Changing the Call

The New York Giants have been called many things during their improbable march to the Super Bowl--plodding, unimaginative, lucky, sleep-inducing--all of them, to varying degrees, deserved.

But this was a new one: radio pirates.

High-tech thieves of the airwaves.

Band-width bandits.

The Giants’ 41-0 victory over Minnesota in the NFC championship game was so shocking on so many levels, even Canadians were disturbed. While most of the continent was still wondering if Kerry Collins had sold his soul to Elizabeth Hurley, the Toronto Globe and Mail forwarded a less plausible theory: The Giants had cracked the Vikings’ play-calling code, intercepted the signals that made their way from the Viking sideline to the headset in quarterback Daunte Culpepper’s helmet, and knew what was coming each time the Minnesota offense assembled at the line of scrimmage.

“Ludicrous,” said Giant Coach Jim Fassel, who noted that his team has enough trouble getting “our own transmissions to work. What, did we have a guy over there with rabbit ears listening?”

And then deciphering the code-speak and flashing hand signals to the Giants’ defensive captain who would then pass along the information--run or pass, inside or outside, left or right--to his teammates on the field and realign them, all before the Vikings could snap the ball?

Even the Vikings had to be dubious, which might explain why the team quickly issued a statement saying they hadn’t contacted the league and there was no investigation. Except, perhaps, into how Minnesota Coach Dennis Green could start a junior college-caliber secondary with a trip to the Super Bowl on the line.

This never would have happened in the old days, when men were men and quarterbacks wore black hightops and called their own plays in the huddle. Thirty-five years ago, when the Super Bowl was but a callow rookie, both quarterbacks, Green Bay’s Bart Starr and Kansas City’s Len Dawson, called the game the way they saw it, sizing up down and distance, looking over the defensive formation and barking out the plays they wanted to run.

Contrast that to today’s scenario at Raymond James Stadium: Collins and Baltimore’s Trent Dilfer opening Super Bowl XXXV with 15 or so plays that were scripted for them days in advance, with every ensuing play radioed in from offensive coordinators intent on choreographing their every move and systematically ratcheting down the margin for error as far as the vise will allow.

“The way quarterbacking is today, you don’t need your quarterback to go out and win games for you,” says ESPN football analyst and former Washington Redskin quarterback Joe Theismann. “The game plan is simple. ‘Just don’t screw it up. We’re going to play great defense. We’re going to run the football. If you don’t make a mistake, we’re going to win.’

“All you have to do is look at the statistical breakdown of giveaways and takeaways. If you turn the ball over once, your chances of winning are, like, 75%. If you turn it over two times, your chances of winning are 50%. Your chances of winning if you turn it over three times are 26%. So with each turnover, the opportunities and percentages go down.

“If you’re the quarterback and you’re the one throwing the ball and handing it off and you don’t make that critical mistake, if you don’t take that critical sack that takes you out of field-goal range, then the way the game works out, if the other guy makes a mistake, you win.

“That’s really what the position has boiled down to. Very few quarterbacks are asked to go out and win games. At least in the first 58 minutes.”

Thus, the game has been reprogrammed and dehumanized, off-the-cuff ingenuity replaced by technological engineering. Long gone are the days of the quarterback spitting blood and grabbing his left guard by the facemask to get his attention because even though it’s third and one, the next play is going deep down the right sideline and the protection had better be there this time because the quarterback is getting tired of spitting blood.

Instead, we are left with the occasionally curious sight of a quarterback backpedaling anxiously out of the huddle, banging a hand against his helmet because his headset is pulling in a local country-western station while the offensive coordinator fiddles frantically with his belt-attached radio transmitter and the panicked head coach is screaming, “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?”

Such is the evolution of play-calling in the NFL. Or, as Dawson derisively assesses it, “the demise of play-calling.” None of the 31 teams operating in the NFL today allows its quarterback to call his own plays. Several, among them the Super Bowl XXXIV champion St. Louis Rams, do not even allow their quarterbacks to call audibles at the line of scrimmage.

Sterilized football, claim the detractors, most of them old enough to have once called Joe Namath a white-shoed pansy but now remember him as an ingenious leader of men who called his own plays and called enough of them in Super Bowl III to manufacture the upset of the century--16-7 over the 17 1/2-point favorite Baltimore Colts.

The only way to go, counter the modern-day practitioners, who say the game has grown too complex for one man to handle and therefore have turned the operation over to the offensive coordinator, assisted by the quarterback coach, the running back coach, the wide receiver coach and the offensive line coach.

“No quarterback calls his own plays now,” former Giant quarterback Phil Simms says. “And you know what? Nobody ever will.

“The reason why a quarterback couldn’t do it now is because it’s complicated. Too many formations. Too much movement. Too much information. You just can’t do it. Can’t do it. Teams now have more than 100 plays. There’s no way you can pull one out of your memory bank quick enough that’s appropriate for the situation you’re going to see.

“There’s no way. I can’t imagine any quarterback even wanting that responsibility.”

Today, few do. Collins said he is relieved to be relieved of play- calling, happy to accept his orders from Giant offensive coordinator Sean Payton. Kurt Warner, who quarterbacked the Rams to a Super Bowl victory last year, says he wouldn’t want to call his own plays, even if given the choice.

“In this day and age, with as much as we do, from personnel groupings to movement shifts, multiple formations, it’s just difficult to do,” Warner said. “In the allotted time that we have, I think it’d be difficult to call your own plays.”

The Great Divide

Within the NFL quarterback fraternity, this is where the generational divide chooses sides, with 1975 the rough line of demarcation.

Many of those who played before 1975, such as Dawson, tend to agree that the game began the road to hell in a handbasket when the play-calling went to sideline observers equipped with headsets.

“Roger Staubach would still be playing if he could have called all the plays,” said Dawson, today a broadcaster for the Chiefs and a football analyst for HBO. “First of all, who’s to say the guy calling the plays is smarter than me? Don’t give me this stuff that it’s too complicated. For who? You’re telling me that you’re smarter than I am, that I can’t comprehend what’s going on?”

But many of those who played after Dawson, some of whom had some experience calling their own plays before the great shift to the sideline in the late ‘70s, believe this is one change for the better.

“I called my own plays for three years and I liked it,” Theismann said. “But I also appreciated coaches calling them because they’ve got all those resources on the sideline. There’s another set of eyes, a whole bunch of eyes seeing what’s going on. . . .

“When I played football, your play calls were simple. One play would be ‘Spread right, 60, outside.’ See, that’s simple. That’s the formation, that’s the direction of the play, that’s the blocking, that’s the back who’s carrying it.

“Now that’s approximately, what, five words? There are plays that coaches call today that have upwards of 20 words. So, it gives you the range of communication quarterbacks today are getting from the sidelines.”

Simms, who quarterbacked the Giants to Super Bowl victories in 1987 and 1991 while playing for a run-oriented coach, Bill Parcells, jokes, “If I were calling my own plays, I’d have thrown for 30 touchdowns every year. We’d get inside the five, I’d be saying, ‘You know, we’ve got a great pass here, I’m going to use it.’ I’d be Dan Marino. . . .

“The game changed for the good when the coaches began calling the plays. No question. When somebody’s only job is to evaluate and pick out what’s right and wrong and call plays, their view is going to be better than the quarterback’s. They have all the plays on a card right in front of them.

“I remember the days I did call plays. I’d get out there and say, ‘Shoot, I can only think of about 10 of them.’ Then I’d go to the sideline and look at the card and I’d say, ‘Oh, right. I should’ve called that one.’ ”

Dan Fouts, a Hall of Fame quarterback who broke in with the San Diego Chargers in the mid-1970s, called his own plays during the first few years of his professional career.

“I was so good at it we were, like, 2-11-1 and 2-12 and 1-15,” he said with a laugh. “When [Don] Coryell got to San Diego, that’s when rule changes [prohibiting defensive backs from bumping receivers

coming off the line of scrimmage] happened. It’s also when he started experimenting with shifting a guy like [tight end Kellen] Winslow out wide and putting him in motion and using three and four receivers. So we were on the cutting edge.

“It was important, because of [substitutions] and personnel groupings, for the coaches to control that on the sideline.”

Soon, the Chargers were in the playoffs.

“I enjoyed winning,” Fouts said. “My ego was taken care of when we won.”

Shuttle Diplomacy

The first experiments in sideline play-calling can be traced back to the late 1950s, when Cleveland Brown Coach Paul Brown tinkered with shuttling in plays with his offensive guards, followed by crude versions of helmet headsets that sometimes left the quarterback spinning comically in circles, trying to reposition his antenna for better reception.

“The technology in the ‘50s, as opposed to what you have now, was kind of like when a guy would attach a string to two tin cans and talk to the tin can on the other end,” says Gil Brandt, the Dallas Cowboys’ longtime director of scouting. “There was interference, they’d pick up the wrong frequency.”

Until headset technology caught up with the Cowboys’ revolutionary computerized playbook, Dallas Coach Tom Landry toyed with other means of sending in plays--there was his infamous, ill-fated quarterback shuttle, which involved two quarterbacks running in and out of the game every other play, carrying that down’s pre-selected play with them.

Landry first tried it during the early 1960s with Don Meredith and Eddie LeBaron, but only as a preseason experiment that was quickly shelved. Later, believing the system was sufficiently refined, Landry tried it in the early ‘70s, during the regular season, with Staubach and Craig Morton, only to soon scrap it again.

“It was not a good system,” Brandt said. “The continuity wasn’t good, and you know, quite honestly, quarterbacks have to run enough as it is. When they had to run an extra 15-50 yards to get on and off the field, I don’t think that helps them any. . . .

“One thing about quarterbacks: They all want to play every snap. If you say there’s an average of 68 snaps a game and you say, ‘I’m going to play 34 and you’re going to play 34,’ you’re going to be left with two unhappy guys.”

Hand signals became the preferred play-calling technique, with an assistant coach flashing in the play to his quarterback much the same way a third-base coach sends instructions to a hitter in baseball. One problem: Hand signals could be filmed by opposing teams and studied and eventually deciphered in time for use in the rematch. Which is why former Houston Oiler coach Jerry Glanville deployed two assistants to signal in the plays--one sending in dummy signals, the other sending in the actual play.

“I’d call the play by talking into a microphone,” Glanville said. “Two assistants would hear it. One would flash dummy hand signals and the other would be standing 25 yards away, flashing the live hand signals.”

By the early 1990s, radio technology had improved to the point that most teams had headsets installed inside the helmets of their quarterbacks by 1995. Much more expensive than hand signals, but the play-caller’s mode of choice for one very simple reason.

“It’s much, much faster,” says Ram Coach Mike Martz, who called plays as the team’s offensive coordinator during their championship season of 1999.

On the down side, the technology still isn’t perfect.

To activate the transmitter attached to his belt, a play-calling coach pushes a button on the device that gives him limited time to communicate with his quarterback. The device automatically shuts down 15 seconds before the ball has to be snapped.

“If I start talking too fast, before I have finished pressing the button, the quarterback only hears the end of the call,” Baltimore Raven offensive coordinator Matt Cavanaugh said. “If I take too long, the transmitter shuts off and he only hears the first part.

“Besides that, there are frequency problems. Sometimes, you’ll hook into the wrong frequency and pick up a local radio station. You try to get the problems solved during your pregame [warmup], but it still happens from time to time during games.”

Playing indoors, as the Rams do inside their home stadium, the Trans World Dome, often compounds the predicament.

“Sometimes, [the headset] cuts out because there are other people on the station,” Warner said. “Sometimes it cuts out because of the noise of fans. The fans are screaming and you get a bunch of interference. Sometimes it’s tough to pick up exactly what words are being said and you try to piece it together with the plays that you know. I’ve heard security people talking over the same line.”

The Rams’ first home game of the 1999 season was particularly troublesome, according to Martz.

“The frequency kept breaking up and it took a whole quarter to correct it,” he said. “We spent the whole first quarter in a state of panic, using hand signals while we had people trying to fix it.”

Having Warner calling his own plays wasn’t an option, nor was allowing him to call audibles at the line of scrimmage, because the Rams’ offensive game plan does not include an audible package.

“What we do, with all the formations and shifting and what not, it’s just impossible,” Martz said. “We try to go out and shift and move as fast as we can and take control of the tempo of the game. . . . Our whole thing is trying to keep the defense off balance. And when you audible, you can’t do that. When you audible, you’re in one formation.”

Eliminating the audible also eliminates the risk of a quarterback ad-libbing himself into disaster, or a turnover, which in the mind of many a coach are one and the same.

Mike Ditka called the offensive plays during the Chicago Bears’ 1985 championship season, but jokes, “No matter what I called, [quarterback Jim] McMahon changed it half the time anyway”--most notably during the Bears’ first offensive series in Super Bowl XX.

“Our first play of the Super Bowl, he called the wrong formation and Walter [Payton] got hit before he got the ball, we fumbled, they recovered,” Ditka said. “I went crazy on the sidelines. I was going to kill him. He said, ‘Coach, get away from me, take it easy, take it easy. Everything’s going to be OK.’ And he was right. Everything turned out OK.”

New England turned that turnover into a field goal and a 3-0 lead . . . before being outscored the rest of the way by McMahon and the Bears, 46-7.

The Future Is Now

Ditka believes play-calling belongs in the hands of the coaches because “they work so hard and study so much film, they feel they’re better equipped to analyze what the defense is doing and try to attack it. Now if the players would work as hard the coaches did, they could call the plays just as well.”

But that, says Glanville, would mean “putting in 10 hours a day studying film alone. Coaches do that every day. Easily.”

For quarterbacks today, Brandt believes, there is simply too much to learn, too much to know.

“I read something in Harvard Business Review,” Brandt said. “It talked about the curve of learning from 1750 to 1900 never changed. And then it changed three times in the 1990s. So basically, you had to be three times as smart in 2000 as you were in 1990.

“What I’m trying to say is the difference between 1990 football and 2000 football is unbelievable. People are just doing so many more things on offense, so many more things on defense. Look at the coaching staffs. Some teams now have 16, 17, 18 coaches. Consequently, you can do so many more things--you can break things down and get tendencies and do things so much faster than you could before.

“It made the game so much better. I think it’s like people who drove a 1990 model car--they were pretty happy with it. But the 2000 model is so much better.”

Still, Cavanaugh concedes that the current model lacks spontaneity.

“I think there’s something to be said for the Johnny Unitases of the world, the Bart Starrs, the Joe Namaths who stood in there and were true field generals,” he said. “They got their game plan during the week and then they went out and orchestrated the game.”

But that is music from a long-passed era. Today’s quarterbacks march to the tune of the voice buzzing in their ear, when they’re not picking up a nearby traffic controller or the local Spanish-language station.