I admit that I was fascinated by Manziel despite his lack of height and loved how Garoppolo dominated his level of competition. (That might not have swayed Al Davis, but it was enough for me.) Manziel had a boatload of off-the-field issues that we had to research to separate fact from fiction. Garoppolo stood out in almost every area, but spending time with him would help us determine whether he could duplicate his skill set at this level and grow in our offense. One directive Belichick kept pounding into us was that we were not looking to duplicate Brady; whoever we drafted, the offense would have to do some adapting to his strengths. (Spoken like a true Walsh devotee.) That is not to suggest that we would overhaul the offense, but once we understood the new guy’s strengths, we would feature plays and wrinkles to highlight them. When Brady took over for Drew Bledsoe, the Patriots tweaked the offense by making it slightly less vertical, increasing the focus on timing routes and the tight end as a weapon. When big play wide receiver Randy Moss arrived, the Patriots tweaked their attack once more to take advantage of his incredible speed and downfield threat. Belichick might not be much for change, but he’s a big believer in adaptation.
When potential draft picks come to New England for a visit, it is not a recruiting trip. Belichick has zero interest in being a salesman for the program. His just wants to find the truth about each player. Players meet with all divisions of the football operation, then sit alone with McDaniels as they watch tape. At some point they have to explain the plays they are watching and then learn some basics of our playbook. After lunch the players are put through a walk-through of the plays they learned. Once this is over, they meet with Belichick, who, like any great trial lawyer, has all the answers to the questions before he asks them.
After Manziel and Garoppolo headed to their next NFL destinations, Belichick held a meeting to review the day. All the coaches in the session felt that both men passed muster as far as being able to learn the offense and not being overwhelmed by their potential proximity to a legend.
But Manziel had those issues that would not be cleared in a one-day visit.
Garoppolo, in contrast, just had it. I swear he seemed like the living embodiment of my 7 QB Qualities. And after we selected him in the second round, it became clear that everything we thought about him was dead-on. There was a quiet confidence in whatever he did. He was a great worker, his football smarts were off the charts, and he carried himself like a leader at all times. (Was he throwing spirals from the crib? Probably.) He quickly bonded with the offensive linemen and was respectful toward Brady even as he competed to win a spot as his backup. For someone who has studied quarterback prospects for 30 years—how to find them, evaluate them, and develop them—it was a very exciting and interesting time.
Everything just felt right. Everything except the timing, it turns out.
More on that in Chapter 9, but I will say this: Watching Garoppolo’s style and mannerisms, Walsh would have wanted this kid, and remember—spoiler alert—whatever Bill wants, Bill gets.
6
DEFENSE
WHERE SIMPLICITY IS COMPLEX
Times were simpler, defenses didn’t move as fast, and the quarterback was often the best athlete. Now he’s being chased by the best athletes.
—BILL WALSH
You know that game people play where they name their dream dinner companions? In the spring of 2016, I actually got to live one of mine. Before the draft that year, Bill Belichick and I traveled to the University of Alabama to evaluate the school’s talent at its annual Pro Day. There we also caught up with Nick Saban, a friend of mine, who was the defensive coordinator on the Cleveland Browns staff and a friend of Bill’s even before that. When the Crimson Tide’s Pro Day was over, the three of us headed to Saban’s house near campus for dinner and conversation about—what else?—football. Whenever I finish a lengthy phone call with Belichick, my wife, Millie, always asks me, “Do you two talk about anything other than football?” The answer, of course, is no. Hey, you talk about what you love, and we love football. The only other person I know who loves to chat about the gridiron as much as we do is Saban. As we left campus, he informed us that his wife, Ms. Terry, was not going to be home. That meant the three of us football nerds didn’t even have to pretend to be interested in anything but ball.
We practically raced to Saban’s house. It was going to be a real man-cave dinner with a single course: defense.
Imagine my luck that evening: being a fly on the wall at a long and uninterrupted dinner with perhaps the two greatest football coaches in history, men who have enjoyed a long, symbiotic, and successful history of pushing and challenging each other to perfect their sometimes disparate defensive styles and philosophies.
Even before they were together in Cleveland, Belichick and Saban would meet at West Point or at points along the road to discuss different ways to create the all-important pass rush. Saban and Belichick agreed that pressuring the quarterback was the best way to slow down any aerial attack in the pass-happy era. They just didn’t quite agree on how to accomplish it. On this matter, Belichick offered a staunch conservative counterpoint to Saban’s screamingly liberal all-out-pressure-on-every-down-and-from-everywhere approach. But each saw the merits of the other’s position, and ultimately neither was above borrowing a little from the other and blending it into his own philosophy.
When they reconnected for dinner in Alabama, the timing couldn’t have been better. Saban had just defeated the high-powered Clemson offense for the national championship, although the Tigers, led by Deshaun Watson, put 40 points on the famed Crimson Tide defense. It sounds incredible, but despite the win Saban was still fuming over that defensive performance. As I said, sometimes these guys seem like twins. For both of them, their moods are never a reflection of the score—it’s about the execution. And Saban is far too savvy to pretend that his team wasn’t lucky to prevail.
Clemson ran over and through Saban’s defense by using the spread attack that has been popular in the college game for some time. What made the dinner conversation so intriguing to Belichick was that the up-tempo spread was becoming increasingly commonplace in the NFL as well, ever since Chip Kelly, late of the Oregon Ducks, had brought his version to the Philadelphia Eagles a few years earlier. Belichick could not have cared less about the menu that night or Saban’s spectacular home. He wanted to pick Nick’s brain about stopping the game’s newest offensive wrinkle.
The NFL has a version of the run-pass option: Two plays are called in the huddle—one run, one pass—and the quarterback determines which to go with once he gets to the line and peruses the defensive formation. In college, though, the run-pass option adds a wrinkle, the spread formations from which teams either hand off the ball or fake the handoff and throw a pass. They can do this because unlike in the NFL, college offensive linemen can be as much as three yards downfield, which means they can always block as if for a run play—regardless of whether the offense ends up throwing a pass. In professional football, it’s illegal for linemen to be so far downfield, and anyway, most, if not all, teams would be reluctant to run the option this way for fear of getting their quarterback clobbered.
Nevertheless, Belichick was eager to understand how Saban planned his counterattack. Between bites, Saban went into all of it in depth. Trying not to sound like too much of a fanboy, I have to say that his discourse was amazing: not just the scheme but the way he could make even the most complicated pieces of this puzzle seem simple and easy to digest. Belichick wasn’t particularly interested in the micro, the countless adjustments to each of the calls. What he wanted to hear more about was Saban’s broad philosophy. Belichick would figure out the particulars himself.
That was how they always did things when they worked together.
In 1991, when Belichick became the head coach in Cleveland, he inherited a team that allowed 462 points (28.8 points per game). In just one year, he and Saban dropped that nu
mber to 298. And in 1994, the last time Cleveland won a playoff game, the Belichick/Saban defense gave up just 204 points (12.7 per game). They did it with a defense they invented called Red 2.
Red 2, which is often credited to Saban but was truthfully a joint creation, was a “match coverage.” Depending on the pass routes, receivers would be defended man to man or passed off as they crossed into and through different areas of the field. Essentially, it was football’s version of a matchup zone in basketball, and it was used mainly when football offenses were in the red zone. It had different rules and guiding principles than a typical Cover 2 because it defended a more contracted space, and it was hard for the players to understand at first. In fact, my colleagues got sick of me walking around the office saying that learning Red 2 could double as the entrance exam for Harvard. But before long it became clear that Red 2 was a keeper.
In the Red 2, a corner was responsible for carrying a receiver for a distance before passing him to a safety and waiting for another receiver to enter his area and become his responsibility. What made the Red 2 so hard to learn—but nearly impossible to game-plan against—was that each week it could be tailored specifically to the opponent’s passing designs. One week the corner might carry a receiver for 10 yards through his “zone,” and the next week he might cover him for just 8. Depending on any number of factors—matchups, scores, personnel, speed, injuries—the parameters could and often would change. It was taxing on the brain but very effective on the field.
That night he boiled it down for us to a single tenet: More than anything, the goal was to make sure that the “run force” player (the defender who “forced” a rushing play in a certain direction) was never compromised. Setting an edge to contain an outside run and redirecting it inside toward the teeth of the defense had to be that defender’s primary focus, so much so that he needed to be free of the responsibility of handling pass plays, too. Whatever adjustments or sacrifices needed to occur in coverage schemes to make that happen, well, they just had to get done.
Between courses, Belichick peppered Saban with so many questions—“If they double your defensive end, then what?” and “What do you do if the quarterback steps up in the pocket?” and “Could a screen work if you threw it over the end?”—that we were dishing out dessert before I knew it.
Looking back, my dream dinner had little to do with the food and everything to do with the high-level theoretical conversation. The meal was tasty, yes, but the seminar offered by two of the greatest football minds ever was much more filling and fulfilling.
And it inspired me to create my own philosophy about the 11 essential rules of good defense.
Bon appetit.
1. THE DISGUISE IS AS IMPORTANT AS THE DEFENSE
In the movie The Usual Suspects, the small-time con artist with cerebral palsy, Roger “Verbal” Kint, regales U.S. customs agent Dave Kujan with tales of an elaborate heist scheme and a mysterious man named Keyser Söze. Verbal’s grand story about the villainous, enigmatic Söze includes one of the most classic movie quotes of all time: “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist” (which—fun fact—is actually a rephrasing of a line from the nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire).
When it comes to disguising defenses, Belichick is the NFL’s version of Keyser Söze, without the murderous impulses, of course. At his peak as a defensive coordinator in the mid-1980s, with everyone watching and trying to reverse engineer his schemes, the tight-lipped Belichick convinced everyone that the New York Giants’ defense was nothing more than a 3-4 Cover 2, with no complexity to it. He convinced the football world that the important wrinkles in his attack didn’t exist by aligning in the same front and showing the same coverage look on every play. Most teams vary their fronts and coverage shells on first and second down to confuse the opposing quarterback. Not Belichick. He brings a level of confusion and disguise after every snap that keeps most quarterbacks up at night.
Belichick kept up the Keyser Söze act even with his friends and colleagues. When I asked about disguising his defense in 1991, he told me that, in fact, the 3-4 Cover 2 was his only call. He wasn’t lying, but in what some might consider classic Belichick fashion, he wasn’t being entirely truthful, either. Yes, the call was 3-4 Cover 2, but what the defense did out of it depended on the strengths and weaknesses of the particular opponent, not just from week to week but from play to play. For example, just before the snap on an obvious passing down in Belichick’s base 3-4, it might look like the outside linebacker was lined up to rush the edge, but a split second after the snap Belichick would drop the outside backer into coverage and blitz the inside backer through the interior line—all because the last-second switch created a better matchup with a lesser blocker. On the next play, he might slant his entire defensive front to the strong side to combat a strong side run team. The layers of complexities were subtle and the modifications slight, but they allowed Belichick to use what seemed like 35 custom defenses in a single game, which shifted the tactical advantage to his team’s side. Anyone who wanted to believe the tweaks didn’t exist was making a huge mistake, just like the saps in The Usual Suspects.
Belichick’s simplicity-first ruse on defense was inspired by Washington Redskins Hall of Fame head coach Joe Gibbs. Gibbs was a masterful offensive tactician, with a scheme that featured a power running game that won three Super Bowls under three different quarterbacks, none of whom are household names. (Think about that next time you’re engaged in one of those best-football-coaches-of-all-time debates.) His offense appeared complex on first glance, but when Belichick broke it down, he found that it all could be reduced to 13 base plays (3 runs, 10 passes). Gibbs believed, as Belichick does, that repetition breeds execution. All those basic Redskins plays, however, were executed out of (and disguised by) myriad formations, looks, shifts, and personnel groupings that turned 13 vanilla plays into 130 complicated and mysterious plays. For the quarterback, though, no matter what went on before the snap, by the time he dropped back to pass, all the routes in front of him looked just like they always did. Similarly, by the time the ball was in the running back’s hands, the blocking scheme and running lanes before him looked exactly the same. Gibb’s playbook had 13 pages. Everything else was window dressing used to keep defenses in the dark and on their heels, constantly worried that the devil they didn’t think existed was actually playing tricks on them.
Before he became a head coach, remember, Belichick competed against Gibbs twice a year as the Giants’ defensive coordinator, and what he saw in that camouflaged offense had a major impact on him. On his first day as a head coach, in fact, Belichick walked into the Browns’ headquarters and declared that we would adopt the Skins model: core plays disguised with various looks and personnel groups to create confusion.
New plays don’t win consistently, he preached; using old plays in new ways does.
2. STUDYING AN OFFENSE IS THE FIRST STEP TOWARD STOPPING IT
Battles on the gridiron are much like battles on a chessboard. In each case, grandmasters know their opponent’s tendencies and spend time studying games played in styles reminiscent of their own. When Belichick sits down to study an offense, he doesn’t read the press clippings or fixate on the win-loss record. Instead, he watches tape of teams that play a scheme similar to his own base scheme to learn how his upcoming opponent attacked it. Knowing the opponent’s offensive or defensive coordinator is critical, too, so he maintains a thick file on all the men holding those jobs. The more he knows about them, the better he can anticipate what they’ll do in key game situations. When Belichick arrived in Cleveland and I was the pro personnel advance man, we would meet each week to discuss the next opponent, and those meetings began with a debrief about the coordinators. From background to football influences and finally to recent games, he wanted to know as much about the coaches as he did the players because, like chess champion Bobby Fischer, he wanted
to know how he was going to be attacked.
The movie A Beautiful Mind was based on the life of another troubled genius, John Nash, the renowned mathematician who made fundamental contributions to game theory and the study of partial differential equations. (Yeah, me neither.) In the film, Nash’s office shows a desk covered with papers and drawings and a blackboard filled with all sorts of equations and no more room to write. Maybe all geniuses think and work alike, but I swear, Belichick’s office looks just like Nash’s. The coach’s conference table was always covered in stacks of paper—or as we all called them, “the pads.” The pads are Belichick’s version of Warren Buffett’s massive in-depth preinvestment research, the due diligence required to make a correct evaluation of a company, though in this case the company is an opposing team. To “own” an offense, first you have to know how it works. But incredibly, most teams misidentify what opponents do best because they don’t spend enough time studying them.
Every week defensive coaches around the NFL talk about “stopping the run.” But which run? From what formation and toward what direction? And even if you do go deep enough with your analysis, that’s only half the work. Now you have figure out the right way to counter. Say they love to run left. Do you match your primary run defender against their best blocker—like against like—or do you try to free him? Nor is the answer to simply show an eight-man front. If that idea worked all the time, no team would ever gain a yard on the ground. In fact, general solutions often create more problems. No, it’s never as simple as “stop the run.”
Gridiron Genius Page 15