Inside the Helmet: Hard Knocks, Pulling Together, and Triumph as a Sunday Afternoon Warrior

by Michael Strahan

  Set the front and blitz with a Closed RT/LT call to the TE. Closed tackle will execute a “Nail” stunt; will loop blitz “C” to “B.” We will play 4 Under and 3 deep un coverage. The SAM and SAFETY play the flat. The Mike and Open Tackle play the hooks. (A) to C.O.S. motion.

  CP: Mike = Strong Hook, Open Tackle = Weak hook away from (Roy-Lou).

  Then under these hieroglyphics we list the position and his responsibility.

  For example: Ends, To the call—Wide 9 Technique contain the rush. Away from the call my responsibility is—4 technique “Jet” to contain. Each one of us has a little rectangle with our instructions. These make hieroglyphics look like Hooked on Phonics. You’d probably have a much easier time deciphering ancient wall drawings than last year’s call sheet.

  Finally we get a break in the monotony. The next forty pages or so are scouting reports of each player. There is no secret decoding, just massive amounts of film work done by our scouts in which they break down each player and write up reports just like you would when you’re inspecting a used car or a new house. They’ll do this for every single player we face during an entire season.

  Let’s take the page from my opponent in this Saints game. It reads, “Jon Stinchcomb, 6-5.1 inches, 318 pounds, 5.07 40-yard dash.” He gets a cute little bio that goes over his medical history, what he does well mentally and where he may have a weakness in the heat of battle.

  I’ll search through all of the personnel department’s scouting report on his faults for ones that may come into play in our matchup. “Falls short in strength areas; pushed back by straight power in pass protection; Overset vs speed and gets beat back to the inside” are among a few that catch my eye. If my foot can hold up, these will fall right into my strengths.

  Page after seemingly endless page details every possible scenario the Saints have recently used. Each formation is broken down. The players on the field on each play are detailed: what their skills players did on each of these plays, which way the play went and whether there was a gadget or trick play called, whether it was a play action or straight drop. Every scenario is broken down into more detail and then those details are broken down into finer detail. And then those details are broken down even more specifically.

  At times you’d think we were in a high school geometry class rather than an NFL meeting room. The next pages are lined with still photographs, pie charts, graphs, column after column after row upon row. For those kids who don’t want to pay attention in geometry class, it turns out there’s a use for it after all. Our pie charts break down the player grouping the Saints use on each down, every scenario, every situation of the game and where the runs and passes were aimed.

  For those next 200 pages or so, we are bored to death with still photographs, pie charts, statistics, formations, calls, the exact number of times they ran every single play they’ve run in the last four games, every little tiny itsy-bitsy piece of information that could possibly come into play in our game.

  It’s painful stuff, people. Especially if we’ve already played against a team. I could probably write the Eagles playbook if need be. Yet twice a year I’m still supposed to read over our 250 pages of information on their team. Painful. I understand why we study it so hard. We study for an SAT-type mind game each and every week of our seasons. We study because we try to eliminate as much guesswork as possible. Whenever the Saints are in a certain situation in the game, I’ll already have a full breakdown in my mind of exactly what they’ve done in the past. Yes, the good players in this league actually have it memorized.

  Football may be a big man’s game, but it’s also a thinking man’s game. When the Ravens middle lineback Ray Lewis was at his best, it wasn’t because he was physically more gifted than every other human being in our league. It’s because his recognition of exactly what a team will do out of each formation was better than most. His anticipation is scary. And that’s what makes many of those University of Miami players so great. The Ed Reeds, Warren Sapps, Armsteads, Jon Vilmas of the world. They recognize things out there faster than most. You wouldn’t think that Warren Sapp would be a model student, but that joker has his game down pat, better than just about any of his peers.

  Can you see why I’m on my last legs and why this game catches up mentally as fast as it does physically? Plus, we haven’t even gotten to the real monotony of the week yet. We’re just beginning our Wednesday mornings.

  After we get these playbooks, for the next two hours, we break off into meetings again. We’ll start by spending time on the running game, usually just first-and second-down runs. We focus on what their tendencies are in certain formations on first and second downs.

  As specific as our playbooks are, the meetings are even worse.

  Man, we have meetings for everything! The moment I retire, my body will thank me, but my mind will probably want to take me on a cruise to thank me for not putting it through those Wednesday meetings anymore. Sometimes I feel like telling the coaches, “Look, I’m going home. If you find something new to talk about, call me.”

  The best way to think about a game plan is this: Try to take all the variables you can possibly find and condense them into which formations a team likes to run certain plays out of. Then look to see which players are on the field for each of these plays. That allows you to cut down some of the guesswork even more. Look for specific things like, on a certain play, does the receiver line up inside or outside of the hash mark?

  If a guy like the Redskins Pro Bowl wide receiver Santana Moss lines up outside a hash mark and the rest of the team is in a certain formation, by all of this film work we do and all these meetings, we know he’s likely to run the couple of routes we saw in our breakdowns. Then, once we factor in which personnel are on the field at the time, we can take away another possibility or two. Then, if we see their tight end lined up somewhere specific, we can narrow it down even more.

  We meet and meet and meet and meet because the more players can see these variables on the field at the same time, the better our chances are in that game. This is where coaches and personnel pro guys earn their money. They’re the ones who need to see these tendencies, point them out to us and then formulate a reaction based upon this information. At the same time, the coaches need to come up with game plans that somehow hide our own tendencies.

  After we meet as a defense, we’ll break out into more meetings, this time with our position coach. More details, here we come! Every Wednesday, he’ll make sure we go over every single play and every formation in our game plan. Then we’ll have a detailed overview regarding all of our run-blitz packages. We spend all this time just on run blitzes because later we’ve got a totally different meeting for pass-rush blitzes.

  Why do we need to meet just for these special calls? One week we could have a blitz that’s called one thing where I run one way, and then the next week have the same exact blitz with the same name, but I start to run upfield on a slightly different route.

  We already know the blitzes because we’ve done them in the past or learned them for another game. But the coaches make us go over them again in these meetings. The next day we’ll have the same exact meeting, but for blitzes designed to get to the quarterback instead of the ball carrier.

  After this meeting breaks, we have about eight minutes to rush and get dressed into different clothes and get out onto the field for walkthrough. A walkthrough is a fancy term for another damn meeting, except out on the field. As if our heads aren’t spinning from the two-hour-plus meeting, for the next thirty-five minutes, we have to transfer onto the field what we just had a meeting about. It’s overkill. Plus, we’ve got to rush to get out there on time. Everything with Tom is a rush. He’s scheduled things so we’re constantly running to be on time.

  From 10:45 to 11:10 we’ll take the field for the walkthrough and work on running plays and first-and second-down pass plays. Coaches hold up cue cards with the opposing team’s plays and guys on the scout team line up in the formations we just saw the o
ther team run in the meeting. We’ve seen these first in the playbooks and then on film. So now we transfer it to the field so we can recognize their offense and their tendencies before we actually practice against it later in the day.

  We’ll break forty-five minutes for lunch, a media session and any other issues we have to wrap up. At high noon, there is no siesta. We go right back into the meeting rooms for another thirty minutes of reviewing what we’ll be practicing today and another specific area of the other team we haven’t seen yet. To say it’s like a broken record is to insult the music industry. And that broken record plays over and over again. There’s no stopping it until Sunday. Remember, folks, up to this point, we’ve only gotten through one half day of game-plan meetings. At 12:30 Wednesday we finally hit the practice field. This is the only part of the week that breaks up the painful repetition of studying, film, meetings and more studying.

  Special teams go out before the rest of the team. When we first come out, we do something called tank. Stretching. Why don’t we just say we’re stretching? Because we’ve got to have a different word for everything in the NFL.

  After stretch, we’ll work ball-security drills, then ball-scoop drills, hand drills and pretty much any other drill the coaches can come up with. Then we’ll go into individual drills and here we’ll work on more specific aspects of each play—getting in and out of our stance, bag drills, hand and feet drills, specific placement of hand and feet drills. That’s how we warm up every single day. If after one year it’s boring, imagine how boring these same drills are after fourteen years. But regardless of how boring it is, these drills are important. They work on details and when you’re out there on the field tired, hurting, thirsty, you hope your body naturally remembers these details on its own.

  Throughout practice we’ll strap on the pads and actually hit each other. We’ll work every scenario you could imagine. We’ll do red-zone drills, two-minute drills, goal-line drills. We’ve got drills and a game plan for every scenario of Sunday’s game.

  It’s quite physical, too. We don’t just dillydally out there, because the coaches are watching us and critiquing. Believe it or not, the entire two-hour workout is all caught on film. We’ve got members of our video department filming high atop a crane that looms over the practice field.

  Why do they film our practice? Because you have coaches and personnel people who watch practice shortly after it ends, for the sole reason of scouting our own team, to see how we perform the two plays they have designed for Sunday. We do this with every single practice of our lives. Then we study more of what we did right or wrong in practice.

  Let me give an example of the value there. If a coach or scout sees that every time we run a certain play from a certain formation, Eli always checks off the receivers and throws it down to Tiki in the right flat, somebody needs to catch it and hopefully throw a wrinkle into our game plan on Sunday. We’ll hope a team sees the same tendencies on film and point it out to their team in their monotonous meetings. When we finally get to the game, we’ve adjusted to where we’ll show the same formation and run the same play, but Tiki will act like he’s running into the flat, and instead he’ll take off for a fly.

  We may show on defense that every time we line up a certain way, a blitzer always comes around the left end. We need to recognize this and have him act like he’s going to take the same route but instead shoot an inside gap. This is where the coaches really earn their bread.

  It’s all a big chess game and much of it isn’t even played on the field. It’s played inside meeting rooms, played out in the film rooms. You ever play chess? It’s great for thirty minutes or an hour, but could you play one single game of chess that lasts Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday? We play that chess game every single week of our season.

  Once practice is over, what do we do? You guessed it, we go right into more meetings. What do we do in these meetings? We watch the tape of the practice we just had. We’ll very rarely get through the entire practice tape. So, often we’ll come in and finish up the next morning.

  The practice film allows the coaches and scouts to catch some of the glitches, correct them and make us work on those corrections the very next day in practice. There are ways to hide tendencies, and each week we try to look for them in order to make adjustments.

  The coaches also look at these tapes to see who is grasping what we’re trying to do that particular week. If a guy is screwing around or shows signs that he’s slacking, they’ll make sure they work with him more.

  We have meetings in the morning to go over our game plan and the opposing team’s tendencies. We then go onto the field and get a scout team to look at what we saw in those meetings, and then meet again after lunch to remind us what we just saw on the field, which reminds us what we just saw in the meetings. We then go out to practice and work on what we saw in the meeting that was based on what we saw in the walkthrough that was based on what we saw in the morning meeting. And then? We have another meeting to go over the practice we just had that was based on, well, you get the idea.

  And we get to do it all over again on Thursday! Same exact schedule, but with emphasis on other areas of the game. Just like Wednesday, we show up and get to play the whole thing all over again. Same faces, same meeting rooms, same coach-speak. Life during the season is like the movie Groundhog Day.

  We get through it, though. Some guys resort to downloading video games onto their cell phones. A lot of guys fall asleep during the films. It’s hard not to. Turn out the lights, put on a boring movie and listen to the same guy over and over and over again.

  These meetings get so repetitive and boring, and this isn’t an exaggeration, that sometimes when I have trouble sleeping at night, I’ll try to mentally put myself back in these meetings. It’s a trick I picked up years ago and while it doesn’t always work, it has a pretty good success rate.

  There’s an art to getting through these meetings. The primary weapon we use to battle the boredom is sleep. Frankie Walker, our cornerback who this off-season signed with Green Bay, used to fall asleep during the first five minutes of those meetings. It was so bad that the coaches made him stand up in the meetings to make sure he stayed awake until the end. What did he do? He’d fall asleep standing up! It was the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen. How the hell do you fall asleep while standing up in front of an entire meeting room? That’s a true skill. I used to get upset with habitual sleepers because I feel like we all need to sit through the torture together. Eventually I fell asleep as well.

  My first year in the league, LT would come in to meetings and blatantly lay down in the front of the meeting room and go to sleep right there in front of us. Lawrence didn’t care. Our former middle lineback Micheal Barrow used to rat out players who fell asleep by screaming in his best Howard Cosell imitation:

  “Down goes Strahan [or whoever just fell asleep]!”

  There’s an art to grabbing a few midafternoon Zs. Step One. Imperative for taking a nap is wearing a hooded sweatshirt. You put the hood up so the coaches can’t see your eyes. Step Two. You put your forehead in your hand at a certain angle that makes it appear that you are diligently studying, but in reality you are hiding your eyes. Step Three. Make sure you turn a few pages every once in a while or ask a question to trick the coaches into believing you’ve been all ears the whole time.

  But the most important factor to getting a good sleep, the absolute number one rule before letting those lids get cozy is this: Enlist a trustworthy teammate to wake you up before the meeting is over.

  Sometimes when we want to get some sleeping knucklehead, we’ll tell the coach to keep the lights off and we all sneak out of the room, leaving the sleeper sitting all alone. We’ll either get the coach to flip the lights on or we’ll let him wake up naturally in a panic once he realizes we’ve all moved on to the next portion of the day’s agenda.

  Sometimes during film sessions, a coach will fall asleep. If we notice that, the Sneak Out is a popular favorite. Once we noti
ce a coach dozing, we’ve got carte blanche to mess with him. The last thing he wants to do is fire back at us, only to have us tell the head coach his employee was sleeping on the job.

  When we get behind the closed doors of these meetings, it’s like being in grade school all over again. We’ll do anything we can to get through a meeting. We’ll have “Who can stay awake the longest” contests. We’ll play Tic Tac Toe. Hangman. Anything. Guys kill time with video iPods, text messaging, writing rap lyrics, doodling.

  When Deion Sanders played under Jerry Glanville in Atlanta, they had a coverage called Cat. It stood for “You see that cat over there, Deion? You got that cat.” That was it. Nothing special. Jerry would take the greatest cover man in the NFL, put him on your best receiver all day long and just say, “Your job this week is to follow that cat all over the field!”

  One day Deion was sleeping in a meeting. A coach yelled at him to get up.

  “Get up, get up, you can’t sleep in these meetings.”

  To which Deion replied, “Why? I know what I’m doing. I got that cat!” With that, he put his head down and went back to sleep.

  As bad as the Wednesdays are, and if Thursdays are an exact copy, what about Fridays? You guessed it. More meetings and more practice. While the coaches cut back on practice on Friday, the meetings are still brutal.

  Saturday mornings. More meetings and another walkthrough. More treatment. Saturday night, we gather at the team hotel and have more meetings. Once the season gets into full swing, players get into a rhythm that allows us to pick up game plans much faster, so it gets even more repetitive. The coaches repeat everything step by step, day by day as if it were Day One.

  At this point, I ask myself, Do I really want to go through another year of these horribly boring meetings? Do I really want to deal with reading those playbooks for another year? As I arrived at the doctor’s office in Charlotte the day after Christmas, I wondered whether a negative report is coal in my stocking. Or should I hold a piece of mistletoe over the doctor’s head and kiss him for putting me out of my misery? If he tells me I need surgery, that means I’ve sat in my last-ever NFL meeting. I can announce my retirement sometime in February.