“Blood, Sweat, and Chalk”: A Roger Bertholf review

“Blood, Sweat, and Chalk” by Tim Layden

A Roger Bertholf review

Football coaches are a paradoxically humble breed; they routinely deny any credit for innovations in the game that have been attributed to them. Every coach will tell you that he has copied a scheme that has been used before at the high school, college, or professional level. “It’s a copycat league,” they all say.

Over the course or two years, Tim Layden, a writer for Sports Illustrated, interviewed football coaches and players, studied film, and probed the origins of the offensive and defensive strategies that define the modern game of football. “Blood, Sweat, and Chalk” is his account of that journey into the strategies that make football such a compelling sport, and the men who have dedicated their lives to refining its nuances.

Sometime around the turn of the 20th Century, football in America broke from its European rugby roots and evolved into a different game. Popular mythology often claims that President Theodore Roosevelt was responsible for the changes in football rules that led to the modern game, and the story is partly true. Roosevelt was instrumental in changing the rules of college football to prohibit closed-formation blocking (the “wedge”) because he thought the mass momentum approach made the game too violent. At that point, American football forever diverged from the rugby scrum.

Football is a game that a casual observer views as an entertaining confrontation between men (or boys) who compete for physical dominance. Coaches view the game differently. Coaches study the game, and try to blend the talents of their players with a scheme that will give them the best opportunity to succeed.

On September 21st, 2008, the Miami Dolphins ended the New England Patriots’ 21-game winning streak with the help of an offensive formation popularly called the “Wildcat,” (named for the Kansas State University Wildcats, where the formation was used in the late 1990s by Coach Bill Snyder, although its origins can be traced to the single wing formation that was commonly used in the first half of the 20th century). The Wildcat uses an unbalanced offensive line, with two tackles on one side of center. The “quarterback” (who is usually a tailback) takes the snap in the shotgun, and the weak side flanker runs parallel to the line of scrimmage to create the third option for the quarterback, who can run off right tackle, hand the ball to the halfback, or throw. Against the Patriots, the Dolphins ran the play six times, and scored five touchdowns, using Ronnie Brown as quarterback and Ricky Williams as the flanker. The Wildcat caused a sensation in the NFL, but it was just a variation of the single wing offense Glen Scoby (Pop) Warner devised over a century earlier.

Defenses adapted, and the “Wildcat” offense vanished as quickly as is appeared, another casualty in the evolution of modern football.

“Genius” is superlative that is too loosely applied to football coaches, and they acknowledge this fact, giving credit to others for truly innovative offensive and defensive schemes. Perhaps a better way to stratify the accomplishments of football coaches is by their impact on the way the game is played.

Lombardi’s Packers dominated professional football during the 1960s with the “power sweep,” which relied on Fuzzy Thurston and Jerry Kramer to pull from their left tackle and guard positions and create a hole on the right side for Paul Horning to run through. But Jerry Kramer and Fuzzy Thurston didn’t have the critical blocks; the success of the play was mostly dependent on the tight end (Ron Kramer) blocking the left outside linebacker, and Jim Taylor leading with a block on whichever linebacker or defensive back read the play and came up to stuff the runner. When executed with the precision that Lombardi demanded, the power sweep was good for at least a five yard gain, and was nearly unstoppable. But the power sweep rarely works anymore, because defensive ends, left unblocked, are fast enough to catch the runner from behind. In Green Bay’s power sweep, Horning would retreat about a yard and a half after getting the ball before he’d choose the hole to attack. Lawrence Taylor would have buried him in that moment of hesitation.

But Vince Lombardi recognized that the play would work if it was executed perfectly, and he drilled the Packers incessantly on the sweep. There were no tricks in his playbook; Lombardi just used the strengths that he saw in his roster—two great offensive linemen, a bruising fullback, a cagy halfback, and most importantly, a tight end who could win the battle against a linebacker. Everyone knew the Packers were going to run that play, but nobody knew how to stop it.

Throughout much of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, when the NFL (under the inspired leadership of Pete Rozelle) established itself as the most popular sport in American history, football was a run-first game: establish dominance in the running game, and wear down your opponent with physical strength. But Don Coryell changed that when, as head coach of the San Diego Chargers from 1978 to 1986, he devised an offensive strategy that was based on a pass-first mentality.

Coryell sent multiple receivers on deep, intermediate, and short routes, and instructed his quarterback to read them in order from deep to short. The strategy was to threaten a deep pass on every play; the deep pass was the first read for the quarterback! He numbered the nine basic routes for the wideouts one through nine, and the tight end’s routes 10 through 90; a 538 play, therefore, had the left flanker running a 5 route, the tight end running a 30 route, and the right flanker running an 8 route. It was simple, effective, and very easy to teach. Coryell’s scheme was designed to force linebackers into situations where they had pass coverage against faster players in the open middle of the field.

“Air Coryell” changed football from a running game to a passing game. It overwhelmed defenses at first, but a new breed of linebackers (and safeties) evolved that had the speed to neutralize the threat of speedy receivers getting open in the middle, and big, physical defensive linemen became necessary to disrupt the quarterback’s rhythm. A quarterback who can quickly read the coverage, however, will often find an open receiver downfield, and the balance in the modern game of football is tilted toward teams that have a quarterback capable of making those reads and delivering the ball quickly and accurately to the first open receiver.

The wishbone, the spread, the West Coast offense (poorly named, because its NFL origin was in Cincinnati), the zone blitz, the cover two; Layden dissects each of these strategies and reveals how they came about, through the recollections of coaches who used them, and the players who made the schemes work.

Layden exposes the myth that football coaches lead an enviable life. The itinerant lifestyle of most football coaches—even the very successful ones—is almost as brutal as the game itself. It is not unusual for a coach to change jobs every two years; long term employment is the exception, not the rule. These are intelligent men, who understand the game of football at a level that observers like me will never approach. Coaches are teachers, and they do it for the same reason that any teacher does; they consider themselves privileged to teach the game they love, and wouldn’t ever consider doing anything else with their lives.

“Blood, Sweat, and Chalk” is a view of football from the coach’s perspective, and it reveals much about the history of the game, and the men who left their mark on it.