by Ron Jaworski
Montana was just as beholden to John Ayers, whose Molly-block protection kept Joe out of L.T’s crosshairs. As Taylor admitted to Michael Lewis in The Blind Side, “It was the first time I’d seen it. It was the first time they’d brought the guard back to meet me. I couldn’t figure out what to do with him. There was nothing I could do but try to run him over.” Lawrence tried, all right, but was continuously frustrated by San Francisco’s protection scheme.
Bill Parcells believed that Taylor’s troubles were due in no small measure to the muddy playing surface. “Their tactic of using a guard to block is one that would not work on a dry field against Lawrence,” he insisted. “It could be used in bad weather. We couldn’t get any pressure that day because of the field conditions. They had a good design and were a better team than us at the time. But as time went on, it became more difficult for them to do that to us.” Parcells pointed out in The Blind Side that when he studied the game film later, he saw that whenever Ayers dropped back, he left a hole in the middle of the line. Had the Giants blitzed either Hunt or Kelley from the inside, they would have had a clear path to Montana, but on that day they never did.
“You look at Giants-Niners games from then on, and you’ll see they didn’t do a whole lot against us,” stated Bill Belichick, who was on New York’s coaching staff throughout the eighties. “Pulling the guard out was effective in that game, but part of it was that we hadn’t really seen it and didn’t have a good answer for it. The field slowed Lawrence down, plus the ball was coming out so fast. Their receivers never really stopped because they were always in motion routes. We just didn’t match these things quickly enough, didn’t pressure the quarterback with a quick pass rush. We were still playing a more traditional game. They were better than us, had better players, and—I’ll admit it—they outcoached us. But by the time it got to the end of the decade, we beat them a number of times, and they didn’t have anything near the offensive success against us that they did in those first few games.”
“The Giants gave us the most trouble,” admitted Walsh. “From then on, we were pretty even with them. Their great talent and coaching really crowded Joe. They got in his face, and he didn’t have as much time to throw those precision passes. There were times we just couldn’t get it done. Our games with New York were slugfests, and they took away a lot of what we had. Parcells and Belichick figured out better ways to defense us.”
Bill was being gracious when he said this. There were some notable Giants victories, especially in ‘86 when they won the Super Bowl. But for the record, the Niners beat New York seven out of ten times between 1981 and ‘89. The Giants shouldn’t feel too bad, though, because during that same stretch, San Francisco was so good that it had a better overall regular-season road record than any team’s home record. The 49ers won three more Super Bowls as they expanded their explosive repertoire with better offensive players.
None of this would have happened without the events of the ‘81 Giants-49ers playoff game. I know the Niners-Cowboys game played the following week—highlighted by Clark’s amazing catch—is part of NFL mythology, but it wasn’t as far reaching as the Giants game. Here’s why:
This game made clear the potential dominance of a pass-rushing outside linebacker in the 3–4 defense. Now every team was on the lookout for someone like Lawrence Taylor, a force that could disrupt an opponent’s passing game.
This game made clear that left tackles are critical. Bill Walsh had gotten away with using John Ayers to stop Taylor, but that was only a short-term solution. If the Niners were going to prosper, they’d have to get a better athlete on Montana’s blind side—and did in ‘83, drafting Bubba Paris. Today the offensive left tackle is one of the highest-paid positions in the NFL, and it all started because coaches could now see how critical a good one was to keeping their quarterback healthy.
This game expanded defensive pressure concepts out of the 3–4. Coaches now understood that they were going to have to broaden their repertoire with more variety and disguise if they were going to compete against teams that ran West Coast systems. Otherwise they would be picked apart. Defenses would also have to become faster, especially at the linebacker position.
This game inspired innovation from offensive minds … Taylor’s arrival forced Redskins coach Joe Gibbs to modify his Air Coryell–oriented offense into a new system that relied upon the H-back position to neutralize L.T. Joe’s breakthrough made Washington a dominant team over the next decade, earning three Super Bowl championships.
… as well as defensive ones. As timing and precision offenses became more widespread, people like Buddy Ryan and Dick LeBeau were forced to come up with new and better ways to apply pocket pressure.
This game formally introduced football fans not only to a new offense but also to a new philosophy. Walsh’s West Coast attack changed everything: how offenses were called, how they were coached, how teams were built. Standards for higher pass completion percentages jumped dramatically.
fter I retired from the Eagles, I was an NFL analyst with CBS,” recalled Dick Vermeil. “I was doing a Niners game early in the 1986 season. That summer, Jack Kemp’s son Jeff was really struggling at quarterback for the Rams, and they let him go. Walsh signed Jeff, and it’s a good thing he did. Montana hurt his back and missed a lot of playing time, so Kemp replaced him. I don’t think Jeff had been there more than a few weeks when he was pressed into the lineup, but he did very well. He actually did better than that—he was putting up big passing numbers and eating people alive. Why? Because of Bill Walsh’s system. It was so quarterback friendly.”
Bill followed his old friend Vermeil into sportscasting shortly after retiring from the 49ers in ‘89. But the competitive fires still burned, and Walsh went back to coach Stanford in the early nineties. He later returned to the 49ers as their general manager and then came full circle by returning to where it all began: San José State. In 2005 he served as a consultant to his alma mater, even as he bravely battled the leukemia that would eventually end his life.
As the NFL enters its second decade of the twenty-first century, there are many differences between today’s game and what it was like when Bill Walsh began tinkering with his West Coast philosophies. “When Walsh started this approach, it really wasn’t a complex system,” observed Bill Parcells. “He had a tight end, two wides, and two backs almost all the time. You didn’t see much motion, because he wanted to see what the defense would be before the snap. Mike Holmgren and Andy Reid have since changed the West Coast offense to be something quite different from what Bill originally designed.” Al Saunders acknowledged those profound differences, but also noted, “The language Walsh created for his offense is still prevalent in the NFL today. If you see Reid’s offense in Philadelphia, it may look more like a Gillman or Coryell attack, but he uses Bill’s terminology.”
I asked Jon Gruden about the Walsh lineage, and he offered some additional examples: “A lot of Walsh disciples have taken the West Coast offense in new directions. What Holmgren did with the screen game in Green Bay was sensational, and Mike Shanahan’s ability to add his own touches with the Steve Young teams of the nineties might have been the most exciting shit I ever saw. Just look at footage from their Super Bowl win over the Chargers. They absolutely shredded them—stuff with Brent Jones and Ricky Watters—it was a full-court press. And they ended up doing it to everybody.”
There are still occasional flashes of Walsh’s original precepts. In Green Bay, Mike McCarthy has quality receivers who run those familiar slants, hitches, and comeback patterns, and his quarterback Aaron Rodgers is a quick thinker who reads defenses rapidly. The slant-pass foundation is still a big part of what Brad Childress does with the Vikings’ passing game. In Houston, Gary Kubiak likes to run inside slants with Andre Johnson, throw to his backs out of the backfield, and use tight end Owen Daniels in classic West Coast style. But the reality is that Bill’s original offense has been modified so much and by so many that, in its purest form, it no longer exists. T
wo-back sets are rare because of multiple-receiver spreads. The fullback was a key component in Walsh’s original offense, and some teams don’t even carry one on their roster anymore! Zone blitz schemes and defensive exchanges have totally altered protection packages, all but banishing the pro set package of the early eighties.
Timing and rhythm were really what Bill was all about, and that’s what has most endured of the West Coast offense. The synchronization of the quarterback’s drop and the depth of the receiver’s route, spot-on pass location so that the receiver can make the catch without breaking stride, the harmony between the receivers and the offensive line—this is Walsh football. When you look at today’s precision offenses, like those of the Colts and the Saints, you are witnessing skilled, cerebral quarterbacks who understand and live by Walsh’s principles. Peyton Manning and Drew Brees honor the memory of Bill Walsh every time they put the ball in flight.
Sunday No. 5
CHICAGO BEARS VS. DALLAS COWBOYS
Texas Stadium, Irving, Texas —November 17, 1985
ne of the best experiences in my sports career happened well after my playing days had ended. Along with rock legend Jon Bon Jovi and several other partners, I became co-owner of the Arena Football League team the Philadelphia Soul. My favorite moment came in 2008, when we won the Arena Bowl, the AFL’s version of the Super Bowl, to become league champions.
That ‘08 Soul team started out 9–0, then hit a few speed bumps before we bounced back to win the title. After suffering our first loss of the season to the Cleveland Gladiators, we appeared to have regained our footing the following week against the Georgia Force. We were ahead by 21 with barely three minutes remaining in the fourth quarter, but the Force staged a furious rally and beat us in the final seconds. This was easily our most painful loss of the year. And Georgia’s head coach was Doug Plank, a guy who’d inflicted considerable pain on me in the past. You may recall that it was Plank who put me out of that 1980 Bears-Eagles game after Mike Hartenstine had first blindsided me. Like a lot of safeties, Plank wasn’t a great cover guy, but he could really whack people around. Battering opponents until they didn’t want to get up anymore is a longtime Chicago Bears trademark, and Plank did it as well as anybody. He became such a destructive force that Chicago’s defensive coordinator eventually named his signature scheme in Plank’s honor, calling it the “46,” which happened to be Doug’s jersey number.
That coach was James David “Buddy” Ryan, and the philosophy behind the 46 has, in my opinion, been the single most influential factor in shaping modern NFL blitz pressure packages. I view Buddy’s defenses the same way that I came to regard Bill Walsh’s revolutionary offenses: something radically different from what everyone else was doing. You could look at Buddy’s designs on film, and there’d be stuff you’d never seen before. He went so far with it that, at times, his schemes were fundamentally unsound, and they often looked disorganized. As a quarterback, I could glance at any other defense and have a general idea where the holes were, where I could throw. Against Buddy’s defenses, I was never sure what I was going to see.
As far as I know, Buddy was the first guy who blitzed regardless of down and distance. He blitzed anytime and anywhere. One of the craziest things he did was to blitz during the final two minutes of the half; no other defense dared do that. He’d call a base defense on the first play, and, as a quarterback, you’d feel pretty safe. Then he’d cross you up with a full-house blitz, and all hell would break loose.
The 46 propelled the Bears to a world championship in Super Bowl XX and then got Buddy a head coaching job with the Philadelphia Eagles. His first year in Philly, 1986, was my last, and that was no coincidence. From day one, I was persona non grata. Buddy came in with a “Let’s clean house” attitude, and one of the things he wanted to do was to replace the guy who’d been Philadelphia’s starting quarterback for nine straight seasons. He traded for veteran Matt Cavanaugh and also had a young Randall Cunningham waiting in the wings. But to Buddy’s extreme disappointment, I beat them both out for the starter’s job at training camp. From there, our strained relationship only got worse.
Philadelphia went 5–10–1, but the numbers were even more embarrassing when it came to our pass protection. The ‘86 Eagles set an NFL record by allowing 104 quarterback sacks in sixteen games! All these hits took their toll, and I missed six games because of injuries. With so many breakdowns, you can imagine the problems we had on offense. Even so, I’m not sure Buddy really cared all that much. His heart was with the defense. I think that’s why he preferred Cunningham at quarterback over me: He didn’t want a disciplined system in Philadelphia because he didn’t think Randall would do well in it. I was there for a speech Buddy made at Philadelphia’s Maxwell Football Club dinner in which he told a stunned audience, “I hear all this about the three-step drop and the five-step drop. I tell Randall, ‘Forget all that bullshit, go out there, make two or three big plays, and we’ll win.’ ”
I remember, during one game, coming to the sideline to get the next play from offensive coordinator Ted Plumb. In the middle of our conversation, Buddy stuck his head in and screamed, “Run the goddamn ball!” I asked him what he wanted, a “power-O” or one of our other standard calls in the Eagles playbook. He spat back, “I don’t give a shit! Just run the goddamn ball!” Buddy simply did not know the plays. He had no real understanding of our offensive scheme. The one thing he did know was how to stop one.
If Buddy comes off sounding like a master sergeant, it’s probably because that’s exactly what he was. When he was barely eighteen, Ryan left his small farming town of Frederick, Oklahoma, to join the army, later serving two years in the Korean War. After being discharged from the army, he returned home to play football at Oklahoma A&M. Buddy coached at a number of southwest high schools in the late fifties before making the jump to the college level. My former ESPN Matchup colleague Sam Rutigliano knew him in the mid-1960s when Buddy was coaching at the University of Buffalo. “Even then, Buddy Ryan was the kind of guy who’d pull the trigger before the target was up,” said Sam. “He’d say and do whatever he wanted. Buddy didn’t give a crap about anyone’s feelings. He always did things his way, but he was also a smart and very funny guy whom his players loved.”
Buddy’s first job in pro football could not have come at a better moment. He was hired by the New York Jets in the winter of 1968, in time to be part of their Super Bowl championship season. He remained on their staff for eight years, which is why Buddy must have been a proud pop when his son Rex was named Jets head coach in 2009. Rex later stated, “My dad is most famous for what he did with the ‘85 Bears, coaching maybe the best defense of all time and winning the Super Bowl. But to this day, his Jets Super Bowl III ring is the only one he wears.”
The most influential concept of Buddy’s football life came from the guy who gave him his first job in the pros: Jets head coach Weeb Ewbank. Weeb put a lot of emphasis on protecting his “meal ticket,” quarterback Joe Namath, whose knees were in bad shape even before his rookie season as a Jet in 1965. Ewbank spent hours refining and teaching intricate pass blocking schemes, including a technique he’d developed with Paul Brown called “cup” protection (in which a semicircle formed around the quarterback, with the linemen interlocking their hands to avoid both holding calls and arm slaps from pass rushers). This clearly made an impression on Buddy. He figured that if Weeb thought it was so important to keep Namath from getting hit, then, as a defensive coach, Buddy needed to come up with whatever he could to hit the quarterbacks of other teams. More than anything else, pocket pressure became the most significant principle of his entire defensive philosophy. This was a truly groundbreaking idea when pro football, especially as played back then in the NFL, was totally defined by the running game.
I got my first exposure to “Buddy Ball” while I was still in college. I had just completed the last game of my senior season at Youngstown State when I got a call from Bills coach Lou Saban. Lou was in charge of the North squad a
t the Senior Bowl, and he needed another quarterback to replace Oregon’s injured Dan Fouts. Naturally, I said yes and flew to Mobile, Alabama, to join the team. It proved to be one of the luckiest breaks of my life. I got into the game in the second half with our side trailing, 30–13, then threw two long touchdown passes and nearly rallied the team to victory. Even though we lost, 33–30, that performance greatly improved my status in the NFL draft. Before that game, I was probably going to be only a fifth-or sixth-round pick, but because of what I did in Mobile, the Rams ended up selecting me in the second round.
You’re thinking, Nice story, Jaws, but what does it have to do with Buddy Ryan? Well, the South team was coached by Weeb Ewbank and his Jets staff, which included Mr. Ryan. College all-star games have different rules than what you have in the regular season, mostly restrictions to protect players from getting hurt. The last thing bowl executives wanted was for some highly touted prospect to suffer a career-ending injury in their game, so blitzing was strictly prohibited. Well, Buddy really didn’t care about any old sissy rules and decided that he was going to pressure us with extra defenders anyway. All game long, you could hear Saban screaming on our sideline, “That son of a bitch Ryan is blitzing my quarterbacks! He can’t do that! Doesn’t he know the goddamn rules?” I know I had to hurry a lot of my throws when I was out there, but the refs never said a word to Buddy all day.
Buddy continued to spread his “gospel of aggression” when he coached one of the great front fours in history, the Purple People Eaters of the 1970s Minnesota Vikings, which included future Hall of Famers Carl Eller and Alan Page. When Vikings assistant Neill Armstrong was hired to be head coach of the Bears in 1978, he asked Ryan to come with him as his defensive coordinator, and Buddy jumped at the opportunity. Now he could run a defense his way, experimenting with ideas that those once above him had found too radical. It didn’t happen overnight. Chicago was a mediocre team, and Buddy’s early Bears defenses didn’t have the best talent. But they did like to hurt people—which made them just the kind of players he liked. The NFC Central was still known as the “Black-and-Blue division,” and Buddy’s boys lived up to that name every Sunday. But blood and broken bones didn’t translate into many wins, and in 1981, a 1–6 start put the Bears at the bottom of the standings.