Do You Love Football?! (11 page)

How do you feel about the audibles that are accessible to you in the blitz this week? Do you feel good about those?"

I do the same thing when I'm going over the script of our first fifteen plays. I'll ask Brad Johnson, "Do you like 22 Z In?

What do you give it on a scale of one to five?" If he gives it a four, I'll write that on my practice script, which reminds me that this is a play he likes a lot and therefore I'm more likely to call it.

"What about 72 X Shallow Cross? One to five?" Now if he says "three," I might question his sanity because I know it's a good play. But I won't try to convince him to like it as much as I do because if he doesn't feel comfortable with a play, that's probably going to show up in the execution. Once I hear a three or a two from the quarterback, I'll never call the play. If there are two or three plays he doesn't like, it's not a problem. We've still got 147 others from which to choose.

Another thing I learned from Mike is that having favourite plays is a two-way street. A lot of times there are plays that players want you to call, but just hearing them tell you how much they like it isn't enough reason to call it. You have to see proof in the way they practice it. It isn't like you have time to practice Waggle Right Double Out twelve times or 22 Texas sixteen times. You practice each one maybe twice. Mike would let the players know that the onus was on them to make the plays they wanted to run on Sunday look good on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

"Do you guys like this play?" Holmgren would say in a challenging tone. "It's the sixth play of seven-on-seven today and it's the ninth play of the team period, so it had better look good or you're not going to get it called during the game."

Guys would compete with that in mind.

George Seifert was in his second year as the 49ers' head coach, having been promoted from defensive coordinator after Bill Walsh retired. George had the most organized practices I had ever seen. Everything was situational. It wasn't just a case of "Let's go out here and run some plays." It was "We're in the red-zone fringe here. We've got five shots from the twenty-five, we've got three from the twenty, two from the fifteen, two from the ten, and two third-and-goals from the three."

He didn't want his team spending any more time on the practice field than it had to. When the horn blew to end one period, the next period had better be set up and ready to go. It was tight.

It was precise. The "look squad"-which is another name for the scout team because it provided the offense or defense with the "look" of the opponent's offense and defense-was coached as hard as the regulars. George demanded the perfect look. So if, for instance, the guy emulating Junior Seau didn't bite on a play fake, you'd hear "Damn it! Junior Seau's not going to play like that. He's going to bite on the play-action pass. He's Junior Seau.

He bites on everything. We need more activity. Bite on a play pass! We're trying to get that ball thrown in behind you!"

George had a very low tolerance for error. If a play wasn't run properly, it was repeated at the end of practice. He'd tell Mike, "I need to see play number nine again . . . I need to see number eleven one more time." Everybody would be pissed when that happened, of course, because when you repeat plays it makes the practice longer. There would be a lot of days during the season when the players practiced without pads or in pads and shorts so they wouldn't be beating on each other and getting too worn out to be effective late in games or late in the season. But they still practiced with speed and explosion.

George had a beautiful office that was always neat, nothing out of place. That was because the place where he actually did all his work was a little room connected to that office. George had his projector in there and a bucket stuffed with about a hundred number-two pencils all sharpened to a razor-point edge. It was like his laboratory and George was like a mad scientist. One night when George wasn't around, I walked in there and saw that he had drawn plays and made a bunch of notes on four or five writing tablets. He was working his ass off on all aspects of the team. There were eraser shavings everywhere, offensive and defensive tapes all over the place, and I noticed that a lot of those pencils were as dull as a butter knife. I thought I would help the head coach out a little bit, so I took each dull pencil, put it into an electric sharpener to restore that razor sharpness, then put it back into the bucket. I cleaned off the eraser shavings and stacked up his tablets.

Much to my surprise, an angry George began the next day's staff meeting with a question: "Who messed with my office?"

"I did, Coach," I said, instantly realizing that my good intentions had turned into a very bad mistake.

"Don't you EVER go in there and touch my stuff again."

"Yes, sir."

So much for being that fly on the wall my dad talked about.

George would watch all the film of each opponent-every bit of offensive and defensive film-and would form his own opinions that didn't always agree with what his assistants thought. Sometimes, before we hit the field, George would take the cards that showed the scout team defense how the opposing defense was supposed to line up in practice and change them to how he thought it was going to align. When practice began Mike Holmgren and Joe Montana would see the revised card, and they wouldn't like it.

"Who did this card?" they would say. "They're not going to play that coverage."

"Oh yes, they are," George would shoot back. "I've been watching them all week. They're not going to line up and just let you gut them. They're going to do it this way."

I spent a lot of time helping Mike, but I'd also be involved in different drills on the practice field. As soon as the prepractice stretching was over, I'd go over to help the secondary coach, Ray Rhodes, in period one. I'd throw balls so the DBs could work on their interception skills. Some were low, some high, some in the hole between the safeties and corners. I used be as nervous as hell throwing to Ronnie Lott and Eric Wright and Chet Brooks, because I knew if I threw a bad ball, I was going to hear about it from them. Coaches also made sure I was doing the drill the way they wanted it done.

"Put a little mustard on it!" George would bark. "Goddamn it, throw a higher ball! . . . Throw a lower ball!"

Ray was the ultimate, consummate players' coach. All the players loved him, offensive guys as well as defensive guys. The DBs liked going to his meetings. They couldn't wait to hear Ray Bob, which was what they called him, although I have no idea why. Ray had an unbelievable way of communicating with the players. He'd get on your ass and then he'd make you laugh, all in the same sentence. It was the exact opposite of any other meeting I had ever attended. I'd like to share what Ray told his players, but if I did, this book would get an X rating. His language was as raw and as salty as could be. That's where I learned a lot of the colorful phrases I use to this day. Ray Bob would say just about anything to get his points across. I didn't know you could talk like that without getting put in jail.

One time after a meeting, I asked him, "How do you even think of those things that you say?"

"Hey, you can say it like it is or say it like it isn't, Gruddog," Ray said. "Some of the more descriptive adjectives we use have four letters to them."

Don't get me wrong. Ray conveyed a lot of technical football in his meetings, but in the middle of watching tape he would go off on some pretty graphic tangents. The bottom line was that Ray knew how to reach players, how to keep their attention, which is half the battle in these meetings.

Being a secondary coach for an accomplished defensive guy like George Seifert isn't easy. That's like being a quarterbacks coach for Bill Walsh. But Ray Bob was one of the best field coaches I've ever seen. Besides getting to see him in action while throwing balls to his DBs in practice and pregame warm-ups, I would always make a point of getting together with him during training camp, at lunch or in the evening, and ask him how certain plays we were using on offense look from a defensive perspective.

"Does this play hurt this coverage?" I'd ask him. "Does that play hurt this coverage? Do you feel you can stop this play with that coverage?"

After finishing with the DBs, I'd go over and chart plays for Mike, then, in period three, I'd serve as the quarterback for one-on-one pass-rush drills involving the defensive and offensive linemen. Bobb McKittrick would actually have me call the play in the huddle so his offensive linemen would hear what the protection sounded like under circumstances similar to the way they would hear it in a game. He didn't just want to send them up to the line of scrimmage and say, "Okay, it's you against you.

Ready, set, hut." We'd get in the huddle and I had to call the play just like Joe Montana did: "Red Right 22 Z In! . . . Blue Right F Short 2 Jet Flanker Drive . . . Red Left F Short 3 Jet Flanker Drive Halfback Corner . . . Change Right C Left 72 X Shallow Cross." I had to give the snap count: "On one . . . On two . . . On first sound." Once I got up to the line, I'd say the cadence just like I heard the quarterbacks do it: "Blue 85 . . . Blue 85 . . . 34 . . . Set, hut!"

The center would hike the ball, I'd drop back to pass, and the defensive linemen would rush. We're talking about Charles Haley and three of the best nose tackles in the game-Michael Carter, Jim Burt and Fred Smerlas. Fortunately the same hands-off policy that applied to Joe and the other quarterbacks applied to me, too. Thank God.

Bobb McKittrick is the greatest coach I've ever seen. He is my all-time coaching idol. Bobb was bald and had dark eyebrows.

He looked like Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise. For a guy in his mid-fifties, Bobb was in top physical shape. He was an ex-marine and he was buff-buff and tough.

Whether it was a hundred degrees or cold as hell, he would always wear a short-sleeved shirt and a fishing hat. He might have been the most respected coach on that 49er staff. I can't tell you how many times Coach Seifert would go up to him and ask, "How do we help on blocking this guy? What do you think of this? What do you think of that?" Bobb had bizarre intelligence that he was able to apply to the players. He knew the strengths and weaknesses of every defensive front.

Among the many valuable lessons he taught me was that it's one thing to identify the front; it's another thing to identify the talent level of the personnel within the front. I was always amazed at how, in every game, Bobb could carry thirty-seven different runs and twenty-five or thirty different pass protections. He also was brilliant in terms of self-scouting, where you study your own tendencies to make sure you're not becoming too predictable to the opponent with the plays you call, when you call them, and the formations you use. He'd have running plays out of formations we had only passed from previously. There would always be some tendency breakers. "We've run 200 Jet X Slant six times," he'd say. "It's time for Blue Right F Short 65 Charlie."

You had to ask yourself, How in the hell do you coach all those runs and protections to five guys in four days? Bobb would find a way. He would spend hours breaking down all his own film and drawing every run and every protection by hand.

I used to just marvel at the guy's stamina. I would say, "Bobb, you need any help, man? You need some water? Can I get you anything to eat? How about a biscuit?" He'd just shake his head and keep on working. I don't know how he did it.

Mike's meeting room was right across the hall from McKittrick's office. I was in Mike's meetings all through training camp, but a lot of times during the season I would slide out of those quarterback sessions and go over to Bobb's meetings,

which normally lasted a lot longer. With all those extra-large bodies, there usually wasn't enough room for another person in there, but Bobb kept the door open and I would just sit outside and take notes. The amount of knowledge he had was unbelievable. I'd get fourteen, fifteen pages of notes out of one forty-five-minute meeting that he had with his linemen. Through that whole meeting those guys would be leaning forward, eyes wide open, because Bobb knew how to keep it interesting, and they knew that if they paid attention, he was going to make them better players.

When the meeting was over, I'd go help Bobb clean up his office. "That was the damnedest meeting I've ever seen," I would say. I'd have a litany of questions for Bobb, but I was always conscious of bothering the coaches. I figured right after a meeting they would be tired or they would want to get on to their next assignment or they just didn't have the time. But Bobb knew I was really inquisitive and that I was very anxious to see his interpretation of the world. Sometimes he'd actually go out of his way to say, "I know you have questions. What are your questions?"

As smart as Bobb was, he had a real humbleness about him.

When pointing out mistakes in practice, he wouldn't take a direct shot at the players. Instead he would belittle himself. "If we put this on film, I won't even be able to afford to eat at Jack in the Box," he would say. "As a matter of fact, I'll have to go to all-you-can-eat at Ponderosa or Shoney's, just so I can get one meal a day, one meal a week."

Bobb was the same guy every day. He was never yelling. He was never up or down. He was always steady. And he would work with anybody, even if the guy had no chance to make the team. You could pretty much tell who had a chance to make the 49er team. You knew they were going to keep eight linemen and the rest of the seven guys were long shots, yet Bobb would work with the fifteenth guy like he was the first guy. Players respected him for that.

Bobb had the respect of a lot of people around the league, except for defensive linemen. They hated him for the chop blocking and cut blocking he had his linemen do before players were fined for every down block they made. Hell, he had them cross-body blocking people. Bobb would always tell his guys, "You block back high, you block down low . . . and if he's wearing a knee brace, bend it." The linemen would all laugh, but Bobb was serious.

The information I got from him and his meetings came in handy when I would go over the game plan with Steve Young.