Gridiron Genius

by Michael Lombardi

  When offensive coordinators call a play that results in a touchdown or a long gain, we compliment the “great call.” When a defensive coordinator calls a blitz that sacks the quarterback, we often just move on to the next down. But the particular details and timing of the call deserve our praise, too. Specific blitzes attack weaknesses in protection, and that means that defenses have to understand what those protections are trying to do and when the best time to attack them would be.

  The thing is, most of the time coaches don’t have a good enough grasp of those particulars, and so they can’t be strategic about their blitz calls. They just blindly send as many guys at the quarterback as they can and hope for the best. In that sense, Lombardi was right: Random blitzes are a sign of weakness. But well-designed strategic blitzes most definitely are not.

  Al Davis was also not a big believer in total pressure. He saw blitzing the way Lombardi did, as an admission of some inadequacy. In fact, he had a steadfast edict for all his defensive coordinators: Never leave the middle of the field open. And that contained an implicit corollary: no all-out pressures. It was Raider Law. That’s not to say that Davis forbade his defense to blitz; they just had to be sure to leave the free safety in the middle of the field when they did. Davis had reasons for his mandate, particularly his second rule of defense: no big plays. He felt a man in the middle of the field was an important last line of defense against big plays. Not surprisingly, though, his no-all-out-blitz decree handcuffed his defensive coaches and drove them all crazy. To them it felt like an impossible-to-overcome handicap. Every Raiders opponent knew of Davis’s no-all-out-blitz rule, and that meant that they didn’t need to prepare for that type of pressure.

  In 1955, the legendary Paul Brown predicted that as quarterbacks became more mobile and accurate, sending extra men to pressure the passer would become a necessary evil. Writing for Collier’s magazine, Brown stated: “The great quarterbacks in future years will have to run as well as pass to survive pro lines, which seem to get rougher and faster every season. The defense places a greater emphasis on rushing the passer….The new development in pro football, therefore, will have to be the running quarterback.” The guy knew what he was talking about. But his crystal-ball certainty depended on a game in which the value of defensive linemen never wavered.

  To this day there is nothing more powerful than a defense that can bring adequate pressure with a four-man front. When you can create pressure with just four players, that means you can flood passing zones with the remaining seven defenders, which makes a quarterback feel like he’s facing a 13-man defense. It’s such a powerful advantage that it tends to create nickname-worthy defenses such as the Fearsome Foursome of the Los Angeles Rams, the Steel Curtain in Pittsburgh, and Dallas’s Doomsday Defense. Today, though, the economics of the game (salary cap and free agency) make it hard to afford four top-flight rushers on one roster, and that’s why blitzing has become a difference maker. Only now the goal of blitz pressure isn’t to sack the quarterback; it’s to make him throw the ball prematurely and under duress. Forcing a quarterback to throw the ball “hot” is a huge win for the defense, especially on third down, because it will force a receiver to catch the ball short of the sticks and get the defense off the field.

  In today’s pass-first football, pressure matters more than sacks do, as long as it’s strategic. What does it mean to be strategic with pressure? Simply put, it means to run the blitz that will attack the pass protection most effectively and give you the greatest chance to get a defender to the passer unblocked. Of course, that’s not simple at all. And it begins with understanding how the offense intends to protect the passer. What good is a pass-rush stunt blitz, after all, if the defensive end who is looping runs into an offensive tackle–tight end double-team block that is just waiting for him?

  On TV you can hear the sideline microphones pick up a quarterback in passing situations screaming at his line, making sure they know where the Mike backer is. That’s because most pass protections designate a specific player—the running back or one of the linemen—to block the blitzer. The “point out” isolates the focal point of the defense, and all blocking schemes and responsibilities stem from that identification. Who picks up the blitz changes with the protection scheme, keeping the defense from knowing who it needs to worry about—for example, whether or not the tight end is participating in protection, too. All this means that the defense has a lot to decipher before it can choose a blitz with confidence. And choosing the correct blitz is only half of it. The defense needs to call it at a time that maximizes its chance of success. Play callers never get enough credit for making the correct call on the correct down on either side of the ball. Knowing “when” is a product of lots of film study.

  One way to be strategic with pressure is to save something for the second half of the game. In Cleveland, we once faced a team whose offensive line coach wasn’t all that adept at in-game adjustments. The line coach was a former player, a good old boy, and the players fought hard for him, but he was not the quickest thinker. During the week, when he had time to review blitzes on film and work the problem in his own time, he figured out how to have his team ready for Sunday. But during a game he was at a disadvantage, so Belichick saved some calls for critical moments later in the game when the guy had no time to whip up a counter.

  Bill Walsh loved putting all-out pressure on the quarterback, but mostly because it was a sign his game plan had gone well. He counted on his team getting a lead that would force opponents into playing catch-up through the air, leaving them vulnerable to defensive pressure. During my first year in the league, Fred Dean, our best pass rusher, held out for more money. Ray Rhodes, the secondary coach and one of my early defensive teachers, kept saying that we needed Dean back in the lineup to get interceptions. No, the 230-pound future Hall of Famer wasn’t being switched to safety. (Although I would have liked to see that.) Ray Bob—that was Rhodes’s nickname—explained that although Dean’s sacks were important, they weren’t nearly as disruptive as the constant pressure he brought even when he didn’t get to the quarterback. Time your blitzes for maximum impact while keeping a quarterback under constant pressure, and sooner or later he’ll crack.

  9. ELIMINATE FOUR-POINT PLAYS

  All third downs are not alike. A third down when you’re backed up in your own territory is more important than a third down at midfield, because if you fail to convert, your opponent will have excellent field position. The leg strength of most of today’s placekickers means there is a possibility of putting up points without the offense having to move the ball much. In fact, analytics will tell you that the outcome of a third down in the red zone can swing the score by four points, and you don’t have to be a math whiz to see how. If a team holds an opponent on third down in the red zone, it takes the prospect of a touchdown largely off the table, leaving the offense to settle for three—a difference of four points. That’s huge. Most NFL games are decided by a lot less than four points, yet most teams defend all third downs the same way.

  The “high” red zone begins at the 30-yard line, the border at which a field goal seems likely for today’s kickers. From there, offenses are attacking on what is essentially a 40-yard field (30 yards plus 10 yards of the end zone). This smaller field tends to limit the number of offensive plays a team can call, because you cannot stretch the defense or clear out zones, and that in turn shrinks the windows a quarterback can throw into and forces him to elevate his accuracy. A smaller field favors the defense—less ground to defend—especially if it tackles well and doesn’t allow yards after the catch or contact.

  Playing defense in the middle of a regular field means having to defend length and width, whereas a defense in the red zone gets to focus more on width than on length. A throw to the back of the end zone has to be perfect; a receiver doesn’t have room to run under the catch. The back line is a defensive coach’s accomplice. Therefore, the trend today in the
NFL is for teams to play more zone in the red zone, drop eight men into coverage, and let the offense wear itself out looking for a knockout punch. It’s like the Muhammad Ali tactic—you know, the rope-a-dope he used against George Foreman in Zaire. “Force them to take small, harmless gains in the red zone,” Belichick often told his defense, “and they will get impatient and make a mistake.” Then we counterpunch.

  In 1991 Belichick transformed the Browns’ defense from one of the worst in the league to one in its top half with a slight talent improvement but a much greater emphasis on red zone third-down execution. By 1994, Belichick realized that four-point plays—stopping opponents on third down in the red zone and preventing field goals from turning into touchdowns—often came down to keeping a quarterback in the pocket.

  Quarterback movement is a killer for a third-down defense because once the guy gets out of the pocket, all hell breaks loose. Think back to when you played touch football in the backyard. If you are covering a receiver, once the pass rusher yells his fifth Mississippi, the play becomes something else entirely. The quarterback scrambles, the receivers break their routes to get open, and chaos reigns. In the NFL, because teams often use eight men in coverage, that chaos can be epic. Zones break down into man to man, defenders have to chase down a scrambling quarterback, and holes open everywhere.

  In a four-point-play situation, the goal is to not let the quarterback break the pocket. And that demands that defensive linemen attack as they would, say, a field goal—down the middle and always in front of the passer, keeping his sight lines narrow and his escape routes few. If the defense can build an umbrella around the quarterback, he cannot escape. Keeping a quarterback from running is not luck—it’s planned. Too many linemen run up the field, using swim moves to get by offensive linemen, creating space between themselves and other defensive attackers. But that space is an escape route for the quarterback. When the quarterback, afforded space, throws a touchdown from outside the pocket, the lineman walks off the field telling everyone, “I almost had him.” “Almost”s don’t make it onto the stat sheet for a reason.

  This is why in Belichick’s scheme, defensive ends don’t have nearly as much freedom as they would like in any part of the field but especially in the red zone. In fact, ends who arrive in New England after playing for other teams have been known to complain about not being allowed to attack. But they learn soon enough that this kind of rush creates more problems than solutions.

  Compounding the drama, the battleground is at its most intense on third down because the offense knows it needs to succeed to keep the ball and thus will do whatever it takes to extend the play. Most quarterbacks run only when it matters, and red zone third downs matter most, particularly in a situation when the difference can be four points and probably the game. Letting a quarterback convert a third down in the red zone with his feet absolutely breaks a defense’s back.

  In Super Bowl XLIX, Russell Wilson presented a unique problem that required a foolproof rush plan for the Patriots. Stopping Seattle on offense was mainly about stopping Wilson from moving around in the pocket. We were more worried about his feet than about his arm, and more worried about him in the red zone than in the middle of the field. Only two Seahawks had more than one rushing touchdown that season: Marshawn Lynch, the star running back, who had 13, and Wilson, who had 6. Stopping Lynch from running the ball in the red zone would be difficult, but at least we knew what he would do: run. Wilson, in contrast, could feign like he was going to run and then throw a pass. Wilson isn’t tall (forget what the program says; he’s slightly under six feet), so he has a hard time seeing over the linemen. That means he needs to move left or right to find windows in the rush that afford him a view down the field. He does this with great success; his hit chart—a plotting of where he throws from—indicates that he is actually better when defensive pressure forces him from the pocket. If you want to handle Wilson, you better know what you want to accomplish with your pass rush.

  To use a basketball metaphor, in Super Bowl XLIX the Patriots’ rush plan was to stop Wilson by getting their defensive linemen “in the paint,” or within one yard of and directly in front of the quarterback. That prevented him from stepping forward and seeing downfield. All quarterbacks hate dealing with someone in their face. They can deal with pass rushers running at them from the sides because they have room to step up and away. At the same time, from the defense’s standpoint, the worst place for any defender to be is two yards past the quarterback. You just rushed yourself right out of the play. Now it’s 10 on 11. Against Wilson, Belichick had his defensive ends play down the middle, inside the offensive tackles, forcing the quarterback to step into the paint, where our defensive tackles were waiting. Wilson finished the Super Bowl with just 12 completions, a manageable 39 yards rushing, and zero four-point plays.

  10. GAMES ARE WON OR LOST IN THE FINAL FOUR MINUTES—OF THE FIRST HALF

  To this day, when the Patriots win a coin toss, they often defer possession to the second half. The choice goes against conventional wisdom and usually is dismissed as nothing more than a Belichick quirk, but in fact, it’s a pretty ingenious tactical maneuver. All those years of facing Peyton Manning taught Belichick a great deal, but most specifically they taught him that the best plan on defense is to keep the offense on the bench. Forget blitzes, timing, and defensive disguises; the simple truth is that Manning was never less dangerous than when he was standing next to his coach, Tony Dungy.

  Over time, Belichick actually built an entire game management theory around this simple realization. If the Patriots could manage a drive at the end of the first half and another at the beginning of the second, that would keep the opposing offense off the field for almost an hour of real time. For a guy like Manning, that’s an eternity. No offense, no points. No plays, no rhythm. When Manning does finally get back in the game, he and his offense have lost their edge.

  Beyond that, Belichick’s tactic usually tips the number of total possessions in the Patriots’ favor. In chess, the player with the white pieces goes first, and that extra move often gives him or her a slightly better chance to win the game. Belichick’s coin-toss trick does the same thing in football, in which both teams usually end up with the same number (12) of possessions.

  On the road, there’s a third benefit to deferring after winning the toss: It outlasts the crowd. (This is Belichick’s genius in a nutshell. He’s taken something as simple as the coin toss, something 99 percent of coaches don’t even think about, and found a way to extract considerable extra value from it.) At the start of the game, home fans are riled and loud. An away team that elects to receive has to deal with the crowd at its most rested and clear-throated. It’s a recipe for going three and out without even being able to hear the play calls. In other words, a precious series of downs has been squandered. At the start of the second half, though, the stadium has a different feel. Fans are still in the bathroom or on the concession lines, and the stands are half empty; it’s certainly not as intimidating as it is at the beginning. Visitors who have deferred receiving the kickoff don’t have to contend with a wall of noise and thus are better able to get into a rhythm before the fans are back in their seats.

  But the thing is that Belichick’s tactic pays off only if the receiving team in the second half ends the first half with the ball. Too few teams play defense in the final minutes of the half with that in mind. How often have you cursed your favorite team when it goes into its prevent defense, willing to sacrifice yards for points, as the half winds down? Better question: How often have those curses turned into murderous rage when those “meaningless” yards turn into very real points? Far too often, right? Well, that’s because the best four-minute defense is not a prevent defense. It is a defense that fights to get the ball back for the offense.

  To do that, defenses need to use a weapon most people see only as an offensive advantage: time-outs. (When Belichick deploys the tactic, it
doubles as a disruptive influence as well.) Teams that play the Patriots know that if they don’t run the clock out and New England gets the ball back with more than a few seconds on the clock, the Patriots are capable of cashing in because no one runs the hurry-up better and their kicker can hit from the parking lot.

  In basketball, coaches talk all the time about closing out quarters, but in football, the concept doesn’t garner much attention. Except from Belichick, who sees it is an opportunity to take over the game. For starters, by the time there’s four minutes left in the half, he expects his defense to know the offense’s game plan inside and out. If they don’t, he is there to remind them. Over the headsets, Belichick will say things like “This is a Landry game” when the Patriots are playing the Dolphins and he suspects that wide receiver Jarvis Landry will be the focal point. The ends of the halves are when those talented players rear their heads. For another thing, he knows that most offenses wait to take advantage of the way teams simplify their defensive calls in two-minute drills. He, of course, does the opposite. Meanwhile, at the end of the half, offenses looking to move downfield quickly think pass first and foremost. And when an offense becomes one-dimensional, it’s advantage defense.

  When Belichick tells his team that games are won and lost in the final four minutes—and trust me, he does that a lot—he often means the first half more than the second.