by Ron Jaworski
2nd Quarter
The Chargers had three less than prosperous possessions in this quarter before finally cashing in just before halftime. Their first series had Winslow line up as a traditional tight end, with McCrary off the line in what we would now refer to as the H-back position. With two runners in the backfield, that meant only one wide receiver, Jefferson, was on the field. Whenever you have two backs and two tight ends together in the lineup, you have what is called “Twenty-Two personnel.” San Diego would run a number of plays from this formation throughout the game. After the snap, Winslow ran a drag route in front of underneath coverage and picked up 7. The next pass was also intended for Kellen but fell incomplete, due mainly to Millen’s aggressive defense on the young Chargers tight end. “Winslow was physically imposing but wasn’t a physical guy,” observed Millen. “He could run like a little guy. If you put a little guy on him to cover, he’d slap that guy around.”
Winslow laughs about Millen’s tactics now, but it wasn’t funny to him at the time. “I drew mostly Davis in that Raider game, and Odis McKinney as the nickel defender,” he recalled. “But whenever it was Millen, he’d grab my jersey every time! Once you came inside, he’d put his hands on you.” Millen pleads guilty as charged: “The rules were a little different then. I could beat the piss out of receivers down the field. You’d take your shots. You could get away with a lot more things because it was a much more physical game.”
San Diego punted after failing on third down, then did even less on its next series, when Clarence Williams fumbled on the first play. The Chargers quickly forced a fumble of their own to get the ball back. Williams continued to struggle, however, losing 3 yards on a sweep. Facing second-and-13, San Diego came out in a two-back set, with McCrary as the single tight end. Winslow was split left outside the numbers as the X receiver, while Jefferson was out wide on the opposite side. The Raiders responded by going to nickel coverage for the first time, inserting McKinney as their fifth defensive back. For the remainder of the game, he would defend against Winslow whenever Oakland was in the nickel.
“If we saw McKinney on Kellen, Oakland had a huge matchup problem,” claimed Bauer. “That’s what our game planning was all week: coming up with the formations and movements that dictated coverage, gave Dan a pre-snap read, and provided the potential of creating confusion in their secondary.” In this instance, Jefferson worked away from a smart but slower safety in Burgess Owens to make a 7-yard catch. Facing third-and-6, Fouts beat a Raiders blitz, hitting Joiner on a hot read to get the ball to midfield.
Oakland tried to change things up, going to a 3-4 front: rushing four men while dropping its secondary into zone coverage. The Chargers came out in Twenty-Two personnel, with McCrary at tight end and Winslow split left outside the numbers as the X receiver. This time, cornerback Monte Jackson drew Winslow as his assignment. Ironically, Jackson had been recruited by Coryell out of local St. Augustine High School and played for him at San Diego State. On this particular play, Jackson may have shown the Chargers and his former coach too much respect, giving Kellen an even wider cushion than Davis was offering. Winslow ran a 10-yard stop route well in front of the backpedaling Jackson to pick up a first down on Oakland’s 40-yard line.
But then its defense stiffened, first sacking Fouts for a 9-yard loss. The Raiders returned to nickel coverage with McKinney on Winslow for the next two long-yardage plays. Both were passes to Joiner, neither successful. San Diego was forced to punt, but the Chargers’ defense also stood its ground, getting the ball back for one last drive just before halftime.
San Diego began the series at its own 45, with Winslow aligned in the conventional tight end position and Joiner and Jefferson split wide. “We didn’t flip-flop our defensive coverage in those days,” explained Flores. “If Jefferson lined up on Lester Hayes’s side, then Hayes had him. And if he didn’t, then Lester covered Joiner. We didn’t chase them all over the field.” With both wideouts taking their corners outside, Winslow was able to run a slant pattern unmolested in the middle to pick up 9 yards. On the next play, Kellen lined up tight on the left side and blocked somewhat awkwardly for a run by Cappelletti that picked up a first down. “Kellen wasn’t much of a blocker then, but he was a big man,” noted Millen. “It wasn’t lack of effort—he just didn’t know how to block very well. It was only his second year, and, let’s face it, most tight ends aren’t very good blockers anyway.”
Coryell would make far better use of Winslow’s talents during the next few plays of the drive. After an incomplete pass in the flat to Williams, the Chargers faced second-and-10. They split Kellen wide right as the X, isolating him one-on-one with Davis. After the snap, Winslow took off on a Go route. Davis covered him perfectly, and the pass fell incomplete, but Oakland had to be startled nonetheless. In the NFL of 1980, tight ends never ran Go routes. That was solely the province of wide receivers.
Knowing that this had given Oakland’s secondary pause, the Chargers lined Winslow up wide right again on the next play. Sure enough, he took off down the sideline as Jefferson broke free across the field to haul in a 19-yard pass for the first down. Now just outside the red zone, Coryell called Winslow’s number once more. Split as the X receiver, Kellen ran a stutter-Go route, another pattern you’d never see from a tight end in the early eighties. This time Davis got beat badly. He was forced to grab Winslow and was promptly flagged for an illegal chuck—the quintessential enforcement of the Mel Blount rule. Three years earlier, Davis’s defense would have been perfectly legal.
“The ‘78 rules changes just killed a team like Oakland,” claimed Joiner. “It totally changed how the Raiders game planned for pass defense. They’d always had physical corners that would bump you all over the field. It took away a lot of their aggressiveness; a lot of what they did well. But I think the design of Air Coryell was good enough that we’d still have succeeded even without those rules changes.”
Two running plays and a face mask penalty on Oakland put the ball inside the 5-yard line. On second-and-goal, Winslow lined up as the slot receiver on the left side. He broke toward the sideline, taking Davis with him. Fouts quickly threw to the right corner, where Jefferson faced single coverage from Hayes. J.J. then made one of the signature receptions of his career: a leaping, one-handed catch near the corner of the end zone for the game’s first touchdown. “I just loved throwing the ball to J.J. because I felt no matter where I threw it he was somehow going to catch it,” said Fouts. “He had an incredible ability to focus on the ball regardless of the situation. He made so many catches like this, and that just gave me confidence that I could cut loose and not worry about it, because he was going to take care of me. That carried over to the others too, because all our receivers were competing for the ball, competing for my attention.”
For Jefferson, it wasn’t that big a deal. “It was just your typical fade route against Hayes, who would bump and run anybody, anytime. He was the best in the league at that. This time he bumped me pretty good; was right on top of me. The pass was over my head. Somehow I went up and got it with one hand, and it stuck.”
The rest of Jefferson’s teammates, including Hank Bauer, were in awe of the gravity-defying grab. “I always judged players by who you were playing against,” he said. “Here’s J.J. being defended by ‘Mr. Stickum,’ Lester Hayes, one of the all-time greats. Fouts was throwing it away, and it was high and gone like a throwaway should be. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, J.J. reaches up with one hand. He keeps his tippy toes down at the end line, in bounds, and catches the point of the football. On the bench, our jaws dropped, and we said, ‘What? Are you kidding me?’ ”
Oakland’s Cliff Branch caught a touchdown pass of his own a little over a minute later to tie the game at 10 going into intermission. During my film study of the first half, there were several recurring elements that caught my attention. When you also included penalties, the Chargers had run more than thirty plays from scrimmage. I rarely saw the same formations twice. In the NBC telecast, c
olor analyst Merlin Olsen claimed that the Chargers had utilized forty-five different offensive formations the previous year, an incredibly high number for that era. Olsen made the point that the reason San Diego had so many formations was to isolate matchups on specific Raiders defenders.
Despite those variations, I counted a disproportionate number of Twenty-Two personnel packages used by the Chargers. In that package, both Winslow and McCrary stayed on the same side of the formation, with Jefferson as a single receiver to the weak side. And whenever Winslow was the X receiver to the weak side, Jefferson and Joiner were grouped together on the other side of that formation. Raiders defensive coverage also stayed remarkably consistent. In base personnel, Mike Davis was always matched up on Winslow. In the nickel, Odis McKinney was Kellen’s defender.
In their week-one win at Seattle, the Chargers’ ground game had gashed the Seahawks for nearly 200 yards. In the first half against Oakland, it was a different story: only a dozen rushing yards against the Raiders’ defense. “You have to do what you believe in, what you can do best,” said Coryell. “We go into every game thinking that if we think we can run the ball, then we’ll run it. But if we don’t think we can consistently move the ball on the ground, then we’ll throw. And if we have to throw the ball on every down because we know we can’t run it, then we’ll throw the ball on every down.” That’s pretty much what the Chargers did to start the second half—and they were fortunate this decision didn’t cost them the game.
3rd Quarter
I studied quite a few games for this book and saw a lot of things that surprised me, both tactically and athletically. But nothing I watched was more shocking than what happened to the Chargers in the third quarter of their ‘80 game against Oakland. In those fifteen minutes of football, they turned the ball over five times: four interceptions plus a lost fumble that the Raiders recovered for a touchdown. In spite of this meltdown, San Diego, incredibly, trailed by only a touchdown heading into the final quarter. Part of it was a strong response by the Chargers’ defense. It also didn’t hurt San Diego that Oakland’s kicker, Chris Bahr, missed a pair of field goals.
Not all of Fouts’s four interceptions were his fault. In a couple of cases, his passes could have been caught but bounced off a receiver’s hands. Other times it was Oakland’s pass rush. “The only way you could really stop us was to put the heat on Dan,” explained Charlie Joiner. “You had to find a way to pressure him where he couldn’t set up and get rid of the ball quickly. You had to break his rhythm some kind of way.” Even after that happened, Fouts possessed the most important talent a quarterback can possess: resilience. “Fouts was a tough, tough sucker,” admitted Millen. “You could beat up on him, and he’d just get pissed off. The more you hit him, the better he got.”
Even though during this stretch Coryell’s offense was as bad as I’ve ever seen it, there were a number of plays involving Winslow that I found revealing. On a majority of snaps—including the one that allowed the Raiders to force and recover a fumble, then run it in for a score—the Silver and Black was in nickel coverage. Defending the San Diego passing game was clearly the priority, because the Chargers had decided to junk their very unproductive running game. But let’s be clear: Oakland’s use of the nickel defense was dictated primarily by circumstance—down and distance—not Chargers personnel. When you see nickel or dime coverages today, it’s almost always in response to additional receivers in the formation. In September 1980 the concept of having even three wideouts, let alone four, wasn’t yet a part of the game, although Coryell would seize upon this tactic within just a few weeks of this game, after the team made a significant trade.
During the disastrous third quarter, Kellen still made two fine receptions and would have had a third except for a low throw from Fouts forced by Oakland pressure. The first catch was a 10-yard completion, with Winslow aligned as the X receiver against base personnel. Once again, Mike Davis was giving Kellen a 10-yard cushion—out of necessity, according to Millen. “When you were drafting a safety back then, you didn’t say, ‘Is this guy a good player in space?’ That’s because those conditions simply didn’t exist. He wasn’t asked to do what receivers like Winslow forced on them.” Winslow ran a quick 5-yard hitch and had additional room to run, adding another 5 yards before Davis tackled him.
Winslow’s other reception was a real stunner for me. Again aligned as the X receiver, with Joiner in the slot on the left adjacent to Jefferson, Kellen ran a traditional wideout’s route: the skinny post (similar to a traditional post pattern, but cut off at a shallower angle). Tight ends back then just didn’t do this kind of thing. It was as beautifully timed a play as the Chargers ran all game. “Dan had a pre-snap read,” recalled Winslow. “He knew where I was going to go. It was based on the coverage he saw. It was a fifteen-to-eighteen-yard route. You plant at twelve yards, make the catch at fifteen, and hope to break a tackle.” He broke one, all right. The route may have been a traditional wide receiver’s pattern, but what happened next was standard tight end fare of the era. After catching the ball in stride, Winslow ran over free safety Burgess Owens and rumbled for 22 yards.
Although neither catch led to anything other than eventual Chargers turnovers, both foreshadowed what Winslow was going to accomplish the rest of the game—contributing to one of the most fantastic finishes of any contest in the Coryell era.
4th Quarter
Coryell had abandoned the running game in the third quarter but decided to give it one more try as the fourth quarter began. Halfback Clarence Williams ran or caught the ball on each of San Diego’s first four plays, accounting for 35 yards and a pair of first downs. On the next call, Fouts overthrew Winslow on a deep post pattern, but a Raiders penalty moved the ball up 5 yards. Two plays later, Kellen lined up as the X receiver, with Joiner and Jefferson on the other side and split backs behind Fouts. The Raiders went to nickel personnel, which once again put McKinney over Winslow. Oakland played a man coverage scheme and accounted for Winslow with two defenders. Davis and McKinney played what we call a bracket concept: in-and-out, deep-to-short coverage. Winslow ran an X delay underneath pattern at about 10 yards, where McKinney forced Kellen toward Davis on the inside. The third-year safety, a second-round draft pick out of Colorado, tried to stay with him but slipped and fell. Winslow caught the pass at the 15 and ran untouched into the end zone to tie the game at 17. “On that touchdown, I was going back side to weak side,” Winslow remembered. “Oakland wanted to put pressure on the quarterback, so we knew what defensive coverages they were in almost every play.”
After an end zone interception by the Chargers’ Glen Edwards to stop an Oakland drive, Winslow made a huge impact on San Diego’s next series. On second-and-10, Coryell had Kellen line up as the X receiver, this time on the left side of the formation. The Raiders went to nickel coverage, with McKinney shadowing the San Diego tight end, and Kellen burned him with an inside curl route for 11 yards. Oakland continued to stay with the nickel—in essence removing a run defender, and the Chargers took advantage as Williams picked up substantial rushing yardage during the drive. To the Raiders’ dismay, the extra man in the secondary wasn’t doing much to stop Fouts, who found Jefferson for 11 more yards and then hooked up with Winslow again.
Winslow’s ninth and final reception of the game was one of his best, given Oakland’s defensive formation. The Raiders rushed only three men, dropping eight defenders into coverage. It was an interesting and unusual concept deployed by their defensive coordinator, Charlie Sumner. Davis was the over-the-top safety, with future Hall of Famer Ted “the Mad Stork” Hendricks buzzing out from his normal linebacker’s position to get underneath Winslow. This was a zone concept, but had a double-team element to it. It was creative stuff, although none of this mattered to Kellen. He ran an intermediate dig route, sprinting away from the six-foot-seven Hendricks to catch the ball directly in front of Davis for a 22-yard gain. Winslow gave much of the play’s credit to Fouts: “Dan moved safeties with a pretty darned g
ood pump motion—kind of like a pickoff move for a pitcher. He had confidence in the receivers that they would be where they were supposed to be.”
“You could also try to double Kellen on certain plays, taking a chance with single coverage on everyone else,” observed Tom Flores. “You could favor the inside part of the field with a linebacker and have the safety take him from the outside. Or you could just try to knock the crap out of him. He was a tough guy; he took his shots. He kept getting up and making more plays. Even as he was beating you, you couldn’t help but admire what a great athlete Winslow was.”
At this point, the Raiders reverted to base personnel to try to stop San Diego’s suddenly vibrant running attack. It didn’t work. The Chargers had found their rhythm on the ground, and five straight running plays eventually got San Diego into the end zone to take a 24–17 lead. On four of those plays, Winslow lined up as a conventional tight end and blocked efficiently. On the final call, he aligned wide right, taking defenders with him on a short route as Clarence Williams swept around the vacated area to score the go-ahead touchdown.
Winslow’s influence was evident throughout that final drive. His presence had a profound impact on both San Diego’s running and passing games. The Raiders switched back and forth between nickel and base coverages to try to stop whatever the Chargers and Winslow were doing—but never quite succeeded. From across the field, Tom Flores could do little more than tip his cap to a talented opponent. “The NFL is a copycat league,” he noted, “and people would say, ‘Did you see that? Maybe there’s a way our guy can do that too.’ Then I’d say, ‘We don’t have that guy!’ We did have Raymond Chester, who was more of a power-type tight end who’d block your head off, then catch the ball downfield, and outrace you to the end zone. Nowadays you see more tight ends like Winslow and fewer like Chester.”