by Ron Jaworski
ou may remember my stating in the introduction that football doesn’t change only from year to year but from week to week. These changes are often triggered by teams reacting to innovative strategies they’ve encountered on the playing field. But another catalyst can be the heightened demand for success from owners and fans. In this day and age, pro football is a results-oriented sport. Management can grow impatient and give up on a particular coach or his philosophy if improvement doesn’t happen quickly.
In my view, this mind-set was ushered in by the unexpected success of the ‘99 Rams. St. Louis went from worst to first and won a Super Bowl, but before that it had been the worst team of the nineties. Other owners saw this and said, “If they can do it, so can we.” Since then, coaching turnover has increased. Free agency has changed how organizations are built and players are developed, as more specialized role players are emerging than ever before. Technological advances have altered how game trends are evaluated. The sheer size of coaching staffs has grown, so the man-hours for study have also increased. Off-season programs and drills are more complicated and time consuming. Today, football truly is a year-round job, and players and coaches run on a treadmill that is accelerating to even faster speeds.
When the seven games selected for this book were played, the NFL was a different league from what it is today. Even my most recent game choice, the Patriots’ upset in Super Bowl XXXVI, happened a decade ago—and a lot has changed since then. At that time, it would’ve been almost impossible to predict the current state of football. Evaluating these games and coaches who’ve influenced the NFL took nearly three years of study, but at least I was analyzing events that had already taken place. I had game tapes sitting on my desk, and I could run them back and forth whenever I wanted. It’s a far more difficult task to foresee tomorrow’s NFL trends or identify which young coaching wizards might be the next Don Coryell or Dick LeBeau.
Whenever you make predictions, you risk looking like one of those scientists I read about as a kid, the ones who envisioned flying automobiles and moving sidewalks. We’re all still waiting for those modern marvels to appear, and my own forecasting skills might turn out to be just as inaccurate. But I’m willing to take the risk discussing trends that could be in pro football’s future.
n my senior year at college, two of my teammates on the Youngs-town State football team joined me on a weekend trip to Buffalo. The Bills were opening their 1972 schedule against the New York Jets, and the three of us wanted to see Joe Namath play in person. Though I’d been a Bills fan since I was a kid, Joe had been my idol since high school, and I’d patterned much of my quarterback technique on him. After my two buddies, Dave Ferguson and Bob Ferranti, cut a deal with a ticket scalper, we made our way into War Memorial Stadium. This would be the Bills’ final season in the Rockpile before moving to their new home in the suburb of Orchard Park, and it still featured many of the same familiar trappings I remembered noticing as a kid, including that dilapidated snow fence surrounding the field. As we entered, the Jets had just begun their warm-ups, and not more than a hundred feet from where we stood was Joe Willie himself, having a catch with future Hall of Fame receiver Don Maynard.
I’d seen Namath other times from the vantage point of my old Bills season ticket seats, but never from this close. Leaning against the snow fence, I was able to study his footwork, grip, and throwing motion better than any time before. As I watched him, it suddenly hit me: I could do exactly what he was doing. These were skills I also had. For the first time in my life, I truly felt that I could succeed as an NFL quarterback. You can call it an epiphany, a bolt from the blue, whatever you want. But from that moment on, I intuitively felt I understood what a pro quarterback was supposed to do. There would be another year of college play—and seasons learning from the finest NFL coaches before I became a polished pro—but on that day, my pro football journey officially began. It’s a journey I’m still experiencing and enjoying almost forty years later.
Because I’ve both played and studied the quarterback position for so long, I believe I understand its requirements and demands better than any other position. But you don’t need anything remotely resembling my background to realize that today’s NFL is predominantly a passing league. That’s what drives the game. During the 2009 season, a dozen teams threw for at least 4,000 yards—the highest total in the last decade. Despite those attention-grabbing numbers, I believe quarterback talent at the pro level has become diluted over the past few years. I don’t think there are more than ten top-flight quarterbacks in the NFL right now; not even a third of the current starters. When I played, I felt that at least half the league had quarterbacks with consistent pro skills, and you pretty much knew what you were going to get every week. The number is clearly less today, and it has a great deal to do with how the position is presently being coached at the high school and college levels.
Colleges have determined that it’s much easier to achieve success with mobile quarterbacks in spread offenses. Movement passing systems are much simpler to teach than the pro style, because quarterbacks don’t have to learn to read as many coverages. What you end up with are more run-oriented, sprint-option guys, not the drop-back passers that the pro game requires. In baseball, a team’s top athlete becomes the shortstop; in football, the best college athletes are being switched to quarterback. “If everybody is playing spread in college, where are you going to find the quarterbacks that can pass from a pro set?” asked Tony Dungy. “They’re going to be fewer and farther between, and you still have to win. We’re going to have to adapt in the NFL. If this is the product that’s coming to us, we’re either going to create some type of developmental system to get these guys ready—or we’re going to have to adapt to the skills that the guys have who are coming into the league.”
Let me assure you that even as more of these spread quarterbacks enter the pros, there is no way the NFL is going to morph into a higher-grade version of college football. It can’t happen, because the two are not even the same game, and here’s the difference: College game action generally flows from the “outside in,” whereas action in the pros mostly originates from the “inside out.” Why? Two simple reasons, really. One is the vast disparity between the talent levels of athletes; the other is that colleges play on a differently configured field than the pros. A lot of the wild gadget calls you see each Saturday in the Southeastern Conference or Pac Ten simply won’t work in the NFL. “When you put the ball on the hash marks in college, you have a wider side of the field to work with, and defenses are based on that,” explained Bill Cowher. “But the pro game is played in the middle of the field, which means you can attack or be attacked from both sides. So it’s much more complex for college kids making the next step to the pros, because overall play is not as clearly defined in the pros as it is in colleges.”
Bill Belichick believes that the college hash mark placement produces many of its big plays. “Fast guys in college can make a lot of yardage just by outrunning people on defense. But in the NFL, because the ball is in the middle of the field, and because NFL defenders are close to being as fast as offensive guys, you just don’t see many plays in the pros where one man outruns the whole team. And when you put the ball in the middle of the field, you don’t have that extra ten yards of space to outrun them.”
“In college you can get away with an athletic quarterback who isn’t that accurate with his passes,” noted former head coach of the Arizona Cardinals Dave McGinnis, currently the Tennessee Titans linebackers coach. “Because the NFL’s hash marks are different, everything is squeezed into the middle of the field, so the passing lanes close much quicker. The speed of the linebackers and defensive backs is faster. Quarterbacks can run in college, but not so much in the pros, because more defenders close more quickly.”
This doesn’t mean that NFL coaches aren’t looking to steal good ideas from their college counterparts. Quite the contrary. And they’ll often find formations or schemes that can be readily applied to the pro
game—one recent example being the “Wildcat” formation. The Wildcat, of course, was introduced by the Miami Dolphins in 2008—a modern version of the old Single Wing formation from the 1930s and ‘40s. It removes the quarterback and replaces him with a running back, who takes the snap and has the freedom to run or pass from unconventional locations in the backfield. Numerous teams around the league have since added Wildcat formation plays to their offensive repertoire. Most of the time, however, the differences between the two games are simply too stark for any system to be adapted smoothly. Bill Belichick exhausted a ton of man-hours one off-season poring over college film, hoping to find solutions that would improve New England’s ground attack. “I went through all of Navy’s games,” he recalled, “because they’d led the nation in rushing, even though they obviously don’t have the best players. I thought there might be something that we could apply to help our running game. But after watching every game and every play they ran, I saw that all of them involved a running quarterback. Either he ran the ball, or the defense had to play him as if he was going to run. None of our opponents is ever going to defend Tom Brady running the ball. Unless you have the absolute right guy, you’d be giving up a lot in the passing game. Navy’s running game is as good as any in college—or pro football. It’s a great system. But we couldn’t use it in the pros.”
Although a majority of schools depend on spread formations and mobile quarterbacks, a number of them still teach the pro passing system. They include USC, Georgia, Arkansas, Ole Miss, Rutgers, and Miami. After evaluating the quarterbacks from these schools, it’s evident that even their underclassmen already have the look of NFL quarterbacks. By that, I mean that their drops, mechanics, and delivery truly resemble what you see at the pro level. They simply play the game a lot differently from the movement quarterbacks you see in spread systems. “The top two quarterbacks selected in the first round of the 2009 draft weren’t running the spread,” noted Jon Gruden. “They ran a more conventional offense. Matthew Stafford [drafted by the Lions] and Mark Sanchez [the Jets] were easier for scouts to evaluate because they were more familiar with pro sets.”
Just a few years ago, these types of passing prospects were virtually the only ones who were drafted. “In years past, for college teams to recruit top players, they tried to run pro-style offenses,” pointed out Sam Wyche. “This way, they could say they were training them to play in the NFL. Now the pros are looking at all of these great quarterbacks coming out in the spread, and they’re modifying their offenses. They’re trying to accommodate the new talent experienced in it. There are clearly spread quarterbacks in college who are quite capable of throwing the ball from the pocket.
“But because of their spread capabilities and their ability to run, they could become the ‘other quarterback'—as a changeup to the pure passer on the team,” Sam believed. “My theory is: God did not create thirty-two quality starting NFL quarterbacks to play at one time. A lot of the guys in the NFL are starting quarterbacks because there’s nobody better to take their place. So you’ll have teams searching for additional help. And the teams that do have a Manning or a Brady might say, ‘Why don’t we have a little wrinkle in here; pose a threat aside from our normal stuff?’ ”
Sam thinks that if pro teams carried such a double-barreled weapon, keeping both conventional-and spread-formation quarterbacks on NFL rosters, they would pose real problems for defenses; “I see guys like Armanti Edwards from Appalachian State becoming the ‘other quarterback’ in the lineup—where the opponent is going to have to prepare for two offenses. As long as that quarterback is a threat to throw the ball, defenders have to worry about him. Quarterbacks that can throw but also move like running backs could be big in the future. Teams that draft these guys are going to have a giant edge, because they’ll force opponents to split their practice time in half, defending two styles of offense.”
If NFL teams try this, they’d better make sure that division of labor is clearly defined. As Brian Billick observed, “What’s the biggest problem in the league now? If your number one quarterback goes down, you are screwed. If teams go to the spread more regularly, do you really want to expose your quarterback with less protection? It’s pretty risky. You can’t let your quarterback take those kinds of hits in the NFL.”
With some teams, the difference between their first-string and backup quarterback isn’t that much, but if your number one guy is a superstar, it’s an entirely different story. One time, Jon Gruden and I were attending a Colts practice before one of our ESPN games, and we were standing next to their offensive coordinator, Tom Moore. Tom is “old school” in every sense of the word. He’s been in the NFL for over thirty years and has signaled in every play call of Peyton Manning’s career. As we watched, we were surprised to see Manning taking virtually all the reps in the session. Jon asked Tom why he wasn’t giving some snaps to Peyton’s backups. Moore is a man of few words, but when he talks, those words have weight. He looked us both in the eye, paused for a moment, then said in that gravelly voice of his, “Fellas, if ‘18’ goes down, we’re fucked. And we don’t practice fucked.”
Bill Cowher is optimistic that today’s best collegiate spread quarterbacks will be capable of making the adjustment to the NFL. “It may take some of the college spread quarterbacks a little longer to develop,” he stated, “but I don’t think there’s been a better time, with so many good quarterbacks. I attribute that to the fact that there’s so much more passing going on in college now. They have a better feel for the passing game.”
I hope Bill’s right, but I wonder whether these young guns possess the skill set needed to be a solid NFL quarterback. As I see it, there are four basic abilities a pro passer must have:
the ability to read coverages during dropback
the ability to plant the back foot while knowing where to throw
the ability to deliver the ball with timing and anticipation
the ability to pass accurately
In the NFL, the elite quarterbacks are the ones who sit in the pocket and deliver the ball on time. The best of them right now include Peyton Manning, Drew Brees, Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady, and Philip Rivers. But these types of guys are a diminishing breed in the college game, and that trend is filtering down to the high school level. If a teen isn’t learning drop-back skills in high school or college, it may be too difficult for him to pick this up by the time he reaches the NFL. Eventually, I’m not sure there will be enough qualified dropback passers to go around. So I expect that you’ll eventually see more movement-oriented quarterbacks at the professional level.
One interesting change that might result from an increase in the number of mobile NFL quarterbacks could be an increase in the number of running backs who offer versatility and can pass proficiently. And there could be quarterbacks who excel at traditional running plays. It’s entirely possible that we’ll see plays out of the I formation with run/pass options built in, depending on the defense they’re facing. You certainly couldn’t build your entire offense around this because your quarterback would get killed, but it would be very exciting as a change of pace.
Jon Gruden sees it as more than an either/or choice, saying, “Teams today are almost required to have components of the spread as part of their system. The quarterback has to be able to run and make at least one guy miss. He needs durability, elusiveness, and the ability to dominate in one-on-one situations. [Denver’s] Tim Tebow runs like a fullback. It almost seems as if he likes the punishment. As a pro, he could end up running the ball ten times a game. If you have Tebow on your roster, you have to do that. Just understand that you can’t bring in a guy like that and think you can quickly train him to throw like Joe Montana. He can learn the pro passing system, but he’ll be better adding elements that weren’t there before.”
Jon’s right when he says it would be too much to expect rookie spread quarterbacks to be successful right away, because the NFL spread formation is considerably different. In college, quarterback reads are simple. I
had a conversation with 49ers quarterback Alex Smith, and he told me he never even read coverages when he was at the University of Utah—he had to make only half-field reads, where he threw to spots. Even though college personnel can be spread just like pro personnel can, the design of their offenses doesn’t call for them to attack the full field. This makes it harder for scouts to project how well spread quarterbacks will react to what they see across the line in the NFL.
In addition, the intelligence requirements are much tougher in the pros than in college. Today’s NFL quarterbacks need a high football IQ to play against pressure defenses. It certainly helps if kids in high school and college are taught how to read coverages, become more familiar with pre-snap looks, and understand what the defenses are trying to do, but even that doesn’t guarantee full understanding. I retired in 1989, which wasn’t that long ago. But I never even thought about doing some of the things asked of quarterbacks today. Calling out protection schemes, shouting dummy snaps two or three times during the cadence, changing the play, changing the snap count—I never had to worry about any of that when I played. I really tip my hat to the guys who now play the position.
Because of the current rules, emphasis on the ground game is greatly reduced from my era. The old adage of running the football and then playing great defense still works up to a point, but I don’t think it gives you your best chance to win a Super Bowl. Today’s game is all about explosive plays. The running game must fit the passing game. Too many teams look at them as separate entities. The more proficient teams are better able to mesh the two, both through formations and play calls. Teams that can run the ball well out of passing formations will be the teams with the most explosive offenses. “The hardest thing in the pro game today is to run the football,” claimed Gruden. “The multiplicity of defenses makes it tough. It’s hard to know what defense you’re blocking. It’s hard to make that first down late in the game when you run. And it’s hard to run it in on the goal line. There are no real fullbacks. And the tight ends now are receiving tight ends—they can’t make the blocks you need on third-and-short.”