Backpedaling into place to receive the punt, it’s clear that Metcalf is limping. A bad knee kept him out of practice until Friday, and truth be told, he probably shouldn’t be playing. But all week long, Belichick has been buoyed by the feeling that the Steelers’ special teams aren’t as strong as ours. Seeing an advantage to exploit and a chance to build the culture of an eventual playoff-caliber team, he’s pushed our special teams units to make big plays and set the physical tone against the Steelers—a challenge Metcalf has answered with an already gritty performance on one healthy leg.
Belichick’s other go-to toughness test was administered on the field: the trial by fire of kick coverage and returns. No other play in football demands that 10 big and fast men—apologies to all the kickers out there—run full speed at and through 10 other big and fast men to tackle a runner. Covering kicks is a show of bravery that eliminates the weak. Watching a player perform that task can answer a couple of questions at once: Does he play with abandon? Does he love to get physical? If the answers were yes, Belichick knew he had a guy with grit who would put his body on the line for the greater good of the team. If you want to determine a player’s mental toughness, ask him to help out on kickoffs and punts. This was one of the many grueling tests we gave newly arrived players in Cleveland. Emphasizing special teams toughness helps instill an “all-in” vibe up and down the roster. That was why Belichick ruled that virtually every player must contribute to the various special team units.
Metcalf was a former number one draft choice. So was Eric Turner. Turner, Belichick’s first pick as Browns head coach, would become an All-Pro safety, but he was precisely the kind of strong, athletic player Belichick loved to see on his special teams. In Cleveland, we became so focused on developing our special teams with that type of talent that our defensive coordinator, Nick Saban, complained about how his side of the ball was always being slighted, forced as it was to incorporate lesser players because they also could help the kicking game.
Before he sent his punt return team onto the field, special teams coach Scott O’Brien made sure his group understood that he wanted them to set up a right sideline return. That means the jammers (blockers) on both ends of the line have to do a great job of blocking the Steelers’ gunners (the punt team’s best cover men and generally the first defenders down-field). Earlier in the game, Metcalf took one back 91 yards for a touchdown with a left sideline return, and O’Brien knows that if Royals makes a tactical mistake and punts down the middle of the field, a right return, the play he called, will be the shortest path to the end zone.
But on the right return the responsibility of jamming the gunners falls to a couple of exhausted defenders, Turner and fellow safety Stevon Moore. Turner and Moore have played their hearts out all day. These stars of the defense are also special teams stalwarts. Being exhausted is no excuse; their teammates need them. In reality, they secretly love the violent chaos of punt return duty. If all goes as planned, Turner will go to the left side of the Steelers line, jam his man, peel off, and race across the field to help set up a “fence” of blockers that will lead Metcalf up the right sideline in front of the Cleveland bench. Moore will align to the right side and jam his man inside toward the middle of the field and then race backward to help seal the sideline for Metcalf.
Belichick has called off any rush of the punter to better set up the return, hoping the extra time causes Royals to relax a bit and overswing on the kick rather than direct it to a sideline. And the tactic works. Royals’s kick is headed exactly where we’d hoped it would go: straight down the middle of the field toward the most explosive talent in the NFL.
Many NFL teams give certain players dispensation to avoid particular team drills, but I’ve never seen that do anything except divide the group into haves and have-nots. That was certainly the case in Oakland. During the 2005 season, I was driving home from Friday practice to have dinner with my family when I got a call from Al Davis. “How could you let them work him so hard?” Davis yelled into the phone. To which I naturally asked, “Who is him?” In his angrier-by-the-second Brooklyn accent, Davis answered simply: “Alvis.” Ah, Alvis Whitted, our fourth wide receiver. My still-flummoxed response: “Do what?” only got him more riled. “Let him run down kickoffs!” he clarified. “We have to save his legs!”
When I pointed out that we needed guys to cover kicks, too, Al followed with his signature “Ah, fuck” and hung up.
Whitted did have incredible speed, but he was the fourth or fifth option at his position—exactly the kind of guy who fills coverage units. We couldn’t exempt him. Here’s what separates the most subtle football thinkers from the rest: They know that special teams account for nearly 20 percent of all plays during a game, and they’re not willing to forgo the chance to gain an advantage over an opponent in one-fifth of the available opportunities. But most coaches (and owners) are happy just to get off the field with clean exchanges—that is, no turnovers. They’re not even overly concerned with field position, because you can turn field position with one deep pass. Davis was one of those guys. He wasn’t interested in risking the health of his starters—and primary backups such as Whitted—on a unit that to him didn’t matter strategically. He certainly wasn’t thinking about building a foundation of teamwork atop the unit. Guys like Belichick, though, believe firmly that an “all-in” culture is an essential piece of the championship equation and that special teams are the fastest path to it.
Davis, in all fairness, loved specialists. He drafted a punter, Ray Guy, and a kicker, Sebastian Janikowski, in the first round, and so it would be hard to knock him for not loving the special teams. He just didn’t love using his “fast” players from the offense to cover kicks. He found his edge in other places. For one thing, he saw the advantages of forcing opponents to field a ball kicked by a left-footed punter, particularly when they’d had no experience at it. Davis understood that the ball comes off a left foot with a different rotation, making it a challenge to catch. Plus, left footers are rare, which means returners don’t have a lot of practice dealing with that rotation. Davis would hire left footers when he could, and he always made sure to bring one in to practice the week before we were set to face one. And now Belichick does that, too.
Another reason for Belichick’s obsession with specials teams is that they allow coaches to interact with more of the team at once. Offensive and defensive coordinators just manage guys in their unit, but the kicking games use players from both sides of the ball. Aside from a full team meeting, the special teams meeting is the largest regular gathering. Sure, most of the players at that meeting are from the back end of the roster, but a second tier that is strong and nourished pushes frontline players as well as any cash bonus or contract incentive.
Belichick isn’t the first coach I saw use special teams to change the broader culture. When Kansas State hired Bill Snyder to be its head coach in 1989, the program was among the worst in college football. Snyder took over a program that had gone 27 games without a win. In the 53 years before his arrival, the Wildcats won 137 games, total. A couple of years earlier I had sat in the stands in Manhattan, Kansas, watching practice as a Niners scout and wondering if anyone could ever have success there. And then Snyder put up 136 W’s in 17 seasons. He won many of those games with a wide-open offense and by taking advantage of the instant upgrades that junior college transfers offered.
But it was from the kicking game that he concocted that all-important, all-in atmosphere. Just recently, Snyder shared with me that he knew going into the project that turning around Kansas State would mean building tough-minded players. He also knew that excelling in the kicking game was something all coaches said they wanted but rarely spent the effort to achieve. That is why Snyder walked the walk from the beginning, devoting as much practice time to that unit as he did to the others. Snyder still boasts about how much time he has spent on the kicking game. There is no magic to any of it; it’s simply a function o
f the head coach’s level of attention. Snyder once said, “You think about the number of repetitions in the course of a ball game that you get in some aspect of special teams, and it is pretty substantial, so it deserves the time you invest in it.” When Snyder landed in Kansas, he was determined to make starters play on special teams because that was how he was going to create what I call the tornado effect.
All-in teams are in fact a bit like tornadoes: disparate energies that band together into a single destructive force that cuts down everything in its path. The greatest example of this concept is the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team. Coach Herb Brooks didn’t collect the best hockey players in America for his squad. Rather, he found the right players. To help put together the roster, Brooks, a psychology major, gave each prospect a lengthy test in which he was looking for high scores in three areas: open-mindedness, willingness to learn, and coachability. He felt those interrelated qualities would allow him to build a team that could overcome the large talent gap it would confront as college kids playing against the best teams from around the globe.
The Soviets had won every hockey gold since 1964, outscoring opponents 175–44 in international play and crushing the NHL All Stars 6–0 in 1979—with a backup goalie, no less. That Soviet team was the best hockey team in history, but Brooks beat it with a bench full of misfits and maybe the greatest all-in culture ever created. No wonder, then, that Belichick admired the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team. He admired it so much that he gave its players access to the most protected inner sanctum in sports: his locker room.
In New England, Belichick invited goalie Jim Craig to tell the Patriots about how he flat-out refused to take Brooks’s famous test. The coach relented, but just before the Winter Games were to begin, he told Craig that he was thinking of starting someone else in net. Craig went nuts, yelling, “Is it because I didn’t take your stupid test?” Brooks answered, “No, it’s because I want the guy back who refused to take the test!” Craig was losing his fire, and Brooks wanted to ignite it like Lake Placid’s Olympic torch. Craig was a tremendous storyteller, but he spent very little time talking about his legendary 36-save performance against the Russians, one of the greatest Olympic performances of all time. Two minutes into his speech, though, every Browns player saw what Belichick had seen in Craig: a kindred spirit. Just like most of the players in Cleveland, Craig was a special teamer at heart. Instead of talking about himself, he focused on the power of the 1980 team’s all-in nature and the unique collection of teammates that built it. Belichick was trying to build something equally cyclonic in Cleveland, and he wanted his special teams to spur the teamwide storm.
I have been part of four Super Bowl teams, and all were all-in types. There simply has to be a thread of unity running through any successful team, from the best players to the practice squad. I’m not saying they all have to like one another, but there has to at least be some level of mutual respect. So when a head coach like Belichick makes special teams a priority, treating these mostly unknown and underpaid players with the same respect as the All-Pros on offense and defense (and sometimes with more), it’s a powerful message about trust and accountability that resonates with all 53 men in the locker room.
Turner, the big, fast, hard-hitting safety from UCLA, was football and book smart, fully prepared to lead the defense even though he was younger than everyone else on the unit. But he was exceptional in another way, too. From the beginning, he wanted to play on special teams. And he was very good at it. We counted on him to contribute to both of our coverage units, and he elevated them both. If he needed a break, we’d give him one, but at critical points of every game he wanted to be out there, and we were happy to oblige.
All of the best, most competitive players I’ve been around are exactly the same, willing to do whatever it takes. I was at the University of Miami in 1988, working out some Hurricanes on the “Box,” which is basically an electronic timer that clocks a series of drills. This was data solely about athletic skill, not football instinct. The key to Box drills was that they were run on a wood surface for consistency’s sake, and that meant I often found myself conducting workouts on campus basketball courts (a massive highlight for this serious college hoops fan). Even today when I watch games on TV, I think fondly of my Boxing days and all the janitors I pissed off by ripping the gloss off their shiny floors when I pulled up the tape I’d laid down as players’ marks.
Anyway, Michael Irvin, Miami’s star receiver, wasn’t likely to agree to participate, so I had to improvise. When I made my call to set up a workout, I was not 100 percent truthful. You see, I gave Irvin the impression that I was actually Marty Schottenheimer, the head coach of the Browns. Irvin had no reason to doubt me and, without caller ID, no way to check even if he did. But when Irvin arrived at the gym to find a fat low-level Italian, he was like “Uh-uh—no way am I working out for you” before walking over to join a hoops game with some of his football teammates. I still had to work out other players, and as I put them through their paces, I kept noticing Irvin sneaking glances at the Box. He was curious, but more than that he was competitive; he wanted to prove he could test better than anyone else. Before I left that day, Irvin had completed the test. (And yes, his scores were outstanding.)
Irvin accepted the challenge to prove his talent, and that’s not unusual for the great ones. It’s the main reason that creating an all-in team with a buy-in from the stars—even when that means getting them to participate on special teams—isn’t as hard as you might expect. Great competitors want to conquer every challenge, and that is a win-win for the special teams coach, because getting the most talented guys to line up with the kicking units can make them dominant.
If relying on their competitive streak fails, sometimes a piece of clothing may be enough to get the message across. You’d think the modern football professional would be too rich and too adult to fall for typical high school motivational methods. Never. NFL players are still helpless before the power of the T-shirt. To help create the culture he wanted in Cleveland, Belichick gave the special teams a nickname, the Strike Force, and each week rewarded top achievers with a brown shirt that proclaimed “Strike Force Champion” across the chest. The top performer got a leather jacket. From high school to college to the pros, locker rooms don’t change. Sure, NFLers own expensive cars and thick financial portfolios. It doesn’t matter; competitive sorts aren’t about to let the opportunity to snag a free shirt pass. In fact, stars might covet those shirts most of all. Belichick required players to participate on at least one kicking team unit, but by season’s end, even the best players were pushing to be on more, hoping to raise their chances of earning a T-shirt or that prized jacket.
Like a smooth major league center fielder, Metcalf has taken two steps backward, calculating precisely where the ball will drop into his soft hands. His eyes never leave the ball. Instead, he lets his internal clock tell him exactly how close the defenders are getting. To do this he must trust completely that his teammates will protect him. The other key, he knows, is the first five yards of the return. If he can get a clean takeoff, Metcalf has an excellent chance to gobble up some major yardage. Turner and Stevon Moore, along with fellow defensive backs Stacey Hairston and Terry Taylor, have done the dirty work, battling the Steelers’ gunners tooth and nail on the line, preventing them from getting a clean, quick path down the field.
Metcalf catches the ball on the Browns’ 25-yard line and takes two quick decoy steps straight up the center of the field. It’s a gutsy game of chicken meant to draw tacklers away from the “right return” coming together on the edge. Metcalf hopes that the rest of the unit can stand tall and hold back the onslaught of tacklers.
The Strike Force comes through.
All around Metcalf is a barrage of human projectiles colliding in a kaleidoscope of brown and yellow jerseys. Bodies fly by in all directions at maximum velocity. The violence of a punt return is breathtaking, really. Everywhere you
look players are putting their bodies—and their livelihood—on the line to protect or destroy the returner. You can’t force players to do this; they have to want to do it for one another. Moore even doubles back to race 50 yards downfield just in time to make a perfect diving—and legal—block that springs Metcalf toward the safety of the sidelines and the protection of his blockers, including 295-pound defensive tackle James Jones.
That Moore and Jones were perfectly positioned to help spring Metcalf’s return was no coincidence. Rather, it was a by-product of years of careful game planning and roster building by our staff.
My first job in football was as a volunteer coach at the University of Nevada–Las Vegas, in charge of making coffee for head coach Harvey Hyde. (I was also car washer, fill-up-the-gas-tank guy, and errand boy.) The job was neither glamorous nor high-paying, but it was a start. After my two successful seasons as barista in chief, a young coach from the University of Wisconsin–Superior drove his shiny new Corvette into town, looking for something to do while his wife attended graduate school. That coach was Scott O’Brien.
O’Brien and I quickly formed a football friendship that became a lifelong relationship. (It didn’t hurt that he soon replaced me as official coffee maker, although I always thought he skimped a bit on the grounds.) He had been on the Packers’ practice squad, on the defensive line, but he loved special teams. I mean, he really loved them. Some aspiring coaches are forever drawing plays on scraps of paper. Hell, if someone had snatched any of my notebooks in college, they would have had no luck finding the daily lessons amid the pages and pages of play diagrams. (Did I mention that I was an awful student?) Similarly, O’Brien’s journals featured alley returns for kickoffs and attacking schemes for punt blocks and ways to check into the best return on kickoffs no matter where the opponent kicked the ball. He had an excellent understanding of schemes and what players needed to do to make those schemes work. He was special teams 24/7 and couldn’t wait to teach what he knew, which was quite a bit.
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