Mixed Signals

Mike Heimerdinger, offensive coordinator of the Tennessee Titans, peered down from the visiting coaches’ box at the old Silverdome and used his radio headset to suggest a play against the Detroit Lion defense.

Instead of a response from Coach Jeff Fisher, Heimerdinger heard the urgent voice of a woman.

“Suite 305 needs more hors d’oeuvres right away!” she said.

Two weeks earlier, at the same stadium, St. Louis running backs coach Wilbert Montgomery had trouble communicating with fellow coaches because his radio frequency crackled with uninvited guests.

“We kept getting a lot of truckers talking out on the highway,” Montgomery recalled of that 2001 game. “They were cutting in and out when we were trying to get people out on the field. It gets a little wacky and crazy.”

The Motor City doesn’t corner the market on those mix-ups. During an exhibition game in Philadelphia a few years ago, Baltimore coaches shared the airwaves with a pizza-delivery service. And George Ratterman, the Cleveland Brown quarterback best remembered as the first player to wear an in-helmet radio, got half of his instructions from legendary Coach Paul Brown, half from the police cruisers patrolling the area.

Red 23, Red 23.... There’s a 211 in progress!

The headset system has gotten far more reliable since that 1956 version, of course, and teams are having fewer and fewer wireless worries these days. But things aren’t perfect. Twice this season, the Rams have had to resort to the old system of having coaches on the sideline wearing headsets with cords.

“That was a mess,” Montgomery said. “We were hearing the defensive calls. The defensive coaches were hearing us. It’s always best for the opposing team when your headsets go down.”

Dave Weisz, a spokesman for Motorola, which landed the NFL communications contract in 1999, said such problems are “very rare,” even though years ago they might have been the norm.

“Some of the technology has changed,” he said. “Since our involvement, we’ve increased some of the efficiency of the communications. Other parts of it, it’s the system [the NFL] has had for years and is tried and tested.”

Coaches talk to one another on a two-way radio frequency and their communications are encrypted, so neither the opposing team nor a third party with a scanner can eavesdrop. Coaches can wear a headset with one or two ear cups, depending on preference. They can have the entire staff on one channel, or put offensive coaches on one channel and defensive coaches on another, giving the head coach the option to toggle back and forth.

NFL rules say only one coach can speak to the quarterback via radio, and that coach has to be at field level. Some head coaches use a lapel speaker microphone for that.

In a league in which the slightest edge can mean the difference between winning and losing, coaches go to extreme measures to keep their strategies secret. Denver’s Mike Shanahan was fined this season for lying about the nature of an injury to Jake Plummer, saying the Bronco quarterback had a concussion instead of a slightly separated shoulder. Why? Because Shanahan didn’t want San Diego players going for Plummer’s shoulder.

Coaches have taken to using their laminated list of plays to cover their mouths when sending in instructions. Some, such as Tampa Bay’s Jon Gruden, cover almost their entire face.

There is some logic to that. Ernie Accorsi, general manager of the New York Giants, was the assistant GM with the Baltimore Colts in 1977 when the team hired Bob Colbert as an administrative assistant. Colbert was a former head coach at Gallaudet, the leading university for the deaf and hard of hearing, and was a professional lip-reader.

“We didn’t hire him for that reason, but lip-reading was his expertise,” Accorsi said.

In the 1977 regular-season finale, a do-or-die game against New England, Colbert trained his binoculars on the Patriot defensive coordinator and saw him mouth the words “double safety blitz.”

“We got that in to [quarterback] Bert Jones and he hit Raymond Chester down the middle for a 78-yard touchdown,” said Accorsi, whose team won the division and got into the playoffs with that win.

The Colts weren’t using headsets at the time; the league had outlawed the practice. They were using the backup quarterback to signal in plays to Jones. But the radio technology was available.

In 1956, two Ohio inventors, John Campbell and George Sarles, approached Brown with a radio receiver they had developed, a modified version of one used in a World War II tank. Brown, always at the cutting edge, liked the idea and agreed to put the receiver in Ratterman’s helmet as long as the system was thoroughly tested before it was used in a game.

Before that, Brown, who did all the play-calling, would communicate with his quarterback by rotating in “messenger guards” on each play. He figured the radio would be far more efficient.

“At the time, it seemed to my father to be eminently practical and doable,” said Mike Brown, owner of the Cincinnati Bengals. “Why not? It was better than what was being done.”

The inventors carefully mounted the receiver in a Cleveland helmet and tested it in a secluded area behind Campbell’s home. Sarles would wander into the woods wearing the helmet, and Campbell would try to keep contact with him. They found the signal got weak very quickly and, once, Campbell searched all over for Sarles before spotting him talking to a police officer who had located the signal. The officer was a Brown fan, according to a Pro Football Hall of Fame account of the story, and promised not to reveal the radio secret to anyone.

The Browns first used the wired helmet in an exhibition game against Detroit and immediately attracted the suspicion of the Lion coaching staff, which noticed Brown wasn’t using his rotating-guard system. Shortly after halftime, a Lion coach noticed the partially hidden transmitter sitting behind a wooden light post on the sideline.

That spawned copycat efforts around the league to use radios linking coaches and quarterbacks. None worked as well as the Browns’ system. It all came to a halt when Bert Bell, then commissioner of the NFL, banned the use of the device.

Coaches still had to communicate with each other, though, and some of them worked from the press box. Beginning in the early 1970s, coaches used telephones to get messages from the box to the sideline, and vice versa. The league introduced a rule that if one team’s phones went down, the other team couldn’t use its phones, either.

It was hard to hear on those phones, especially in domed stadiums when the noise was almost overwhelming. So in 1977 the NFL switched to a headset system used by helicopter pilots. With the help of a cord-wrangling kid called a “grip,” a coach could roam the sideline, keep an eye on the action and talk to his assistants at the same time.

In 1979, coaches swapped the helicopter headsets for a bulky Telex device that allowed them to switch between offensive and defensive conversations with a toggle switch. Well, most coaches, at least. Houston’s Bum Phillips refused to wear headsets, saying he couldn’t fit them over his cowboy hat.

“He used to hand them to me,” said his son, Wade, who carried on the headset-free tradition as coach of the Buffalo Bills but now wears them as Atlanta’s defensive coordinator. “He’d tell me, ‘Here. You put these on and tell me if there’s anything I need to hear.’ ”

Marv Levy, the Hall of Fame coach who led Buffalo to four Super Bowls, was never a huge fan of headsets.

“They were helpful,” he said. “But when they went wrong, they multiplied the type of hindrances you had.... The headset has led to more complex offenses and defenses. That isn’t necessarily good. You can communicate more information to your players, but you can give them too much.... It isn’t what you know. It’s what the player can assimilate.

“Sometimes we’d cuss [the headsets] out, just like you would your computer.”

Other coaches found headset conversations enlightening. Homer Smith, former offensive coordinator at UCLA, used to tape the cross talk and play it on his way to and from work. Talk radio, if you will.

In 1985, the NFL began looking into the use of helmet radios again. That never got past the exhibition season. But nine years later, the system was revisited with mixed results. In most cases, the quarterbacks’ transistors didn’t hold up to an “ear-holing” by a 250-pound linebacker. Eventually, though, the technology was refined and the earpieces were made more durable.

On the sideline, coaches went wireless in 1998. The following year, Motorola became the league’s official wireless-communications sponsor and introduced a sleek, 12-ounce headset that could withstand a vigorous windmill spike to the turf. Mike Ditka was the king of that, so after he gave a speech for Chicago-based Motorola, the company presented him with a bronzed headset and named him an honorary quality manager.

“A lot of people thought we’d be upset when he would take off his headset and throw it down,” Motorola’s Weisz said. “We were happy about it. It would work when he picked it up.”

A lot of quarterbacks prefer not to have someone talking in their ear before and after every play. Warren Moon used to wave his hand in front of his face as if swatting at bees when Brian Billick, his offensive coordinator with the Minnesota Vikings, got too chatty. And once, a Cincinnati quarterback tried another method. “Can you hear me?” his coach would say, not raising his voice above a normal speaking volume. “Is this thing coming through?”

The quarterback, standing in the middle of the field, would shake his head no. Can’t hear you at all.