The Games That Changed the Game

by Ron Jaworski

  “We weren’t very good that year,” recalled safety Gary Fencik, a former Ivy Leaguer from Yale who played in Ryan defenses for eight seasons. “We seemed to make a lot of untested quarterbacks successful in those days, and Eric Hipple of the Lions was one of them.” Hipple’s very first pro start came in a Monday night game against Chicago, and all he did was throw four touchdown passes and run for two more scores as Detroit crushed the Bears, 48–17. Buddy was pissed and knew he had to do something. “Our pass rush wasn’t worth a shit,” he said. “We had to find a way to create more pocket pressure because we were getting beat up by every quarterback in the league.” Chicago’s next game would be against one of the league’s best quarterbacks: the Chargers’ Dan Fouts. He and the rest of the Air Coryell juggernaut were the NFL’s top-ranked offense, and they came into Soldier Field that Sunday as two-touchdown favorites.

  “I still remember Neill Armstrong’s speech he made at the hotel the night before we played the Chargers,” Fencik recalled. “Neill basically said we didn’t have any chance of winning the game. But Buddy had some new defensive schemes to try and put added pressure on Fouts, force him to hurry his decisions.”

  Another change came at the middle linebacker position when Ryan gave rookie Mike Singletary the first start of what would eventually be a Hall of Fame career. Back then, Mike and Buddy weren’t yet friendly. “He had lots of irritating ways of pushing my buttons,” Singletary recalled. “For that first year and a half, I hated him and thought he hated me.” But at that moment, the young linebacker was so excited that he called his friends and family to let them know. After the euphoria died down, Buddy looked him in the eye and said, “You’re startin', but whatever happens, you do exactly what I tell you to do. Do anything else, and we’re gonna have problems.”

  Singletary’s debut was so brief, so disastrous, that it’s easy for him to remember exactly what happened: “I make the tackle on the first play of the game. Now I’m really jacked up. So on the next play, Buddy signals in, ‘four-three, three-V.’ I call that play in the huddle, and Fencik says, ‘No, no! You mean two-V’ He and I are arguing, here come the Chargers out of the huddle, so I call time out. I know I’m right. So I go over to the bench, and before I can even say a word, Buddy’s screaming at me, ‘How stupid can you be? No rookie ever calls time out! Go over and sit on the bench.’ So I was on the sidelines the rest of the game and was pretty burned up.”

  With Singletary out, Ryan switched gears, abandoning his standard alignments and, for the first time, leaning heavily on strategies deployed from the 46. “Using my jersey number to identify that defense wasn’t unusual,” Plank explained. “There were a lot of coverages and blitzes Buddy labeled by a specific player’s number, and in this defense I had a lot to do, so that’s where the name came from.”

  Against the Chargers, Ryan unveiled the first permutation of the 46: a nickel package with a 5–1–5 personnel grouping the Bears had not previously shown that season. It looked like this: Buddy moved Plank from his safety position into the box, as if he were a linebacker. The other two safeties, Fencik and future Tennessee Titans head coach Jeff Fisher, were also sent in at key moments to apply additional pressure. “We ran that game from the secondary,” said Plank. “We were able to communicate Buddy’s calls with code words, expressions, and hand signals.”

  At the same time, something was different with the Bears’ down linemen. The weakside defensive end lined up outside of the offensive tackle in a wider pass rush position, while the other defensive end and the defensive tackles set up directly over the guards and the center. This became known as a “reduced front,” and it forced the interior offensive linemen into awkward and difficult one-on-one matchups. It became the defining feature of the 46. This alignment must have looked like something from outer space to the Chargers, and with good reason. In those days, nobody else was playing with eight men in the box. Buddy wanted opponents to throw against the alignment. Heck, he was daring them to do it.

  The only true linebacker on the field was second-year player Otis Wilson, whose main responsibility was to cover tight end Kellen Winslow. Wilson held Winslow to just four receptions. “I don’t want to be bragging,” Wilson told reporters afterward, “but I’d seen film on them, and I don’t think anyone covered Winslow as well as I did. They didn’t go much to him until late in the third quarter.”

  With eight men crowding the front, the Chargers weren’t sure what was going on. If I had been the quarterback that day, I’d have been thinking to myself, How many of these guys are actually going to rush? From which direction are they coming? What kind of protection should I choose? And I’d have to come up with answers for all these questions in the blink of an eye. Plank recognized immediately that this new “Buddy system” could work. “Perceived pressure was a key concept of the 46,” he pointed out. “The anticipation of what might be coming was just as important as what then actually did happen. Against the Chargers, we created a sense of urgency for their entire offense, forcing them to play at a more hurried pace than what they usually did. It changed their whole mind-set.”

  One way the befuddled Chargers responded was to frequently keep their running backs in to protect Fouts. But with Wilson blanketing Winslow, that left only two other available receivers to run intermediate patterns: Wes Chandler and Charlie Joiner. They struggled all day to get open, while Fouts was under constant siege from the Bears’ rush. “Their guys were coming at us from a myriad of stunts and blitzes,” recalled Chargers running back Hank Bauer. “They were pressuring and hitting Dan by pushing the pocket inside. Even after he got rid of the ball, Dan was still getting hit. The Bears’ main goal was to create negative plays, but also to create doubt in the quarterback’s mind.” In essence, Ryan was making the threat of the 46 just as important as its execution.

  It worked even better than Buddy had hoped. Fouts suffered the worst statistical day of his career, completing only 13 of 43 passes while throwing 2 interceptions. One of those picks came in overtime from Fencik, which set up the winning field goal for a 20–17 Bears win. “We’d never seen this defense before and weren’t prepared to deal with it,” said Bauer. “When that happens, it’s pretty tough to change the game plan you came in with. And they whacked us around pretty hard.”

  The most pleasantly surprised people that day may have been the Bears defenders. “You wouldn’t think these blitzes would work against a quarterback like Dan Fouts,” said Fencik. “But we did pretty well that game and felt that if the 46 could succeed against a Hall of Fame passer, well, then it would probably do just fine against a lot of other, less talented quarterbacks.”

  Despite their surprising win over San Diego and a few other strong defensive performances, the ‘81 Bears never got out of the Central Division cellar. By late December, it appeared that Ryan’s time in Chicago was coming to an end. After a 6–10 finish, Neill Armstrong was going to be fired, and the rest of the coaching staff assumed that it would be canned along with him. But Buddy’s defensive stars went on the offensive. The charge was spearheaded by Alan Page, Buddy’s favorite player with the Vikings, who was now finishing his NFL career in Chicago. Page would eventually go on to become a state supreme court justice in Minnesota, and he pleaded a strong case for retaining Buddy in a letter he wrote to team owner George Halas. The note was then signed by the rest of the defensive players. “We did that to cover our butts,” confessed Fencik. “The letter basically said we thought Buddy and his staff had done a good job with us, and no matter who was hired as head coach, Buddy and his people should stay on.

  “So one snowy day at practice, Halas shows up—which he rarely did at this point in his life because he was eighty-six years old. We were all terrified that he was going to be angry about our petition. He told all the assistants to ‘take a walk,’ because he wanted to speak to the defensive players privately. He pointed to us and said, ‘I got your letter, and I want you to know that in all my years in football, I’ve never received one like it
. I came here to tell you personally that your [position] coaches will be back next year.’ ”

  The players were overjoyed. Halas’s new head coach, Mike Ditka, was not. Ditka had been a Hall of Fame tight end with the Bears in the 1960s and was a Halas favorite. But this was Mike’s first head coaching job at any level, and he’d have no say in picking the defensive staff. It was the NFL version of a shotgun wedding, and neither Ditka nor Ryan was thrilled with their marriage. “I always described them as two people who were so similar that they just could not get along,” said Singletary. “They had big egos and were strong willed and had so much pride. Neither one of them were going to say they were sorry for anything. So they just stayed away from each other.” Buddy put it even more bluntly: “No ‘getting along’ was necessary. There was no relationship between us. Not much communication, either. He coached the offense, I coached the defense. That’s what Mr. Halas hired me for. That’s what I did, and it worked.”

  Bears quarterback Jim McMahon viewed the Ditka-Ryan feud as a source of entertainment. “Just watching them argue every game was hilarious,” he recalled, laughing. “The other team would get a big play or maybe a score, and Ditka would blow up. ‘Damn it, Buddy, run some zone once in a while.’ Buddy would just say, ‘Fuck you. I run the defense. Get out of here!’ The players would just sit there and go, ‘Can you believe this? These are our leaders right here.’ ”

  ollowing Ditka’s arrival, the personnel department began its search for more athletes who’d fit into Ryan’s system. Dave McGinnis coached with the Bears for ten years and understood the skill set this defense demanded. “First you needed defensive linemen who could win individual matchups against the guy blocking him,” he explained. “Then you needed linebackers who could run—people with lateral range and explosiveness. And the 46 had to have a smart middle linebacker and strong safety to make the defensive calls.” Chicago already had a good foundation in Dan Hampton, Leslie Fra-zier, Fencik, Wilson, and Singletary. It had also gotten lucky in ‘81 when Steve McMichael was plucked off waivers from the Patriots. “We were gonna make him a center but didn’t have enough defensive linemen,” Buddy remembered. “We really needed help there because Hampton was about the only thing we had at the time. So we switched McMichael to defense.” Subsequent drafts brought in defensive backs Dave Duerson and Mike Richardson, linebackers Wilber Marshall and Ron Rivera, and defensive end Richard Dent, a steal in the eighth round.

  Leslie Frazier was with the Bears at the birth of the 46 and saw it improve season by season. “What gave Buddy the impetus to create this whole system was that better players were added to the team,” he said. “Once he got Dent and some of the others, then Buddy could create situations to capitalize on these mismatches. If we hadn’t had that talent, I don’t know if the 46 would have become the force it came to be.” McGinnis believed that the arrival of Marshall from the University of Florida allowed Buddy to finally do everything he wanted. “Marshall was essential,” he stressed. “He could physically play over the tight end at the line of scrimmage and had the lateral agility to stay with those tight ends in the passing game. He was just as good in confined areas as he was in space.” Fencik called Marshall “the best athlete on our defense, hands down.”

  Whenever anybody asks me what the finest defense in NFL history was, I always answer with the ‘85 Bears. It was the single most talented defensive unit I’ve ever seen. But what also made them great was the system in which they played. Buddy Ryan got absolutely everything he could out of his players because they understood that his conceptual design would take full advantage of their outstanding abilities.

  “We didn’t have just one leader, we had a bunch of them,” recalls Rivera. “Dan Hampton was the blood and guts of the line. He played with a broken arm, a broken leg, broken fingers, and wobbly knees. Fencik was the guy in the secondary. He was so bright and could change things right in the middle of the game. It was like having a coach on the field. And Singletary may have been the smartest of them all.”

  “The 46 needs a traffic cop who can make all the adjustments, and Singletary was our traffic cop,” said Plank. “There are some sets where there could be three different defenses out of one specific play. You have to have a leader who spots when an offense makes changes before the snap and can make the right adjustments.” For a unit that earned its reputation primarily for its smashmouth style, the Bears’ defense mastered concepts that were highly complex and considerably more sophisticated than any other defensive scheme of its time.

  In Fencik’s opinion, “Buddy was the most unique coach I ever had, because he would reach a point with his players where he trusted you to make decisions. This was a totally different dynamic from any other coordinator I ever had.” But first that trust had to be earned—which was why rookies never got much playing time under Ryan. According to Richard Dent, “Buddy used only two words with them: horseshit and asshole. Every now and then they might hear ‘good play.’ ” Rex Ryan laughed as he remembered how “Dad called players only by their numbers until they did something he liked. ‘Hey, 51, get your ass in gear!’ That kind of stuff. If you played hard for him and bled for him, he’d suddenly remember your name just fine.

  “Everybody knows about when my dad punched another coach on the sidelines [Buddy took a swing at Kevin Gilbride when both were on the Oilers staff in 1993], so they think of him as this wild guy. But I’ve coached with my dad and watched how he ran a game. He’s as calm and in control as anybody I’ve ever seen. He was always thinking, always one step ahead of his opponent.”

  Our Eagles team met Chicago twice in 1983 as the 46 was evolving, and we were defeated both times. The first game was especially frustrating. It was played in a steady downpour, and our sputtering offense made the afternoon even gloomier for the rain-soaked Philly fans that bothered to show up. Even if the weather had been dry, I don’t think it would have made a difference. In the first half, we gained a grand total of 24 yards. The Bears were in our backfield all day, sacking me four times. My passing stats stunk: 11 of 30 for 136 yards. I just never had time to throw, and we lost, 7–6. I did slightly better in the rematch about a month or so later at Soldier Field, but still only threw for 150 yards, was sacked four more times, and the Eagles got beat again, 17–14. We just never figured out how to handle their pressure.

  Clearly Ryan was on to something, and the improving Bears finished at 8–8. By ‘84 Chicago was a complete team, including an offense run by Jim McMahon and a pretty decent runner you may have heard of named Walter Payton. And Buddy’s defense was beginning to look downright scary, setting an NFL single-season record with 72 quarterback sacks. The Bears won their division and made it all the way to the conference championship before losing to the eventual Super Bowl champion 49ers. A year later, it was the Bears who’d be world champions.

  I want to take some time to examine the essential features of the 46 and show you how it was more than just a defense that beat up people. It may have often looked unruly, but, believe me, everything was calibrated to work a specific way. The 46 was the perfect defense for its era. At that time, offenses were frequently run out of two-back/single-tight-end personnel sets, which bunched a large number of players near the line of scrimmage. Consequently, Buddy could bring more people closer to the ball, often in eight-man fronts. It became a simple function of spacing. The Bears’ defenders had less ground to cover and a shorter distance between them and the quarterback.

  One crucial element of the 46 was a concept known as the “automatic front and coverage” (AFC). This meant that the Bears could, before the snap, change the angles from which their rushers came and flip what kind of coverage their defensive backs and linebackers were employing. This was virtually unheard of back in the eighties. “We gave lots of different looks to quarterbacks,” explained Fencik. “We were big on shifting around, because defenses on other teams gave simplistic pre-reads, which I thought made it too easy for quarterbacks to figure out. We never wanted that to happen
with us. When we moved around in our AFC, it looked like a jailbreak at times, because we’d swap out a 4–3 for a 3–4. Guys would be coming or dropping back—it looked like chaos. But I assure you it was all coordinated. The offensive line saw this and wasn’t sure who to block, and the quarterback wasn’t sure what coverage he was seeing.”

  Singletary can best explain the other staple of Chicago’s proactive/reactive approach, which the Bears referred to as “blitz to formation” (BTF): “When Buddy clapped his hands, there were about thirty or forty different things that could happen, depending on what our opponent’s formation was, where their receivers lined up, the backfield set, down and distance. We’d factor all that in and make an on-the-spot choice as to where we were going to go with the best blitz for that situation. We’re going to run certain fronts. Our corners would do things in tandem with our safety. A number of things could happen, but there had to be a lot of communication within that clap Buddy conveyed to our defense.”

  See what I mean when I say you had to be smart to play in the 46?

  “With most coordinators, their players didn’t know what was going to be called, but not us,” Fencik bragged. “Buddy told us everything we needed. You could run the defense off a cheat sheet. Our calls were dependent on game situations. We ran our BTFs and AFCs so seamlessly that you never felt like you were in a bad spot. Buddy put us in the best position to beat a specific offense with a specific play in a specific formation.”