chosen guy on the pass pattern. There were as many as five who had a chance of getting the ball. But you had to run your route to precision, run it believably, force the defense to defend the entire field. If you were open, Dan would get the ball to you. No matter what curves the defense had, one of our five receivers was going to be open.”
“The reason Charlie Joiner is in the Hall of Fame,” noted Saunders, “is that he could change his direction with the same body lean going full speed. He could get out of a break as fast as he came off the line of scrimmage. Chargers receivers had to outleverage the defender and get quicker separation. That’s why the ball had to be thrown before separation, so the target could get to the ball before the defender did.”
In 1978 the Chargers drafted John Jefferson out of Arizona State University, adding a deep threat to San Diego’s passing attack. “I had some real speed coming out of college,” said Jefferson. “I was the type of guy who might be covered at first going deep downfield, but once the ball got there, I was able to go up and take it away from whoever was on me—very similar to Lynn Swann with Pittsburgh in his heyday.” As a rookie, Jefferson led the league with 13 touchdown catches, and the Coryell system had much to do with that. “In his passing tree, you can give your receivers two or three different routes,” explained Jefferson. “In San Diego, the coaches allowed us the freedom to change those routes, depending on the coverage. Dan pretty much knew when we were going to break those routes and when to release the ball. Sure enough, we’d be there. This made it difficult for defenses to shut us down. They might have the proper coverage to stop that first route, but when we changed it, we had them beat.”
Nineteen seventy-eight was the Chargers’ first winning season since 1969, when Gillman had been their coach. Al Saunders pinpointed an even more significant similarity: “Both Sid’s and Don’s offenses were built on big-play potential, which is the reverse of the ‘control the football, move the chains’ approach. But look at the stats, and you’ll see a pretty good balance with the running game—ground attacks that were very efficient. Unpredictability was vital to their success. Defenses don’t want to give up big plays, which made them tend to play more conservatively.
“Both men’s mind-set was ‘score,’ not ‘control the game,’ “ he continued. “So they were ahead of their time by being more aggressive in their calls. I can never remember Don Coryell saying before a game, ‘We’re going to pound these guys into the ground, we’re going to wear them down.’ Winning in physical style wasn’t his way. You never sensed that Don was going to hold back—he was always aggressive in his play calls. Keep the pressure on the defense. And neither Sid nor Don were in-the-box thinkers. They were willing to utilize players’ talents to help them succeed. And that often meant coming up with creative solutions.”
Both Gillman and Coryell knew that none of this could take place unless their quarterbacks were well protected, so both placed a premium on quality offensive line play. The 1980s unit of center Don Macek, tackles Billy Shields and Russ Washington, and guards Ed White and Doug Wilkerson was one of the finest in league history. It was so big in size for that era that one local writer nicknamed them “the Five Tackles.” Fouts loved them like brothers. “My guys were great players and great people. They really formed a tight pocket for me. We were strong in the middle and had athletic tackles on the sides to run defensive ends away from me. Obviously I knew their importance to our success and to my own well-being, so I’d always take them out to dinner the night before a game. How well they’d performed the week before determined the size of the tab I was going to run up. I’d use this as a motivating tool in the huddle late during the fourth quarter when the game was on the line. I’d say, ‘We’ve got to go down and score, men. What’s it going to be: prime rib or pasta?’ The big boys always wanted their meat, so to me, those T-bone steaks were the best form of life insurance.”
But there were also some noticeable differences between Gillman’s Chargers and Coryell’s late-seventies model. “I think Sid’s was a more deliberate system to get the ball downfield. There were fewer progressions with those Chargers teams—a primary receiver to a check-down,” Saunders noted. “Don’s system created more options for the quarterback when he didn’t have to throw downfield. When I was with Don, we had screens off of downfield throws. Let’s say you had a curl route for Joiner, with the back on a swing pass. The guard would pull out wide. What Don and Ernie did was expand what you could do with underneath receivers. It allowed for more creativity, because as the game evolved, people were utilized in different ways.”
t was the next draft that would drastically reshape the look of Air Coryell—and permanently change the NFL passing game. San Diego’s two veteran tight ends, Bob Klein and Pat Curran, were showing their age, and the team needed new blood at the position. After orchestrating a deal with the Browns, the Chargers were able to move up in the first round and select the University of Missouri’s Kellen Winslow.
“I didn’t play high school football until my senior year,” Winslow recalled. “Up till then, I was kind of a nerd. I was in chess club
and had an after-school job with UPS. Once I finally got out on the practice field, I didn’t know what I was doing—I was pretty green. But my chess knowledge actually helped me figure things out. It wasn’t till the end of my sophomore year in college at spring practice that I realized I was the ‘knight’ of a chess board. At that point, the light went on, and football began to make sense to me. There’s only so much time and space to get certain things done. You can’t be everywhere. The knight is the only chess piece that can move eight spaces in multiple directions. It helped me understand what the wide receivers and backs were supposed to be doing.”
During his rookie year in ‘79, the Chargers used tight ends primarily to shuttle in plays. Their duties were traditional to the position: run blocking and short-to-intermediate routes originating next to either offensive tackle. Winslow caught only twenty-five passes before a leg injury prematurely ended his season. That winter, Coryell and his staff thought long and hard about better ways to take advantage of Kellen’s skills. “The Chargers’ offensive line coach back then was a guy named Dave Levy,” remembered Saunders. “Dave said, ‘If you gave me Kellen for a year, I could make him into an All-Pro tackle.’ That’s how athletic he was. He was a wide receiver in an offensive lineman’s body.
“You have to understand how tight ends were being used in the early 1980s,” Saunders added. “Their primary function was as a blocker, then to move out to the back side as part of the route and run a drag route. Or they’d run hooks inside, or get open in the flat. That was it. They were all big guys, ‘tackles’ who could catch the football. Plus, outside linebackers could still grab a guy and smack him around trying to defend the run.”
It pained Joe Gibbs to see Winslow’s talent being held back by the traditional limits of the position. “When we lined him up at the standard tight end spot and he went to release, he got pounded by the outside linebacker in a 4-3 or the inside linebacker in a 3-4,” he recalled. “He had a tough time getting off clean, and we felt we had to do something. So Ernie, Don, our O-line coach, Jim Hanifan, and I said to ourselves, ‘Maybe the thing to do is take him off that line of scrimmage and start moving him all over the place.’ ”
The idea itself wasn’t entirely new to Coryell. “I remember at San Diego State when Don, out of nowhere, moved a wide receiver to the tight end position when he thought the guy could get deep in the middle,” recalled Tom Bass. “We ended up getting a touchdown on that play. Even then he was thinking this was an alignment that was ripe for exploitation. That got everyone’s attention back then.”
The experimentation with Winslow began when he was running dummy drills before a 1980 summer camp scrimmage with Dallas. “The Cowboys had a lot of motion, lots of sets,” Winslow recalled. “I was working with backup quarterback James Harris on the scout team, and it was hard to mimic what they did before the snap, because a lot of it was impromptu. So they’d hold up a card and say, ‘Line up where you want, but end up in this formation.’ So we just started playing around with it. Our coaches saw something, and so I ended up in practice running the same routes as the wide receivers. I loved running those routes, the ‘skinny post,’ the ‘deep post'—and there weren’t many guys then at six five, 245 who could run these traditional wide-out routes. When you looked at the film, I ran the routes about as well as the wide receivers, although I was usually a step or two behind where they were.”
What Coryell and Zampese did with Winslow was to take a player with extraordinary pass-catching ability and create positions in which he could be the primary receiver. “Now you had a guy in the middle of the field who took advantage of personnel matchups or man-on-man matchups,” said Saunders. “Back then, either a strong safety or linebacker was going to have to cover him. They didn’t play zone defenses then like they do today, giving Winslow much more space to operate. The more Kellen showed what he could do, the more Coryell added to the system. And because of that offense’s versatility, everybody could play a part in what was going on. Winslow was a big target, but he was also courageous, catching in a crowd. He was always better than the defender he was going up against.”
Turning Winslow into what I call The Roving-Y created a king-sized headache for opposing defensive coordinators, including Denver’s Joe Collier, who faced the Chargers twice a year. “During the early years of Air Coryell,” he said, “the strong safety wasn’t much more than a glorified linebacker; basically a run defender who could cover an average tight end. You put a guy like Winslow out in the slot and he’s going up against coverage that’s a lot slower than he is. It’s not the matchup on defense we liked. So we’d try to give that strong safety some help, like bringing a linebacker out to him or bringing the other safety over to help. Of course, this weakened us in other areas. It forced us to do things we didn’t want to do.”
San Diego opened the 1980 season on the road with a relatively easy 34–13 win at Seattle. Winslow was barely a factor, catching only two passes for 41 yards. The Chargers were saving him, along with some creative new play calls, for their home opener the following week against the arch-rival Oakland Raiders. “Ernie Zampese was a master at handling top talent,” Winslow recalled. “He was quick to compliment and encourage. After I caught only two passes against Seattle, he made a point to say he’d try to get me a lot more in the next game. We were so tied to the team concept that we all knew if you caught two passes one day, you’d get a big increase in another game. Teams would try to take a guy out who did well the week before, so things would open up for someone else.”
Rod Rust was the Chiefs’ defensive coordinator during the heyday of Air Coryell. As a division foe, he became all too familiar with San Diego’s share-the-wealth receiving strategy. “By design, the Chargers went through a rotating ‘receiver of the week’ scheme,” he explained. “What you would see on game film from the previous three weeks was not what you were going to see in your game. If you went back more than four weeks, then you might be able to see what they were more likely to run. They used so many formation variations, moving people around, and there are only so many hours in the week for film study.”
During the ‘80 draft, the Raiders selected a big and physical Penn State linebacker named Matt Millen in the second round. The week-two matchup with the Chargers was only Millen’s second professional game, and what he saw that afternoon was the first glimpse of an offensive approach that would profoundly affect pro football strategy. “That day, they ran a bunch of stuff we hadn’t seen, hadn’t practiced against,” Millen confessed. “Today all this stuff is commonplace, but not then. The Chargers’ coaching staff was fortunate to have Winslow, and he was fortunate to have those coaches. Had it not been in San Diego, it would eventually have been done someplace else, because it was time. This was the right place at the right time for both.”
1st Quarter
Winslow was not in the starting lineup when the Chargers began their first series. Instead San Diego went with Greg McCrary at tight end, a skilled blocker of considerable size who’d actually caught a touchdown pass the week before in the win against the Seattle Seahawks. From a traditional two-back set, the Chargers ran the ball on their first three plays before missing on a throw to Jefferson. A Raiders holding penalty on a punt gave Fouts a fresh set of downs near midfield, and that’s when Coryell called the first of many passes to Winslow.
Kellen replaced McCrary, but he did not line up as a traditional tight end. He was split right outside the numbers as the X, or weak-side, wide receiver. Joiner was in the slot to the left, with Jefferson aligned outside of Joiner. Clarence Williams and John Cappelletti were split in the backfield. Raiders strong safety Mike Davis was aligned over Winslow but gave him a generous 10-yard cushion. Davis was a terrific run defender but had limited abilities in open space. “Like the rough beard he always wore, Mike was tough,” remembered Tom Flores, who was in his second year as Oakland’s head coach in 1980. “But it was a lot to ask of him to go man-to-man all day long on Winslow. He was just a bitch to cover
or slow down. Whenever Winslow split out, our rule was for the strong safety to cover him. When possible, we also had a linebacker move out and try to bump him at the line of scrimmage.”
Nobody hit Kellen on this first pass, a quick 5-yard hitch that gave him plenty of room to run. Winslow picked up 16 yards and brought the ball into Raiders territory before he was finally brought down by Millen.
“It was the genius of Coryell and his coaches to use Kellen this way, because nobody had ever done this before,” claimed Bauer. “We’re playing the Raiders, who played man-free coverage ninety percent of the time. That’s fine if you’re facing a normal pro set, but we come out against them and suddenly shift Kellen outside to flanker. Who goes out to cover him? Are you going to take one of your corners off a receiver and put a strong safety on Winslow? Early on, that’s what they did, so the first thing that told us was they’re playing man under, free coverage. And we also got a mismatch, because no strong safety could cover Kellen in the open field. They weren’t as big, as fast, or as athletic. If they bumped out a corner, then we’d know they were playing zone, and they’d put a linebacker on Kellen, which was even better for us.”
“The problem Winslow presented was that he ran like a wide receiver,” said Millen. “If you tried to get up on him, he’d just blow past you. He and Davis had some good battles out there that day. But Mike had to play off him, because he didn’t want to miss a tackle.” There were no more throws to Kellen the rest of the drive, which ended with a 52-yard field goal by kicker Rolf Benirschke. At the time, it was the longest kick in Chargers history. Oakland tied the game on its next drive, then San Diego was quickly dispatched with a three-and-out in its only other first-quarter possession.