Category Archives: football stealth

Here’s the play….

There was a recent headline on the website Yahoo!Sports asking if college football is “ready to get out of the stone age” by implementing in-game coach-to-player communication via tiny speakers inside players’ helmets. By copying that NFL system in effect since 1994, college coaches could further remove judgement calls from quarterbacks—who just happen to be the fellows in the cockpit of action—and endorse coaches’ control-freak impulses. There even have been reports that, unlike the NFL shut-off deadline of ending communication with 15 seconds left on the play clock, college coaches might be allowed to continue giving directions as a play unfolds.

“Joe’s open at the 10-yard line. Throw to him!”

My first thought, as a card-carrying member of the stone age, was of appalling micromanagement. Autocracy. Something between a general discouragement of athletes using their heads and complete player subservience. Isn’t decision-making an important role in individual performance, a demonstration of competitive awareness that abets physical skill?

“Interfering with the quarterback destroys his confidence,” Col. Red Blaik, who won three national championships during his 18-year career coaching Army, once argued. “He loses his faith in the coach….If the coach has worked properly with his quarterback [in training, the quarterback] knows more about running the works than does the coach.”

OK, Blaik coached in the 1940s and ‘50s. Ancient history. By the time Cleveland Browns coach Paul Brown began shuttling “messenger guards” into games with play calls in the mid-50s, the evolution toward robotic quarterbacking had begun in earnest. Brown, in fact, was the first to attempt the use of in-helmet walkie-talkies to decree a specific play, though those primitive gadgets sometimes picked up local radio stations and air-traffic controllers and soon were discarded.

That obviously didn’t stop the march toward dictating real-time orders from the sideline, leaving only the implementation of actions to the on-field cast. By the 1970s, Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry was shuttling his quarterbacks into the huddle on successful plays, a system that neither Roger Staubach nor Craig Morton appreciated.

But typically, critics—fans and commentators—so often ascribe blame for failure to the workers, not the boss. So the modern coach figuratively calls for a forward pass of the buck. (Once, when coach John McKay was asked what he thought of the on-field “execution” of his forever bumbling Tampa Bay Bucs, a first-year expansion team in 1978, he said, “I’m in favor of it.”)

It is difficult to imagine that, for decades, college football had a rule banning any instructions relayed from the bench—subject to a 10-yard penalty. The NFL, too, had such a prohibition until 1944. The first college coach to use baseball-like signals to telegraph plays from the sideline, in 1967, reportedly was Ohio State’s Woody Hayes. (Not that Hayes’ schemes appeared especially creative with a team known for its predictable “three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust” attack.)

Understandably, coaches seek as much control over developments as possible, given that retaining their jobs depends on winning. A belt-and-suspenders approach therefore has come to predominate. Coaches are electronically attached via headsets to assistants who are doing reconnaissance of the enemy from the press box. Signals are sent from the sidelines on “picture boards”—the photo of a bald-headed celebrity (no hair=no running backs) indicates the formation to the players; a drawing of an elephant might signify as so-called “heavy package” of extra tight-ends for short yardage; pictures of books could telegraph that players “read” the defensive alignment. Coaches wave arms, point fingers, pat their heads to relay instructions.

Plus, of course, there is the ubiquitous sight of the coach peering intently at a large laminated card on which he has various options. (A silly social media post, from some Brits self-styled as the Exploding Heads, just surfaced after the Super Bowl, wherein a English bloke accustomed to soccer wonders at many American football oddities, including, “Why is the coach holding a take-away menu?”)

All this military-like maneuvering, and especially the need for secrecy, of course has intensified after the University of Michigan was accused this past season of stealing opponents’ signs. Prominent NCAA coaches have contended that electronically transmitting commands—coach’s lips-to-player’s-ears—would solve the problem and, after some testing at a few bowl games, ought to be implemented forthwith.

From a stone-age perspective, that sounds like giving the coach a joystick and closing in on Esports.

NFL: Stealth and surveillance

Once again, the NFL has evoked Mad Magazine’s goofy Cold War-inspired cartoon “Spy vs. Spy.” How else to consider the recent heavy-handed punishment of New York Giants head coach Ben McAdoo? When his league-approved encrypted communication device, which pipes his voice covertly into his quarterback’s helmet, malfunctioned, the dastardly McAdoo resorted to the use of a walkie-talkie.

McAdoo was hit with a $50,000 fine and the Giants assessed an additional $150,000 penalty, as well as a degradation in their 2017 draft order. All because the walkie-talkie, unlike the NFL’s authorized CoachComm system, did not have a cut-off switch to discontinue the coach’s play-calling instructions with 15 seconds remaining on the play clock.

That theoretically unfair advantage over the Dallas Cowboys, who still were operating with the cut-off switch, nevertheless led to a drive-ending interception against the Giants. Still, the league must be forever vigilant in assuring a level playing field! Paranoia reigns among coaches, whose inherent tendency toward micromanagement—as a function of self-preservation—pairs with advancing technology to emphasize stealth and surveillance.

For a sport that sees itself as a simulation of war, with its blitzes and bombs and field generals, clandestine strategizing is of great consequence. Thus the strict rules against the use of, say, Navajo code talkers or Enigma machines.

(Enigma machine)

It’s all secrecy vs. chicanery—with teams, for decades, bivouacking in huddles to guard again pilfered campaign intelligence, and more recently deploying sideline pantomimes and the helmet implant.

Football wasn’t far beyond its rugby roots when Washington D.C.’s Gallaudet University, a school for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, devised the first huddle in 1892 to shield Gallaudet’s hand signals from opponents, themselves often hearing impaired and therefore conversant in signing.

For a century afterwards, huddles worked wonderfully for all players because quarterbacks—without the coaches’ direct involvement—called plays out of earshot of the opposition. Then, in the 1950s, Cleveland Browns coach Paul Brown, not satisfied to leave strategy to his soldiers on the field, began using “messenger guards” to shuttle play calls into his quarterback.

There were tales that wise-guy Browns quarterback George Ratterman once told rookie guard Joe Skibinski to “go back and get another play” when he didn’t like the one delivered from the sideline. So Brown took the next step, recruiting two Ohio inventors to build the first radio receiver into Ratterman’s helmet. That was in 1956.

“My helmet acted as an antenna,” Ratterman told me in a telephone conversation a few years before his death in 2007. “And I had to turn a certain way to hear, so I’d be standing outside the huddle, revolving around, trying to tune in the signal.”

Worse, Ratterman said, in a game against Detroit, the Lions got wind of the experiment, “so the Lions kept saying to each other, ‘Kick the helmet. Kick the helmet.’ And I kept trying to explain to them that my head was inside the helmet,” Ratterman said.

(George Ratterman’s wired helmet–without his head)

“Then, in Chicago,” he recalled, “we played a benefit game at Soldier Field against the Bears and they were planning all kinds of sets and displays for a halftime show. All during the first half, I was picking up walkie-talkies of these workers, setting up the displays. I couldn’t hear Brown at all, but I kept hearing stuff like, ‘Hey, Joe, set that up over there.’”

Brown’s messengers soon were employed by other coaches and, in the 1970s, Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry began shuffling quarterbacks after every play, something neither Roger Staubach nor Craig Morton much appreciated. As play-calling came to be wrested almost completely away from players by coaches, the NFL moved to provide direct communication that could cut through stadium noise via CoachComm, which became standard equipment in 1994. (Quarterbacks wired to receive transmissions from the coach’s headset wear small green dots on their helmets, and a fan of secret agents might make an immediate connection to the CIA. In a 1998 novel, veteran journalist Jim Lehrer wrote that CIA snoops had purple dots affixed to their license plates as a special privilege to warn off police and tow trucks.)

There are, meanwhile, many instances of coaches relaying signals by using coded placards, and coaches’ crafty hand-over-the-mouth delivery of commands. Because spies are everywhere.

In his 2007 book, “The GM,” celebrated sportswriter Tom Callahan recounted a classic undercover scheme in a 1977 game between the Colts (then in Baltimore) and New England Patriots. With Baltimore trailing late in the game and stuck with a third-and-18 on its own 12-yard line, the Colts had Bobby Colbert—then head coach at hearing-impaired Gallaudet—read the lips of New England’s defensive coordinator as he called for “Double safety delayed blitz.”

Colbert relayed the message to the Baltimore bench, which passed it on to Colts quarterback Bert Jones, who changed the play and threw an 88-yard touchdown pass for the winning score.

And that is why the always wary NFL, with Ben McAdoo’s walkie-talkie misbehavior, ruled that up with this it would not put.