Inside the Game

Ron Jaworski, The Games That Changed the Game: The Evolution of the NFL in Seven Sundays (link)


Tim Layden, Blood, Sweat, and Chalk - The Ultimate Football Playbook: How the Great Coaches Built Today's Game (link)

"I don't mean this disrespectfully," says Ron Jaworski, "but even the most dedicated fan could never understand football at the same level as the players and coaches who make their living at it.  It's simply impossible."  Nonetheless, his new book aims to narrow the gap.  It illustrates the evolution of modern football through a close analysis of seven games - starting with the San Diego Chargers' 1964 AFL Championship victory over the Patriots, and finishing symmetrically with the Patriots' 2002 Super Bowl upset of the St. Louis Rams.  

Jaworski is particularly well-qualified for this job.  He played the game, and he writes from a player's perspective.  But it is his work since he retired from football that makes the difference here.  His endless film study and dozens of interviews with key figures have enabled him to develop a richer understanding of this material than almost any other journalist (he is a journalist now).  I've read perhaps a half dozen articles on the Cover-Two defense, and none compares with Jaworski's detailed and thoughtful presentation here.  Many people don't understand, he explains, that it is particularly effective against the run:

Before Carson, most secondary run support came from the safeties, but that changed in Cover-Two.  The rolled-up corners made this scheme very effective if the offense ran the ball wide, because tight-covering defensive backs could take away plays designed to bounce to the outside.

Then there is the film study.  Jaworski reviews not just the broadcast tv tapes of the games, but the "real" film, the "All-22" coaching tapes.  We learn that Mean Joe Greene experimented with his disruptive gap offset alignment - the catalyst for the Steelers' feared "Stunt 4-3" set - in November of 1974, even though the Steelers say it was later than that.  The Steelers will need to issue a correction:  Jaworski has it on film.

We also benefit from Jaworski's ability to reach out directly to many of the participants in the games he is analyzing.  Tom Flores, on the impact of Kellen Winslow:

The NFL is a copycat league, and people would say, 'Did you see that?  Maybe there's a way our guy can do that too.'  Then I'd say, 'We don't have that guy!'  We did have Raymond Chester, who was more of a power-type tight end who'd block your head off, then catch the ball downfield, and outrace you to the end zone.  Nowadays you see more tight ends like Winslow and fewer like Chester.

Working through Jaworski's book it becomes apparent that, back in the old days, no one ever schemed their way to the NFL championship.  His illustrative game for Air Coryell is not a blowout, it's an overtime squeaker against the Raiders - a group of very talented individuals playing a few basic defenses.  In his introduction Jaworski says:

I've seen teams that can play the most primitive football and be very successful doing it.  Why?  Because their personnel is better...  But overall, today's teams are more competitively balanced...  And because the talent differential is so razor thin, most successful clubs have to work hard to develop schemes that give them the advantage.

Well, yes and no.  Pittsburg's Steel Curtain ended the Raiders' AFC dominance, and it certainly was an extraordinary group of individuals, the incredibly gifted Jack Lambert in particular.  But it was also based on a demanding defensive scheme.  Bill Belichick says "that was a very sophisticated and difficult defense.  There was no way you could just run it unless you really knew what you were doing."  Cavemen can't play Cover-Two.  Lambert was to Butkus as a cruise missile is to a IED (watch this).


Lambert's responsibility:  the entire middle of the football field

 


Jaworski:  "in 1976 the Steelers ran off a string of nine straight regular-season wins.  During that streak they allowed the opposition only 28 points..."  But it was too good to last - the League introduced rules to limit chucking of receivers downfield (the "Mel Blount Rule").  That de-fanged the Pittsburg Cover-Two, and the gates were open for Air Coryell and the West Coast Offense.

The lesson I take from Jaworski's book is that victory in the modern NFL is the product of a labor-intensive search for small advantages.  Although it is about schemes and game planning, it is apparent from his narrative that - as in war - no plan survives contact with the enemy.  Once we are in-game, a seemingly endless series of adjustments and counter-adjustments takes over. 

But this is only possible when coaches and players are operating at the highest level.  Schemes really can be decisive at lower levels, a point abundantly illustrated by Frank Layden's excellent Blood, Sweat, and Chalk, which came out in May of this year. 

Layden cannot match Jaworski's professional experience or technical expertise, but his book is no less a labor of love.  He interviewed 145 people and worked on it until his family openly wondered if it would ever be finished.  Where Jaworski's tome is organized around games and game plans, Layden's is based on 22 individual plays. 



This gives Layden considerably greater scope.  He can explore the evolution of a particular play - say, the Bubble Screen - as it moves from Granada Hills High School to San Jose State University to the Miami Hurricanes to Purdue's 2001 Rose Bowl victory (winning quarterback:  Drew Brees).  The Rams are trying to learn it now (skip to 1:22), although teams at other levels have mastered it.

It emerges from Layden's book that high school and college coaches have a remarkably open culture.  When one team innovates successfully, other coaching staffs may come to visit, and will usually be welcomed as they try to learn the new system.  Layden calls it "football socialism."

I was surprised to hear this, but as you think about it makes sense.  Coaches need each other.  They know they're expendable.  Universities, alumnae, pro owners - none has the slightest loyalty to a losing coach.  And every coach is going to be a loser at some point.  Even Bear Bryant had his moment of humility:

[I]n '68, '69 and '70 Alabama lost a total of 13 games, with back-to-back five-loss seasons. It appeared there was no magic left in Bryant's houndstooth hat, and surely none in the pro-style passing game that was operated by his quarterback Scott Hunter. Bryant called [Darrell] Royal and asked for help.  Royal and [Emory] Bellard went to Tuscaloosa and holed up with Bryant and his staff in a hotel room, teaching the wishbone. The tutoring session lasted for four days. In the ensuing '71 season, Alabama went 11-1.

The wishbone was perhaps the most extreme case.  "Around our offices during spring training, you couldn't swing a stick without hitting half a dozen coaches," says Bellard.  "It was just unreal."  (If you want to try it yourself, his book is here.)

In high school and college, a good scheme can make up for significant shortfalls in human capital.  In fact, some of the most important systems were devised to deal with personnel issues.  The Spread offense, invented by Tiger Ellison (link - have your wallet ready) and popularized by Mouse Davis, was originally designed to use people who wouldn't be considered top-class football players elsewhere.  Davis said:

Little pissants.  At Milwaukie in 1962 I had a lot of good players, but they weren't big, physical players.  That's the case at a lot of high schools.  More of your good athletes are little pissants.  Good athletes, but small...  And I was a little pissant.  So my attitude was, you take the little guys and put them out in space and they're pretty good.  You put 'em in a slug-it-out kind of game, they're pretty average.  So we were putting them out in space.

It went from high school to college, to the pros (where Warren Moon posted back-to-back 4000 yard seasons with it), and back to college again.  Long after the death of the Wishbone, Texas climbed to the summit again, with Vince Young running an offense designed for "little pissants."

Layden set out to write a book about the plays, but he has really ended up with a book about the coaches.  It is full of passages like:

On a summer evening in 1989 he was sitting in his apartment in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, watching NFL videotapes with other Iowa Wesleyan assistant coaches.  Leach became obsessed with the 49ers' "smash" route, a high-low horizontal pass pattern in which two receivers essentially try to confuse a cornerback, and the quarterback reacts to the confusion.  Leach wanted to know what the indicators are for reading the play, so he jumped in his car and drove six hours to a Packers minicamp in Green Bay where he knew the offensive staff were keen to those routes...  "I was a young coach and I was excited about this stuff.  Eighty-nine, that was the summer of love for the spread offense."

Well, if these books are any indication, the summer of love never ended.  Football is an obsession, and for the highest level practitioners it is a nearly complete substitute for life itself.  It engages the mind as fully as chess or nuclear physics.  And right now, somewhere, an assistant coach is watching film and thinking - what would happen if we...?

[UPDATE:  A free excerpt from Layden's book, on Buddy Ryan's 4-6 defense, is here.]