Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football (24 page)

Buddy Ryan grew up outside Frederick, Oklahoma, on a farm in desiccated country ringed by low hills. The family lived in a four-room house without plumbing. He was up each morning before first light, dragging himself to the barn to milk the cows—an antiquated, old-time American childhood. Scarcity was his god, as having nothing makes a boy tough. Years later, at training camp, he’d stand in the bathroom and watch the prospects shave. He looked for those who shut the faucet between swipes of the blade. The kids who let the water run were fancy boys and could not be trusted; those who conserved grew up with well water, far from town, and were the sort who would play in pain. The rougher the childhood, the more promising the recruit.

To defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan, you were either an adjective or a number. Here he is with number 55, Otis Wilson, celebrating a victory over the Giants in the second round of the 1986 playoffs.

Buddy played high school football, a tough number who punched above his weight. At sixteen, he joined the National Guard. He needed the money—$40 a month. “Then the sumbitches went and mobilized us,” he told
Sports Illustrated.
This was during the Korean War, when the fighting was hot. He arrived in the vicinity of the 38th Parallel in 1951. At night, he walked the perimeter of camp, a pistol on his hip, his mind filled with formations. Everything about the army, from the barracks to the men marching in rank, reminded him of the game. He was promoted to master sergeant, where he learned to haze the privates, shout in their faces, break ’em down and build ’em up—it was the way of the army, and, long ago, before the sports agent and the union, it was the way of the NFL.

Buddy led a platoon in Korea, saw action, then went home. The G.I. Bill put him through Oklahoma A&M, where he played guard on the football team. A big mouth, he loved nothing more than giving the boys a hard education, turning them from a rabble into a unit. Less than a year after graduation, he was hired to coach a high school football team in Granville, Texas. For Buddy, it never much mattered if he was leading seventeen-year-olds or pros—coaching was the thing, building the unit, taking the hill. Ed McCaskey might ask God to convert the Communists, but Buddy was going to force conversion at the point of a gun, a free runner, a blitz. Everywhere he went, his defenses hurt people, and his teams won games. By 1960, he was climbing the ranks, eventually becoming the defensive coordinator at the University of Buffalo. According to the former Cleveland Browns coach Sam Rutigliano, “Even then, Buddy Ryan was the kind of guy who’d pull the trigger before the target was up.”

In 1968, Buddy was hired as defensive line coach of the New York Jets. He’d stay with the team for several years, but the epiphany came in his second season, as the Jets were preparing for Super Bowl III. Buddy spent the week in meeting rooms, listening as the game plan was laid out by head coach Weeb Ewbank. In describing his strategy, Ewbank kept stressing the same point: We’ve got to protect our quarterback Joe Namath. He’s the key. We lose him, it’s over. “If we gotta block eight, we block eight, but Namath doesn’t get hit.” After about the ninth repetition of this speech, a synapse fired somewhere in Buddy’s brain.
The quarterback!
If Weeb will give up so much to protect this one player, he must be the key. If he protects with five guys, I’ll rush six. If he protects with six, I’ll rush seven. No matter what, I must kill the quarterback! “This clearly made an impression on Buddy,” Jaworski wrote. “He figured that if Weeb thought it was so important to keep Namath from getting hit, then, as a defensive coach, Buddy needed to come up with whatever he could to hit the quarterbacks of other teams.”

The story of Buddy Ryan is the story of this one big idea; the rest is commentary, the steady unfolding of packages, formations, and schemes as the coach fiddled until he found the best way to concuss the quarterback.

In 1974, he took a job with the Vikings, where he helped build the defensive unit that came to be known as the Purple People Eaters. In 1976, he was hired as the defensive coordinator of the Bears. Buddy was forty-five, a barrel-chested, theory-stuffed genius. He wore wire-frame glasses and was constantly sticking his finger in the faces of his players, yelling, smirking, or brushing the sandy hair from his fierce eyes. It was in Chicago that he finally got a chance to flesh out his ideas, mold his troops, run the show.

In many ways, Buddy never stopped being a master sergeant, a hard-ass of the break-’em-down-and-build-’em-up variety. He knew all the tricks of the cult leader, how to sweeten the hours of pain with a scrap of praise, a hand on the neck, a tap on the helmet at the end of practice. In Chicago, he put himself at the center of worship. He was charismatic, intense. You’d follow him to the edge of your strength and sanity because you wanted to be acknowledged. It did not matter where you were drafted or how much you got paid: Buddy made you earn your spot. Everyone started at the bottom, where you were mocked and humiliated, name-called and worked over, until he could see you had broken and were ready to submit. Then he remade you into a killer, a kamikaze who would fly into the aircraft carrier. “Buddy operated by numbers,” Plank told me. “There were no names. You were either an adjective, and not a very complimentary one, or you were the number on your jersey. I was 46. Being a number was an honor. It meant you weren’t an adjective. Here comes this master sergeant from the Korean War and he started to develop and encourage pride in being part of a special unit, a defensive squad.”

“Buddy had a grading system when we watched film,” the linebacker Jeff Fisher, currently the head coach of the St. Louis Rams, told the writer Steve Delsohn. “He either said nothing about you, which meant you did your job. Or he said you were horse shit, a dumbass, or an asshole. If you were horse shit, you missed a tackle. If you were a dumbass, you made a mental error and let up a big play. If you were an asshole, you were probably going to be on the streets pretty soon.”

Singletary: “The NFL didn’t have limitations as to what a coach could do back then, so Buddy would break a man down of everything he had, then allow him to build himself back up. There is something psychologically brainwashing about this process.”

Singletary added a kicker that tells you he was among the brainwashed: “Underneath it all, you knew that Buddy loved you.”

“He would beat you down, beat you down, beat you down, then build you back the way he wanted,” Jim Morrissey told me. “I’d have done anything for Buddy Ryan.”

Asked when the defense coalesced, every Bear identified the same moment. “It was in ’78, Buddy’s first or second year with the team,” Plank said. “We hadn’t played well the day before. In fact, the defense had been pushed around. Buddy came in smoking a pipe, looking serene. We went into the defensive meeting room. Now, there’s a line used in the military: they don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care. Buddy was breaking down the game. Then he stopped and looked at us and said, ‘You know what? I’m just disappointed. I thought we were better than that. I thought we would give more effort.’ He said, ‘If there’s one thing that I have a hard time with as a coach, it’s turning on a film and seeing players playing below their ability.’ And as he was talking, a tear rolled down his face. I’m getting emotional just remembering it. We became a family at that moment. After that, whatever he asked us to do, no question, we’d do it.”

In his first years in Chicago, Buddy was coaching mostly mediocre players. On many afternoons, the Bears were outclassed. It was a moment of asymmetrical despair that led to the 46. Playing on Monday Night Football in 1981, Detroit defeated the Bears 48–17. It was a time for radical solutions. To compete, he had to improvise. “He was experimenting with defenses,” Plank told me. “He was going wild, looking for some way to generate a pass rush. You’d go into a meeting and see a bunch of crazy formations on the board. He’d go through each and say, ‘Okay, here’s what we’re going to try.’ And someone would say, ‘What do you call it?’ Buddy didn’t use X’s and O’s. When he put things on the board, it was numbers. He named formations after the number in the center of the formation. So one morning we go in and sure enough there’s a new defense with my number in the middle: the 46.”

“Ryan … moved balls-out safety Doug Plank to middle linebacker,” Tim Layden writes in
Blood, Sweat, and Chalk.
“He called it the 46 because that was Plank’s jersey number, and it would challenge evolving NFL offenses like no defense had before.”

In the standard defensive alignment, called the 4–3, the center was not covered. This usually allowed him to double-team a rusher. But Buddy moved a linebacker to the line of scrimmage, then shifted Plank into the gap left by the repurposed man. This meant none of Buddy’s rushers could be double-teamed. On a blitz, another linebacker or safety would creep up to the line and hide behind a big defensive end. As a result, there were more rushers than blockers, which is why, in 1985, it often looked as if the Bears had too many players on the field. Buddy called the hidden blitzers “free runners.” “Confuse the offense until they have no idea where you’re coming from—that’s what creates a free runner,” Plank told me. “A free runner is an unblocked defensive player, and he gets to the quarterback so much faster. He doesn’t have to shed a blocker and he’s running full speed. When a free runner hits the quarterback, the quarterback flies through the air.”

Here’s Ron Jaworski’s jargon-filled description of the 46 defense: “Buddy moved Plank from his safety position into the box, as if he were a linebacker. The other two safeties, Fencik and Fisher, were also sent in at key moments to apply additional pressure. Something was different about the Bears down lineman. The weak side defensive end lined up outside the offensive tackle in a wider pass position, while the other defensive end and defensive tackles set up directly over the guards and the center. This became known as a ‘reduced front’ and it forced the interior offensive linemen into awkward and difficult one-on-one matchups. It became the defining feature of the 46.”

Here’s how the same defense was experienced by a fan: in fulfilling an age-old playground fantasy, Buddy had decided, fuck it, and seemingly sent all his guys after the quarterback with a simple mission:
Nail him.

There was an inherent weakness in Buddy’s system. Or as the competing coaches put it, “The 46 is unsound.” In overloading the line, the Bears sacrificed coverage elsewhere. Look at film from 1984 or 1985, you see receivers wide open downfield. Buddy’s gamble was that the quarterbacks would be first too hurried, then too terrified, and finally too beat up to find the open men. As with Danny White, they would have just one thought on their mind: get rid of the ball. “The 46 became a fucking nightmare to coach against,” Bruce Coslet, a defensive coordinator for the Cincinnati Bengals in the 1980s told Tim Layden. “It was something nobody had seen and nobody knew how to prepare for it. Buddy changed football with that defense.”

“Scary”—that’s how Jaworski described it. “Abnormal. Different. It was blitzing. It was chaos. It was impossible to prepare for. Just impossible.”

The 46 was the logic behind the modern T-formation come full circle: Halas had raised the quarterback to such a place of preeminence, turned him into such a finely calibrated piece of offensive machinery, that he became almost too valuable for the team’s own good. Rather than cover everyone, Buddy would short-circuit the offense by taking out the QB. As the boxers used to say: Kill the brain and the body will follow.

The 46 defense: The quarterback-rattling alignment as drawn for me by Doug Plank, who explained the mechanics in an accompanying note: “This was the original alignment for the 46,” wrote Plank. “The entire defensive line was shifted down with a defensive tackle playing over the center. The 2 linebackers aligned over the tight end. One of these linebackers always rushed the qb. My position was later replaced by Singletary, and Duerson replaced [Jeff] Fisher. Jeff and I could drop back and play deep 1/2 on some coverages. Jeff and I blitzed, covered outside receivers, and had run support duties. Every assignment was based on what the offense did. If they stayed to block, we would have coverage duties. If the running back ran routes, we would blitz.”