by Mark Bowden
His attitude is infectious.
“Get ready, Ron, here we go,” he says to the big tackle as they prepare to give him the ball again.
There are just over three minutes left when Phoenix gets the ball back, and Seth Joyner puts the game away. Seth has been having an awful game, one of the worst he’s played in years, missing tackles, blowing coverages, drawing penalties, getting outrun by receivers. In the third quarter, running back Larry Centers steps right through Seth for twenty-eight yards. But he rescues his whole off-key performance in the final minutes of the game, as he blitzes and chases down Chandler, drapes his long arms around the quarterback, and slaps the football up and out of his hands—where it is snared by Reverend Reggie right out of the air. Reggie sprints thirty-seven yards for the game’s last touchdown—final score 31-14—and Seth is vindicated.
All week the grumpy linebacker will be accepting congratulations on his great game from fans who don’t know better. He confesses to friends that an amusing side effect of making the Pro Bowl, and being designated a “great player” on TV, is that it becomes virtually impossible to play a bad game! Fans see, at least in part, what they want to see.
“People been tellin’ me all week how great I am,” he tells his wife, Jennifer, on the phone later that week. “I can’t believe it. I played like shit.”
Ron Heller is not among those congratulating Seth. Neither is the rest of the offensive line.
INSIDE THE TEMPLE, Bud Carson is a legend. Long before he had ever been anointed with the headset for a sad, brief tenure in Cleveland, the little white-haired man with the hearing aid and perpetual worried look had already left behind an enviable record as a defensive coach. One of his defenses, the Super Bowl champion Steelers of ’75 and ’76, was regarded as the best ever, and another, the ’79 Rams, rivaled the Steelers’ excellence. Bud was a revered master in the temple long before Buddy Ryan began bringing the heat, and long before Art Modell chose him to be head coach of the Browns in ’89.
In his first year as head coach, Bud took Cleveland to the AFC championship game, where they were dismantled by the Broncos’ sensational quarterback, John Elway.
Bud still has nightmares about Elway.
Denver’s quarterback is one of the game’s great masters of come-from-behind heroics, a sturdy, smart quarterback with a powerful arm and a gift for avoiding trouble in the backfield, complete with the wholesome corn-fed look of the high Pacific plains, the sandy mop of a teen idol, and a bucktoothed smile that is positively Kennedyesque.
In Denver’s Mile High Stadium, for that AFC championship game on January 14, 1990, the defensive guru and his young, surprising team took on the superstar, and when it was done, Elway had played the game of his life. He threw for 385 yards and three touchdowns, pacing three dramatic second-half drives of 80, 60, and 80 yards to a 37-21 victory.
It wasn’t just losing that bothered Bud so much—although that was enough. It was the way he lost. The bucktoothed wonder had embarrassed Bud’s defense. The Broncos hadn’t won on a few fluky plays, the way many football games are decided, but on a systematic dissection of the Browns’ coverage strategies and personnel. When Bud got fired nine games into the ’90 season (after losing seven) by the fickle, meddlesome Modell, everybody knew that the critical step over which Bud had stumbled was Elway. Elway had passed Bud Carson out of the job of his life.
That is all fresh in the coach’s memory. Only twenty months have elapsed since that game, and twenty months is like yesterday to Bud, who has been coaching football since Khrushchev was pounding tables with his shoe. Bud had signed on with Richie just weeks after Buddy Ryan got the ax. He was a sour and angry man in ’91, his tenure as High Priest untimely ended, when he took the rowdy talent Ryan had assembled and coached them into the league’s best defense, a defense to rival the legendary ones in his past—rival, mind you.
It was fun that year watching the Pack’s efforts to coax hyperbole from Carson over his new team. Buddy Ryan’s approach had been to huff and puff an inflated image for his squad and then dare them to measure up. Carson worked the opposite way. His fussy perfectionism was never satisfied. If Buddy had huffed and puffed his team’s reputation, Carson’s very presence was deflating. This green bunch had yet to win a play-off game. In his first weeks on the job, Carson called safeties Wes Hopkins and Andre Waters slow and out of shape and questioned the work habits of the Eagles’ defensive line. Even after Gang Green finished the ’91 season with the rare trifecta—first in the NFL overall, and first against both the run and the pass—Carson stubbornly (and correctly) refused to compare them with the great defenses in his past: “This is a very good defense,” he conceded, “but they haven’t been to any Super Bowls yet.”
Not yet, anyway. But Bud Carson has a lot more to work with in Philadelphia than he had in Cleveland in ’90.
Now Elway is coming to Philadelphia, and Bud is worried. It’s been nearly half a century since Bud actually played football as a defensive back in North Carolina, so the game for him long ago drifted away from the physical realities of the field. Bud doesn’t even picture football the way most people do. Fans watch from the relatively low angle of seats in the stadium or, worse, from the narrowly framed action on their TV sets—beneath layers of often unreliable commentary. To Bud the game is best viewed from directly overhead, in silence, from enough distance that the whole field of play can be seen. From this Coach’s-Eye View, players can be distinguished only by number and position on the field. They move—or are supposed to move—in a carefully choreographed pattern, reacting to the play as it unfolds, surely, but reacting within carefully proscribed limits, holding their positions. The goal of the offense is to draw or knock defenders out of position, fool them or tempt them with indirection and fakes, or hammer them down with a bone-rattling block, but if the players are strong enough and smart enough to hold their positions and make the plays when the ball comes their way, the offense will not only fail to score, it won’t even be able to advance the ball.
Chain-smoking in his windowless office as he pores over computer breakdowns of opponents’ tendencies, moving salt and pepper shakers and napkins around the table over dinner with his wife, preaching precision to defensive backs in front of a screen in a darkened meeting room, scratching his head on the sidelines when he encounters something unexpected … Bud’s game is an abstraction, a live-action chess game in which the pieces don’t always move the way they’re supposed to, and where checkmate ideally comes with a punishing hit. Bringing the heat is an important part of Bud’s philosophy—essential, really—but only a part. It is equally important to learn where, how, and when the heat should be applied. Buddy Ryan is connoisseur of the blitzkrieg, Bud Carson is battlefield technician.
Let’s see … there’re eleven guys on offense. Five of them have to block. That leaves a quarterback and five players to mind. How many ways can a team use those six players to move the ball? What’s the best way to arrange your eleven people to stop them? How does this particular team usually try to move the ball? On first down? Second and long? Second and short? Third and long? Third and short? In the plus-twenty? Deep in their own half of the field? When it lines up three wide receivers on one side, how often does it run? When it passes, where do the passes usually go? If the running back lines up two steps to the right, does that mean the team is more likely to run the ball? If so, where?
Angst-ridden, fidgety, obsessed, Bud’s goal every week is to think of everything, and after twenty-one years of coaching NFL defenses, he’s pretty sure it’s doable. His requests for the computer folks who help the Eagles create each game plan are notoriously voluminous and specific. Many of the older coaches (Bud is sixty-two) disdain heavy use of the computer, relying on their experienced feel for the game. Not Bud. The computer was made for Bud Carson; it enables him to do better what he’s been doing successfully for so long, dissecting offenses so thoroughly that, by game time, he’s inside the mind of the opposing coach—and quarterback.<
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All week Wes, Andre, Byron, and Seth, the field generals of Bud’s secondary, and the front line of Reggie, Clyde, Mike Golic, and newly acquired former Bills lineman Leon Seals have been listening to Bud fret about Elway. The last time the Eagles faced Elway, in ’89, the bucktoothed wonder scrambled for forty-five yards and one touchdown and threw for 278 yards and two more touchdowns!
Yeah, Coach, but we intercepted him three times and we won the game!
But that was three years ago. Elway has gotten smarter, better! Besides, how many times can you expect to win when you let a guy gain 323 yards and score three TDs? Bud has hammered home the four basic tenets of Stopping Elway 101: (1) Don’t let him escape the pocket; he’s most dangerous when he can buy time by fleeing the rush. (2) If he does scramble, it’s imperative that defensive backs stay on their receivers. (3) If he breaks out of the pocket, don’t let him run to his right; he’s right-handed and can throw with accuracy running that way. (4) If he starts running to his right, don’t let him set his feet— otherwise, he’ll kill you deep.
The guys have to chuckle about how nervous Bud is. After all, Elway and the Broncos haven’t exactly been lighting up the league in their first two games this year. They won both, but just barely, and their running game is ranked near the bottom of the league. But right up until just minutes before game time he’s still at it, back in his smokefilled space fiddling with coverages, checking the computer analysis one more time, trying to think of everything.
And this time Bud very nearly does. Elway never even gets started this Sunday. Game three, a dazzling autumn afternoon so mild that most of the crowd at Veterans Stadium is in shirtsleeves, is one of those rare football games that goes almost exactly according to plan— Bud’s plan, that is. It’s a study in defensive perfection, a window into the mind of a defensive master.
On his second play of the game Elway completes a pass to Victor Jones, who races for sixteen yards before Eric Allen drags him down— and it’s all downhill for the Broncos from there. Denver is stopped short on the next two plays, so they need eight yards on third down, a sure passing situation. Bud sends in his dime squad, a formation featuring six defensive backs and only one linebacker. The Broncos line up three receivers split wide to the left and one split wide right— and they shift their sole running back about three steps to the left of Elway; it’s this that catches Seth’s eye.
This is one of the clues Bud mined last week from his exhaustive study of Denver’s offense. When the running back shifts left in this formation, it means he nearly always will be running a pass route to the left flat. Because the left side (seen from Elway’s perspective) is already flooded with three pass catchers, tying up the left-side coverage scheme, it will force Seth to pick up the fourth, a wide receiver, in this case Mark Jackson, if he comes streaking across the middle of the field. The back half of the strategy exploits coverage on the right side. The standard third-and-long coverage of the sole receiver split right will require the safety (Andre) to pick him up short with help from the cornerback deep. If you send the right side receiver racing straight upfield, which is the plan, then both Andre and the cornerback, Izel Jenkins, will be drawn deep. Denver’s play, in a nutshell, is designed to bottle up most of the defensive secondary to the left while matching a speedy receiver one-on-one with Seth, a bigger, slower man, angling upfield to the right. If both Andre and Izel can be suckered upfield in coverage, Jackson should have plenty of room to run if he can outpace Seth and catch the ball.
Only, Seth spots Bud’s clue (the running back split left) and, as instructed, starts shouting “Bronco! Bronco!” kicking his right leg to get the message out to the teammates split wide. The call frees Andre from helping out with the right-side receiver, dropping him into the deep middle zone, where he’s free just to move to the ball.
The play works perfectly. Jackson races across, easily outpacing Seth, catches Elway’s perfect short pass in stride and … Hammer time! Andre will roll his eyes with pleasure describing the hit later on. He had awakened this morning with a wicked crick in his neck and had been trying to work it loose ever since. Jackson sprints across the middle like an invitation for a spinal adjustment, Andre just hanging back in the deep middle, admiring the angle he has for a shot on Jackson (blind side, just over forty-five degrees, allowing maximum impact with minimum warning), so perfect he’s afraid to believe Elway will actually let this happen—No, he’s not goin’ to throw the ball to this man—and then seeing the ball caught and just launching himself from a running start, elbows up in front of his face, eyes closed (gone ballistic now), he arrives at Jackson’s head just a split second after the ball. Jackson crumples as if he’s been hit by a locomotive, two yards short of the first down, and recovers his wits just in time to relocate the ball, which has popped free. The stadium erupts with a scrotal roar, the defense swarms Andre, pounding him on the head—Hey, the crick is gone!—and the Broncos have to punt.
Andre’s neck adjustment sets a vicious tone. All afternoon Bud has Elway off stride. Seth slaps away his first pass on the next series, and when the Broncos next try to run a simple running play up the middle, they are met by a defensive line stunt that has both ends taking one step back and swinging around inside their own tackles, screwing up the running lanes and blocking assignments so that Reggie, Clyde, and linebacker Byron Evans all meet the running back in the middle— crunch!
Faced with third and eight, the Broncos line up four receivers, and the running back shifts three steps to Elway’s left. Again, this alerts the defense that the back may be running a short pass route to the left flat. This time, it’s Andre who changes the call, shouting “Key! Key!” to announce that he will pick up the running back. If the back doesn’t come out, Andre becomes a free man in the short secondary policing against the run. On this play, the back stays in, and when Elway shovels the ball to receiver Shannon Sharp on a running play, Andre again is primed and ready. Diving through the phalanx of big blockers, the safety performs one of his patented submarine tackles, hitting the six-two, 230-pound Sharp at the ankles and literally upending him. The picture will be the centerpiece of tomorrow’s sports page, the big receiver flying through the air upside down, with Andre, prone on the turf, looking back over one shoulder, admiring his work.
Again and again, throughout the game, Bud’s defense anticipates Elway’s moves and, with complex, shifting pass coverages and occasional line stunts, shuts down play after play. Nothing Denver does works. The defensive guru is pacing the sidelines the whole time, nervously consulting his play list, muttering to himself and conferring with his assistant, Peter Guinta, who’s in the booth upstairs. If Bud is taking any pleasure in this, it doesn’t show. On their third possession, the Broncos lose two yards—punt. On their fourth, they can only gain eight yards in three plays-punt. On their fifth possession, five yards— punt.
Meanwhile, the Eagles’ offense is having another big day. Randall is putting on a stylish show, the best he’s looked so far this year, taking off on one classic, swivel-hips open-field run for twenty-nine yards and throwing two touchdown passes in the first half, one to Fred and the other to Calvin Williams. Richie has forsaken the steamroller this week, the three-tight-ends formation that he used against the Saints and Cardinals. Today the offensive workhorse is Keith Byars, who moves back and forth from tight end to running back from play to play, allowing the Eagles to change formations without changing per sonnel—which doesn’t give defenders time to react. At the end of the first half, the Eagles lead 17-0.
In the NBC-TV studios in New York, during the halftime show, who should appear behind the desk to deliver news and analysis but Buddy Ryan, in white shirt and red paisley tie, his round face looking tense, his straight white hair surprisingly long and combed over to the side—which, on Buddy, manages to look like a pathetic attempt to tart himself up for the camera. With his reputation for being a comedian, Buddy has been invited in by the network for a few tries at commentary like this. They are, in a sens
e, screen tests. The network sports execs figure a guy like Buddy can’t miss, just sit him in front of the camera and let ‘er rip! Right? But just as the crew of youngsters back in West Chester had learned a few years back, Buddy’s wit is entirely situational and often inadvertent. Away from his role on the sidelines or in the locker room it fades. On camera now, he looks stiff and uncomfortable, out of place. When he does speak, he says something obvious. He sounds dumb—which he isn’t.
What he has managed to do at every public appearance, however, beginning with the ghostwritten column in the New York Times on the day after the ’91 NFL draft, is make the case that Richie is mishandling his old team. Of course, with the Eagles having won their first two games this year and now soundly thumping the undefeated Broncos, it’s getting harder and harder to do.
Today the old coach is on his best behavior, and it takes an experienced Buddy watcher to discern the subtext.
“You can’t say enough about the Eagles’ defense, of course. On offense, the first big play they had was a scramble by Randall to set up the score. So both sides of the ball are doing well in Philadelphia. The defense is just smothering.” (Subtext: They’re winning because of my great defense. The offense is doing well because they have Randall Cunningham, not because Richie Kotite is doing anything special.)
Elway gets his chance on the first possession of the second half. Punt returner Arthur Marshall sprints forty-seven yards to push the Broncos into the Eagles’ half of the field for the first time in the game—jump start for yet another Elway comeback… Bud can just see it. Positioned on the Eagles’ twenty-eight-yard line, Denver is already in range for a forty-five-yard field goal (the posts are ten yards behind the goal line, and the kicker lines up about seven yards behind the ball). But it’s not going to happen.
