by Ron Jaworski
In one fundamental way, Dick LeBeau is different from all the others: He is the only one who actually played in the NFL. And he was a damn good player. Dick lasted fourteen years as a pro cornerback, which is a remarkable achievement all by itself. He played every one of those years with the Detroit Lions, alongside Hall of Fame defensive backs Dick “Night Train” Lane, Yale Lary, and Lem Barney. He went to three straight Pro Bowls in the mid-1960s and picked off 62 career interceptions. Only three true cornerbacks in league history have more. He also holds the record for consecutive games started by a corner, with 171. It took longer than it should have, but Dick was finally voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2010.
I never competed against LeBeau when he was a player, because he retired just before my rookie season. But we squared off a number of times when I was at quarterback and he was either an assistant coach or a defensive coordinator. The last time I faced him was in 1989, my seventeenth and final year in the NFL. I was with Kansas City as Steve DeBerg’s backup, but when Steve hit a rough patch in the first month, head coach Marty Schottenheimer decided to go with me. Our week-four game against the defending AFC champion Cincinnati Bengals was my first starting assignment in nearly three years, but just before halftime, I had the Chiefs ahead by 10. Even so, we ended up losing, 21–17, and I have to shoulder much of the blame. I threw four interceptions, including three to safety David Fulcher, about whom you’ll learn more later. I don’t recall many of the details from that game, but I do remember having difficulty making my reads against their defense, and I checked the stats to find that I also got sacked four times. The defensive coach who made my life miserable that day? Dick LeBeau.
You know from my work on Monday Night Football and ESPN NFL Matchup that I’m a dyed-in-the-wool football wonk. Here’s more evidence: I’ve saved just about every game plan from my pro career, storing them in the basement of my home. As I was researching this book, I wondered if there was any mention of exotic LeBeau blitzes in the Chiefs’ ‘89 week-four Bengals game plan. One night after dinner, I dug through my files to find out. Sure enough, our offensive coordinator, Joe Pendry, had diagrammed progressions for a dozen Cincinnati pressure schemes. Joe’s first drawing depicted a blitz out of a nickel package. Another sketch showed a blitz that rushed a nickel back, an inside linebacker, and three of the four down linemen, with a defensive tackle dropping into coverage. Joe also included one blitz with a defensive end standing up behind the nose tackle, who then rushed the pass pocket. The most bizarre Bengals scheme showcased a pre-snap set of three linemen, one linebacker, and seven defensive backs. I don’t think any other teams were running stuff like this back then. No wonder my stats were so lousy!
That was more than twenty years ago, and Dick’s still at it today. Now in his seventh decade in the NFL, he remains one of the league’s most respected coaches. Even as a kid growing up in tiny London, Ohio, LeBeau loved to compete. “I’ve been a game player all my life,” he reflected. “When I was a young man, I’d try to figure out ways to beat pinball machines. In high school, I’d draw up plays for our team to run during PE classes.” Dick was good enough to earn a scholarship and play for Woody Hayes at Ohio State, where he made friends with a basketball player named Bobby Knight. “Bobby always had a ‘football’ mentality, and I think that’s the way he coached his basketball teams,” said LeBeau. “We both agreed that pressure on the ball is a good thing—don’t let the other guy breathe.”
It looked as if LeBeau’s pro career would continue in his home state after he was drafted by the Cleveland Browns in 1959, but Paul Brown eventually cut him. Ironically, Dick later served nearly two decades under Brown with the Bengals’ coaching staff. The Lions claimed LeBeau off waivers, and for the next fourteen years, he was the primary cover guy for Detroit, a team that lived and died by the blitz. “I grew up in a pressure system—the Lions blitzed all the time with man-on-man coverage—and I saw what could happen; how it could dramatically affect the game,” he said. Sometimes the results weren’t pretty, and his days in Motown left a lasting impression about what could go wrong when a team blitzed too often without giving its secondary a safety net.
At the end of his playing days, Dick considered his options. “I had a background in business and considered becoming an accountant,” he said, “because my dad, my cousin, and his son were all accountants. I’ve always loved golf and thought I might do something there.” Ultimately, LeBeau stayed in football. “I had gleaned quite a few tidbits by the time I was thirty-five and had studied pretty hard. I felt if I just retired, all that knowledge would be wasted. So it seemed like a good idea to pass some of that on to the players coming after me. That’s what got me into coaching. Coaching is just teaching. I think if you talk to any teacher in any line of work, the joy of their profession is to see your people improve, to reach certain goals that you set together.”
Dick spent his first seven years in coaching with the Eagles and the Packers before coming to Cincinnati in 1980. “He was always the coolest guy in the room, kind of like ‘the Fonz,’ “ laughed Bengals receiver-turned-broadcaster Cris Collinsworth. “He knew stuff about everything, always looked sharp, and could destroy you on the golf course. He loved everything about football: calisthenics, meetings, watching film. And he genuinely cared about his players, truly wanting their lives outside of football to be great.
“I remember one time in practice these two big linemen got into it—swinging away, hitting each other in the helmet, doing all the stupid things you typically see when players in full pads try to duke it out. LeBeau took off, ran and jumped on the back of one of the guys, and started riding around on him, whoopin’ and hollerin’ like he was in a rodeo or something. It was the perfect way to break up a football fight. We all began laughing so hard—even the two guys who started it were cracking up. We’d never seen Dick do anything like it.”
This outburst wouldn’t have been such a shock to the players if they’d known about some of LeBeau’s outside interests. “I was a stunt man for a while in Hollywood and worked with Robert Aldrich, who’d directed Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and The Dirty Dozen,” he explained. “Aldrich was a quite a football fan and was looking for doubles who could run a lot without getting tired. It was for a picture he was making in the tropics called Too Late the Hero.”
Never let it be said that LeBeau doesn’t have a little ham in him. He desperately wanted a few lines in the picture, but Aldrich explained that there was only one American character in the film. If Dick wanted a speaking part, he’d need to acquire an English accent—fast. So LeBeau sought out the cast member for whom he was stunt doubling: British actor Michael Caine. “We were playing pool after finishing the day’s shoot, and I begged him for help. ‘Michael, you’ve gotta teach me an English accent so I can get on camera. I want my buddies to see me on screen.’ Michael replied, ‘Oh, there’s nothing to it. We’ll do a little Cockney.’ So we practiced that whole night while playing pool. The next day, I see Bob Aldrich and tell him, ‘I think I can do it.’ Bob told me to recite the line, and it was something like, ‘There’s a light out on the billiard table.’ Aldrich wasn’t impressed. ‘You sound like a hillbilly trying to do a Cockney accent. Get the hell out of here.’ That was pretty much the end of my acting career.”
Well, not quite. With the Bengals, he gave two different pep talks, one dressed up as Superman and one dressed as Elvis Presley. “It was only at minicamp, so it was a more relaxed atmosphere, and I was trying to make a point—Super-man, Super Bowl—you get the idea. I guess I had this thing for capes. I was going to try Batman next.” And it’s a tradition every holiday season for all the defensive players to assemble for LeBeau’s command performance of The Night Before Christmas.
LeBeau has many other talents. He can repair wristwatches, play guitar, and has a photographic memory. Dick can recite verbatim all the dialogue from his favorite film, The Wizard of Oz. “That movie was made at the same time Technicolor was coming in,” LeBeau not
ed. “The picture begins in black and white, but when Dorothy goes ‘over the rainbow’ and her house falls in Munchkin Land, she steps outside, and suddenly she’s in this beautiful color. Right there you’re seeing the evolution of Hollywood technology. It’s a great moment.”
A similar moment occurred in Dick LeBeau’s life when he first developed what I believe is the most important and long-lasting defensive concept the NFL has seen in the past two decades: the Zone blitz. And I’m in good company because Patriots coach Bill Belichick feels the same way: “To me, LeBeau’s place in history is secure as creator of the Zone blitz. The fact that he not only created it but hasn’t really ever had to modify it is incredible. I can’t find anything else in football to compare it with.”
n its simplest terms, the Zone blitz is a flexible defensive set designed to bewilder quarterbacks and their blockers. Its main premise is to create doubt for the offense in identifying who’s rushing and who’s in coverage. It’s executed by trading off the conventional rush and coverage responsibilities of the defense. On any play, there is the potential for one defender to swap his role with another. This is often called “personnel exchange,” and here’s how it works: When the ball is snapped, designated defensive linemen can drop into coverage instead of rushing the passer, while selected linebackers or defensive backs switch from their traditional coverage responsibilities to apply pocket pressure. The hoped-for result is mass confusion for the offensive linemen.
Ultimately, the main goal is to impact the quarterback’s progressions and delay what he’s reading across the line. Obviously, defenses can vary who they send and drop off on every snap. A nose tackle could rush on one play, then slip into coverage on the next. Safeties can blitz two times in a row and then play a deep zone. The combinations are limitless, making it extremely tough for offenses to sort through all the possibilities as to who is rushing and who is covering. Just think about it: If defensive linemen are dropping into coverage, then it’s a sure thing they’re not going to be playing man-to-man. They can’t. Those guys are simply too big and slow to stay with NFL-caliber receivers. So the coverage of this defense must be zone based. In the mid-to late 1980s, this was a real departure from the prevailing pressure concepts of that era.
Elements of the Zone blitz have been around for a long time. It’s difficult to find examples from coaching film dating back to the 1930s and 1940s, but I’d imagine that college and pro teams through the years have tried variations of this concept. I do know that while breaking down game film of the Patriots-Chargers ‘63 AFL Championship, I was startled to find two distinct instances featuring zone blitz principles. On one play, Boston blitzed two linebackers while defensive end Larry Eisenhauer stood up to play the pass. Later in the game, the Patriots red-dogged two inside linebackers while both of their defensive ends initially faked the rush, then dropped into coverage. I shouldn’t have been surprised, though, because as a Buffalo season ticket holder in the 1960s, I frequently saw something similar with the Bills defense. Their defensive coordinator, Joe Collier, was far ahead of his time. “We dropped off either of our defensive ends, Ron McDole or Tom Day, because both were agile enough to cover a clearly defined area,” he recalled. “Day was about two hundred sixty pounds, but had terrific foot speed. What amazed our coaching staff was that we could also ask this of McDole. He was over three hundred pounds—the biggest lineman in the AFL—and his mobility in pass coverage was where he got his nickname, ‘the Dancing Bear.’ ”
Al Saunders told me of another early example, this one from college ball. In 1970 the University of Tennessee promoted twenty-eight-year-old assistant Bill Battle, making him the youngest head coach in the country. “Battle would have his nose guard drop off and cover like a linebacker,” said Saunders. “He’d also drop off his more athletic defensive ends on third-and-long.” And then there was Bill Arnsparger, the genius of Miami’s defenses during the seventies and eighties. Dolphins head coach Don Shula was thrilled when “Bill came up with the 53 defense, something truly revolutionary at the time. We had this guy Bob Matheson, number 53, who was a very bright and unique talent with the ability to rush the passer as a lineman or linebacker. Arnsparger figured out ways to have him do both by plugging him into a lot of different spots. When Bob got in the game, this rotation turned our 4–3 set into a 3–4 defense.”
Arnsparger went almost exclusively to the 3–4 by the midseventies, after most of his best players from the Super Bowl No-Name Defense retired. The Dolphins drafted to that scheme by selecting hybrids such as A. J. Duhe and Kim Bokamper, athletes who could excel at a number of defensive positions. Duhe quickly learned the contrasts between the old 53 and Arnsparger’s new approaches. “The 53 wasn’t a Zone blitz, it was a conventional 3–4,” he explained. “In a 53, the offense had a pretty good idea who was going to be rushing. So now Bill’s got interchangeable parts like Bokamper and myself, and the wheels start turning. Let’s put some doubt in the quarterback’s mind. Bill begins by rotating who would blitz on a given play. The offense had to worry about as many as six or seven rushing, but we didn’t always come with that number. They end up with not enough receivers out in the pass pattern, which causes hesitation—and the play breaks down. I loved this concept because it gave us an edge and more confidence. We had something the other guys didn’t. Our toy bag was deeper than theirs.”
Dolphins defenders also had to be smart, with an aptitude for adjusting prior to and after the snap. One of the brightest was safety Glenn Blackwood. “Bill gave me the responsibility that when I saw a formation or setup, I could switch blitzing responsibility with the Sam [strong-side] linebacker, who was originally supposed to rush,” he noted. “He could then occupy the tight end so that when I blitzed, that tight end had no way to break through—and that created more pressure in the pocket by having me rush. O-linemen weren’t prepared to block me because they weren’t expecting a safety to be coming in. There were plays where I just blew in scot-free.”
Blackwood remembered what took place when Arnsparger moved Bokamper to end and put Duhe at linebacker: “After the snap, Bokamper would take one step toward the tackle, occupy him, then back up into the inside zone. We’d roll the weak safety to that side, the strong safety then goes deep middle. To the quarterback, it feels like there’s a five-man rush after him. When we ran this, there were a lot of times where the outside linebacker came in untouched. The offensive tackle is focusing on Bokamper, the guy he’s supposed to block. But then Kim backs away, and the tackle is just standing there, watching as other people are sacking his quarterback! To me, this was the real beginning of the Zone blitz.”
LeBeau had always admired Arnsparger’s work. After being promoted to Bengals defensive coordinator, Dick traveled down south to pick his brain. “Arnsparger took a concept that reacted to basic protection schemes of the time and found a good way of attacking them,” LeBeau recalled. “He’d blitz three people at the start, but really ended up rushing just two of the three. This was Bill’s innovation, and he was the first guy I ever saw do it. The light really went on when he said to me, ‘I was just looking for a safer way to pressure.’ And that’s when I started looking for my own ways to do that.” In LeBeau’s lexicon, “safer” meant fewer rushers and more defenders in coverage. The brilliance of the whole concept was creating ways to break down pass protections and pressure the passer with a lot fewer guys crashing the pass pocket. Sam Rutigliano probably put it best: “If Dick LeBeau is the father of the Zone blitz, then Bill Arnsparger is its grandfather. “
The original Zone blitz concepts stemmed primarily from a 3–4 alignment, and at the time that LeBeau was formulating his ideas in Cincinnati, it was the NFL’s most widely used defensive front. The Bengals had switched to the 3–4 in 1980 when Hank Bullough was defensive coordinator, and a year later, that system helped get Cincinnati to Super Bowl XVI. But in those days, the Dolphins and the Broncos were regarded as the most consistently successful AFC teams playing in the 3–4 system. Joe Collier spen
t two decades running Denver’s defense and was its major advocate. In his opinion, “The 3–4 offers you more variety in schemes than a 4–3. You can shift into different fronts and stunt in different ways because you have more people off the line of scrimmage. I’ll bet we had more than fifty front variations with the Broncos, which you would never have in a 4–3. It made it much harder for offenses to prepare for us. I’d hear from opposing coaches all the time, bitching to me about how late they had to stay up trying to get their teams ready for the Broncos.” Arnsparger was causing similar headaches with his defenses in Miami. Now LeBeau wanted to expand on these principles in Cincinnati.
On a flight home, Dick began doodling like crazy on airline cocktail napkins, scribbling down every exotic blitz scheme that came to mind. The brainstorms were brewing faster than he could write. Fortunately Sam Wyche, Cincinnati’s new head coach, was receptive to fresh ideas, no matter how bizarre they might have seemed at first. You may remember that Wyche was the first one to run the “No-Huddle” offense back in the mid-eighties. “I was one of those guys whose theory was: The more things you did outside the box, the better your chances of getting an edge on your opponent. When Dick first brought the basics of the Zone blitz to my attention, I wanted to hear them.”
Even so, Sam wasn’t sold on all of LeBeau’s suggestions, at least not right away. “I can remember our initial discussions taking place in the hallway at Spinney Field, where we practiced. We were debating the merits of Dick’s scheme in a confined area next to a secretary’s desk. We started arguing in this cramped space, literally leaning over her workspace while she was typing, and it got pretty heated. I finally said, ‘Let’s take this conversation outside right now.’ You have to remember that Spinney Field was located in the bowels of Cincinnati. It was right next to a garbage can manufacturer along the Mill Creek—which, by the way, was a polluted creek where we drew the water to hose down our practice field.” It was in this glamorous setting that LeBeau’s Zone blitz was born.