After I left UNLV for the 49ers, O’Brien and I kept in close touch. His career took him to Rice, then to the University of Pittsburgh, where the head coach was another good friend, Mike Gottfried. (Naturally, when he was looking for a special teams coach, I told him to interview O’Brien.) By the time O’Brien was in Pittsburgh, I was close by in Cleveland, so we saw each other more frequently, and when the Browns hired longtime NFL defensive coordinator Bud Carson as head coach in 1989, I saw my chance to get O’Brien to Cleveland. I had no prior relationship with Carson, so I knew it would be a hard sell. Deciding I’d take the same tack that worked with Gottfried—just meet the guy—I marched into Carson’s office. I wasn’t four sentences in when Carson said, “What the fuck would I want with some college guy coaching my special teams?” Two years later I got a second chance when Belichick replaced Carson. Belichick and I had no prior relationship, either, but this time when I talked up my friend, I had an interested audience.
A few days later O’Brien arrived at the Berea, Ohio, training facility. Belichick, dressed in a coat and tie, immediately escorted him into his office. Every so often I peeked down the hall to see if the door had opened, but…nothing. Two hours went by, then three, then four. Finally, after six hours of nonstop nerding out about special teams, Belichick walked down to my office to thank me for the recommendation. O’Brien got the job.
On top of being a great special teams coach, O’Brien was a great talent evaluator. A few years into the job, he made a particularly astute recommendation. When our punter’s leg began to age out, we went shopping for a replacement. O’Brien wanted us to sign Tom Tupa, a local kid from Brecksville, Ohio. Tupa had been a great punter at Ohio State, but he also had been a decent quarterback and the Phoenix Cardinals chose him in the third round in 1988 to fill that higher-profile position. In his first six years in the NFL, Tupa punted just six times, and when he was released (by the Colts), we brought him to camp as our backup quarterback. He didn’t make the team and ended up sitting out the 1993 season. But while he was around for those few weeks of camp, O’Brien urged him to get back to punting. The next season, his booming leg and the bonus of a viable passing dimension as a holder of kicks made him a vital piece of the team. It was the first year of the two-point conversion, and naturally, Tupa was the first to score one. Soon, he was “Tommy Two Point” around the office.
The kicking game allows teams to improve their overall talent level without having to navigate the usual intraleague competition for available players. The NFL procurement system is designed to favor the losers, as poor records earn higher draft positions. But in the draft, those teams are looking for immediate help, players who can make an offense or defense better now. What they are not looking for are players whose skill sets can be honed over time on special teams. This lack of interest in that kind of player creates a variance in the market for those looking for, well, let’s just call it “special” talent.
O’Brien’s ability to find these hidden gems was so uncanny that we built a whole strategy around it. We believed that if a player was a standout in the kicking game, he had a good chance of developing into an effective four-down player (assuming he was smart enough to learn the relevant playbook). And the more four-down players we accumulated, the better we would be. Take Stevon Moore, for example. His trajectory illustrates a best-case scenario in Belichick’s universe. Moore had been a free agent, most recently with Miami. As he did with every potential pickup, O’Brien graded him according to how many kicking teams he thought he could contribute to. Meanwhile, the position coach graded him on strictly defensive criteria. Then Belichick and I assigned a grade that was based on projected overall contribution for the upcoming season and the one after. We also built a specific plan for growing Moore into a four-down guy, which included one of O’Brien’s assistants, Kevin Spencer, teaching him—along with a promising group of 10 or 12 others—the rest of the playbook. Moore eventually was a starting strong safety for us, but he never stopped being an excellent special teams player.
We had to coach up Moore to make him the player he would become, but we never had any doubt that he was a Belichick player. Most of them scream out to you the moment you lay eyes on them. In the spring before our first draft together in 1991, Belichick and I did a one-day, three-city tour of Iowa, kind of like we were on the campaign trail for the state’s caucus. We were coming mainly for Iowa’s star running back Nick Bell. Bell was a big man—not just for a running back but for any position. The problem was, he never played as big or as tough as his size. We had an internal disagreement in the scouting department over his value and role, and this trip was meant to decide whether he would make our final draft board. When we touched down in Iowa City, we learned that Bell was not too interested in working out for us; he especially didn’t want to be timed in the 40-yard dash.
Throughout my career, I’ve found that most prospects are willing to do skill work and strength work but hate the 40, not least because they know that a bad time can offset every good time in their file. We didn’t need to time Bell—his athleticism was not an issue for us—but his lack of desire to run was telling. Unfortunately for him, it also gave us more time to interview him and assess his competitiveness.
Leaving Iowa City, we headed north, and as I drove along Highway 380, we talked about what we had just learned: (1) Bell was neither particularly physically or mentally tough, so (2) he wasn’t a good fit for our special teams. Before our car pulled into a parking spot near the University of Northern Iowa’s indoor stadium, it was decided: We would not be drafting Nick Bell.
We had only one player to work out in Cedar Rapids. That was James Jones, who—his agent Jack Worth kept telling me—was going to be the steal of the draft. Worth was selling his client, sure, but he was a good judge of talent. He scouted players himself, attending games and handpicking his client base. We were already a little intrigued; Jones was excellent on tape, dominating the competition and playing with intensity. But we needed to project his skill set to the next level. Could he play that way against pros? The workout would give us clues. As we entered the football office to meet Jones, he was waiting for us in the small reception area. A good sign. We followed Jones down to the field, where I set up our usual preworkout drill: four large circular bags laid on the ground for players to maneuver over and between. It loosens them up for the rest of the workout while allowing us to judge their quickness, balance, and athleticism. A Belichick workout never began without the bags.
Jones killed in all the drills, from the bags to position-specific tests. During those workouts, Belichick is particularly interested in a prospect’s power. We set up two cones five yards apart. Then, from a two-point stance, the player follows Belichick as he walks from one cone to the other. At some point Belichick turns parallel to the player, at which point the player is supposed to punch the coach’s chest and keep moving. This tight jab gives Belichick an idea of the prospect’s quick-strike force—and often sore ribs. On this day, Jones was Mike Tyson, delivering a blow that I thought was going to earn an eight count. When the workout was over, the guy was on our draft board and Belichick was walking a little hunched over. We drafted Jones in the third round in 1991, and he immediately became a four-down player and a hero, I suppose, to everyone in football who has ever fantasized about hitting Belichick really, really hard.
Jones clears the way for Metcalf to get to the sidelines before lugging his nearly 300-pound frame upfield to find someone else to pancake. As the return is developing, Steelers linebacker Reggie Barnes has the best shot at Metcalf. But the returner’s elite speed catapults him out of reach. The interaction lasts for only a fraction of a second, but it is a definitive justification of Belichick’s singular approach to special teams: Metcalf is a former first-round pick surrounded by blockers who double as starters, but the one guy the Steelers have asked to prevent the game-winning touchdown is Barnes, an undrafted rookie free agent thrown ont
o special teams as an afterthought, who takes a sloppy tackling angle and comes up with nothing but air.
At midfield, Metcalf cuts inside, allowing the Browns to plow a few Steelers halfway onto the Cleveland bench. Out of nowhere and maybe trying to make up for his poorly aimed punt, Royals appears in front of Metcalf. That’s when he is atomized by Jones. Somehow, Jones stays on his feet and manages to stiff-arm Steelers tight end Tim Jorden (yet another undrafted rookie free agent) before he can get a clean shot at Metcalf. At the 15, one last Steeler backup dives for Metcalf’s legs, but he is chopped down by Taylor, who has covered nearly 115 yards and blocked four different tacklers in less than 10 seconds.
Metcalf high-steps his way through the end zone, stopped by the only thing that has been able to accomplish that in the game: the bursting barricades of the infamous Cleveland Dawg Pound, its boisterous celebration seemingly slingshotting Metcalf back into the end zone, where he’s mobbed by teammates. To make this moment even more perfect—for me at least—the stadium speakers blast Springsteen’s “Born to Run.”
5
OFFENSE
FINDING THE SEAMS
If we are all thinking alike, no one is thinking.
—BILL WALSH
Bill wants a meeting.
Combine those two words—Bill and wants—and stuff happened; everyone who worked for the 49ers perked up, paying close attention to whatever came next. “Bill wants” could move mountains. “Bill wants” could make or break careers.
Just days before the critical 1987 draft, what Bill wanted was everyone on the 49ers staff crammed inside a second-floor office facility for an emergency meeting. The tiny impromptu conference room was no match for a “Bill wants” all-points bulletin. At my utterance of those two words every assistant in the building came running, which meant there weren’t nearly enough seats for everyone.
Luckily, Walsh was quick and to the point.
Bill wanted Steve Young.
We were all highly skeptical but also intrigued. A big part of Walsh’s genius was his uncanny ability to spot a quarterback in a crowd. Even from a distance and after only a few throws, he could sense immediately if a quarterback could run his offense. Guys like Walsh and Belichick are unusual this way: They can visualize how skill sets fit in their schemes in a way that both maximizes those abilities and fuels the system. Walsh was secretive about that particular gift of his; he never shared what he saw. So he seemed like a railbird at the track who could discern the best horses just by studying their gait around the paddock. It might have been footwork, a kinetically clean throwing motion, the way a quarterback carried himself in the pocket, or, more likely, some mystical balance of several QB qualities floating around in his head—but whatever it was, Walsh knew it when he saw it.
In Walsh’s first season as the head coach and GM of the 49ers, in 1979, he took a trip to UCLA to work out Olympic hurdler turned wide receiver James Owens. Owens was incredibly fast, but Walsh wanted to see if he had the other skills necessary to be an NFL receiver. He forgot one small thing, though: He needed an arm to throw to the guy. As luck would have it Notre Dame’s quarterback, Joe Montana, was working out nearby, preparing for the draft, too. Walsh asked him to stop by. I’m not exactly sure what Walsh zeroed in on that day with Montana, but after a few throws he was so focused on the quarterback that he practically forgot Owens was there. (As a talent evaluator you never want to rely on this kind of divine, or dumb, luck—accidentally borrowing a future Hall of Fame quarterback as a workout passer or, say, drafting Tom Brady in the sixth round—but you don’t want to be closed off to it, either. Heck, as great as he was and as seriously as he took his profession, Walsh wasn’t above a little scouting serendipity.)
Before the workout at UCLA began, Walsh was leaning toward drafting Stanford quarterback Steve Dils, who had played for Walsh and knew his offense inside and out. But after one or two routes at UCLA that day, Walsh knew he had found what he was looking for: his franchise quarterback.
Nearly a decade later, he needed to find another.
Prior to the 1987 draft, I traveled to Indianapolis with Walsh for the NFL Combine. Part of my duties at my first NFL stop was to caddy around Walsh’s notebooks. This was the mid-1980s, and backpacks were an accessory for Marty McFly in Back to the Future, no one else. Coach Walsh was not a backpack kind of guy, anyway. But that was okay. It meant I had a good job—lugging around a huge briefcase stuffed with his things and mine—and lots of one-on-one time with “the man.” As we entered the old Hoosier Dome that day, Walsh was in a hurry, striding with purpose toward our coaches in the stands who were there to evaluate the rookie class of quarterbacks. The whole idea of having to look for a quarterback put Walsh in a sour mood. The 1986 Niners had been injury plagued, especially at quarterback, and Walsh wasn’t sure how Montana would recover from back surgery. Walsh would never actually say it, but he sensed Montana was nearing the end.
As we hurried to our seats in the stands, Walsh stopped short and turned to stare at the field. Across the stadium a few of the rookie quarterbacks, including an unknown passer from Delaware, were already on the field working out. Walsh stood like a statue, as if he had gone into a trance. I had no idea who or what was holding his attention until he turned to me and barked, “Make sure Holmgren goes to see that quarterback throwing right now.” In one glimpse across a field, Walsh had seen a level of athleticism and timing from Rich Gannon that it would take the rest of the NFL a decade to figure out.
When I relayed the news to our quarterbacks coach, Mike Holmgren, about Bill wanting (once again, “Bill wants”) him to travel to Newark, Delaware, he was none too happy, blaming me for his itinerary, as he thought I had promoted the local boy. The charge was utterly false. Sure, as a South Jersey kid I had a fondness for all things from the Philadelphia area, but I wasn’t nearly bold enough to sell a Blue Hen quarterback to Walsh even if I wanted to. Walsh was the expert.
Holmgren did eventually go to Delaware, and he liked Gannon. But he didn’t love him (Gannon had prototype size and arm strength, but Delaware’s wing-T offense and the old Yankee Conference weren’t exactly ideal preparation for the NFL), and so Gannon was selected by the Patriots—to play defensive back. Gannon had no interest in that, and after bouncing around the league from New England to Minnesota to Washington to Kansas City, he ended up paying off with the Raiders, under Jon Gruden, who finally inserted Gannon into the scheme that perfectly fit his skills: Walsh’s West Coast offense. In 2002, Gannon was named the NFL’s MVP after leading the Raiders out of nearly a decade of mediocrity and back to the Super Bowl. I was with the Raiders staff at the time, and remembering how Walsh had spotted Gannon’s talent in an instant that day in Indiana, I couldn’t help but wonder just how many potentially great quarterbacks have wasted away in the wrong system. Would Gannon’s late-career success have happened much earlier if we had drafted him in San Francisco?
At the time, of course, Walsh really only had eyes for Steve Young.
That was the message he wanted to relay to our entire staff inside that crowded second-floor conference room. As Walsh made his announcement, the faces of the assembled football minds were those of schoolboys who had sipped sour milk. Steve Young? The running QB? Steve Young who was a disaster as the quarterback of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers? That Steve Young?
A little background: Young’s college career was sensational. After leading the Brigham Young Cougars as a senior to an 11–1 record that included an impressive win over Missouri in the Holiday Bowl, he was the consensus top quarterback in the draft. But before that could happen J. William Oldenburg bought the Los Angeles team in the upstart United States Football League and gave Young one of the biggest sports contracts ever to lead it. (The four-year deal negotiated by Young’s agent, Leigh Steinberg, appeared to be worth $40 million.) But then the league folded and Young signed with the Bucs, who selected him with the first pick in the 1984
supplemental draft of USFL talent. In two years in Tampa, though, Young displayed better running skills than passing skills, and the Bucs had seen enough to decide it was time to try someone new.
That meant Young would be a relatively cheap pickup (essentially costing a second rounder and a fourth rounder plus some of owner Edward DeBartolo Jr.’s hard-earned cash). Yes, the former most-sought-after player in football was on the bargain rack, mainly because every other “expert” in the league felt he would never fit the traditional role. That included 99 percent of our staff. Now that Young is in Canton, there’s a lot of revisionist history about how he came to be a 49er. For starters, Walsh has said that once he informed DeBartolo about Young, the deal was done in “minutes.” The truth is that he labored over the decision. In fact, he eventually held that emergency meeting to get his staff’s opinion on the trade. And though lots of people will claim they knew all along that Young was destined for greatness in the NFL, I’m here to tell you that when Walsh asked for a show of hands of those who supported making the deal, none went up.
Gridiron Genius Page 12