Do You Love Football?! (12 page)

To help Steve with the learning process, I'd play a game of Twenty Questions with him. For each one Steve answered wrong, I got a point. For each right answer, he got a point. One time he began the game by getting twelve right answers in a row, so I decided to reach a little deeper into my knowledge pool.

"Okay, Steve, if it's a 38 F, and they play a 59 defense, what's the right tackle's call?" I asked.

"What the hell you talking about?" Steve said.

"That's the question. It's in the game plan. I get the point."

I know what you're thinking. How can someone who aspired to be a quarterbacks coach and an offensive coordinator, a guy who was always told that that was the career path to follow, gravitate to an offensive line coach? It all goes back to Walt Harris. When I was at Pacific he made me learn about the tackles, tight ends, blocking combinations and protection responsibilities. When I had to sit in on all those offensive line meetings, I learned a whole new wealth of information. I began to see a much bigger picture of the offense, and I realized how important that would be in the future. Once I became a coordinator, I wanted to be able to communicate with the offensive line coach. I wanted to be able to speak the same language, to understand what he understood. I knew that it was vital to have a top-notch offensive line coach who is going to give you a strong opinion because that's his expertise. Show me a championship team and I'll show you a stud of an offensive line coach on the staff, such as Bobb McKittrick in San Francisco, Tom Lovat in Green Bay, Alex Gibbs in Denver and our own Bill Muir in Tampa Bay. At the same time, you don't always want to have to agree with your line coach just because you lack the knowledge to have an opinion of your own.

By studying offensive-line play, I was able to learn a whole new perspective of football. Forget about going to coaching clinics and watching and listening while some guy draws up routes. I wanted to know, "How did you keep that great speedrushing end out of your backfield? How did you let your quarterback take a seven-step drop and still throw the ball? How do you get five guys into a route? What if they bring two blitzers from over there and two from over there? Where do you go with the ball? What happens when this linebacker stems in the A gap? Is it a hard call? Is it a gap call?"

I wanted to learn the nuances of the protections and of the blocking schemes. I wanted to be able to have the authority to walk into any meeting of the offensive football team, whether it be with the running backs or with the tight ends, and understand exactly what was being discussed. When you know what the hell you're talking about in every phase of offensive or defensive football, it gives you more respect with the players involved. When Brad Johnson is throwing passes in practice to Keyshawn Johnson and Keenan McCardell, you don't stand there and say, "Gee, Brad, nice throw! Super job! Nice catch, Keyshawn! Great throw, Brad! Nice catch, Keenan!" That's not coaching. That's cheerleading.

If you're going to be a coordinator, you have to coordinate the entire offense. You bring your staff together and you recogxize everything about the team you're going to play-the personnel, the fronts. You're the one who goes around the table in a staff meeting and says, "You bring your ideas to the table, you bring your ideas to the table. Let's adjust the problems, let's react to what we see here, and I'll make the final call." You have to assume the responsibility of determining what your offense is going to do in the end, but to make the final call, you'd better know what the hell you're talking about and you'd better have a staff with a lot of ideas.

Even after I went on to Green Bay, Philadelphia and Oakland, I'd always make a point to find Bobb McKittrick when we would be at the same event where NFL coaches always gather in the offseason, like the Scouting Combine at Indianapolis or the Senior Bowl college-star game in Mobile, Alabama. I'd sit right next to him as he was watching the offensive linemen work out. I'd start bombarding him with about thirty questions.

"You guys were playing Cincinnati last year against the 34 defense, and you were fanning the backside of your protection," I'd say. "Was that a rule or was that an adjustment?" Bobb would say, "Do you watch any of your film or are you just watching all of our films?" But he would answer my questions, and I think he used to appreciate that I was so interested in him and what he was doing. Bobb was my guru. He was my guy.

I spoke with him a lot by phone. He called me all the time in 1998, my first season with the Raiders. He would maybe critique something he saw or say something he felt needed to be said. One day he called after a victory. He talked about our game and congratulated us. Then he changed the subject.

"Jon, I'm dying," he said. "I've got terminal cancer and I'm dying. I just wanted to let you know, because I don't want you to be like me. I want you to be with your kids. It's not all about football, breaking down film. Be with your family. Don't let this game consume you until it's over for you, like I let it do to me. There's more to life than this."

What Bobb told me made an impression. I always make a point to remind myself of my wife and kids. I don't know how long I'm going to coach, but right now it's all I want to do. At the same time, I'm aware of how precious life is and how vulnerable we all really are, even if we try to convince ourselves otherwise. To see someone physically deteriorate in front of your eyes-someone you always thought of as being so strong, so tough, so invincible-was horrible. Bobb's passing was a huge loss for me. There are times I think that every game I coach successfully is a testament to Bobb.

After Super Bowl XXXVII my mom got a phone call from Bobb's wife, Teckla. She didn't know how to reach me, so she called my mom to say, "I just think it's important that I let you know if Bobb were here today he would be calling to say how proud he was of Jon. I know he thought a lot of him. Bobb's only regret was that he never got to coach with Jon."

I could not think of a higher compliment.

SEVEN
When Opportunity Calls, You Answer on the First Ring

A S THE 1990 SEASON wound down-with the 49ers headed to a third straight NFC Championship Game, which we would lose to the Giants on a last-second field goal-Mike Holmgren lined up an interview for me for an assistant coaching job on Paul Hackett's staff at the University of Pittsburgh. Paul had been the offensive coordinator of the 49ers before Mike, and they knew each other in coaching circles. Jerry Attaway, who was the 49ers' strength coach, had worked with Hackett, and Paul had asked Mike and Jerry to keep an eye out for someone who could help him work with quarterbacks while also being the receivers coach at Pitt.

My first reaction was that the 49ers were just looking to get rid of me-that after only one year I had overstayed my welcome in San Francisco. Mike assured me that that wasn't the case.

"Hey, look, you need to go coach," he said. "You're a young guy. You've learned a lot of football. You've got to go coach.

And Paul Hackett's a guy that has a lot of theory that you believe in, that you've been trained to coach in."

Coach Holmgren said something else that really stuck with me: "If I ever do get a head coaching job, I'd feel better considering hiring you if you had some experience coaching as opposed to taking notes." If he would have told me to go to Binford Elementary School in Bloomington, Indiana, to coach quarterbacks, I would have done it, because I was going to do whatever Mike told me to do. I also knew that this was sound advice. As a young guy I had to take what I had learned and go apply it and see if I could get some results. You can only be a scribe for so long.

We were also talking about the Pitt Panthers. The list of players they had sent to the NFL was so impressive, it was hard to believe-Hugh Green, Rickey Jackson, Mark May, Dan Marino. That's a big-time football program. BIG TIME!

The interview with Coach Hackett was set up before our next-to-last game of the season, at home against New Orleans. The only problem was that Cindy Brooks, my wife-to-be, had ?own in to visit me all the way from Atlanta-where she had moved after graduating from Tennessee to work as an assistant director of residents' life at Berry College. As soon as she arrived at my apartment, I had to tell her I was getting on a plane for Pittsburgh. Cindy was not happy.

By that time I had scraped together enough money to buy a car. It was an old white Delta 88 that the players called "Uncle Buck," because it looked like the big, beat-up bomb John Candy drove in that movie. As if I hadn't already done enough to put a strain on our relationship, I had Cindy drive me to the airport in "Uncle Buck."

I landed in Pittsburgh at about 6:30 P.M., checked into my hotel near the campus, and waited for a call from Coach Hackett, who was supposed to take me out to dinner that night.

Finally, at about 10:30, the phone rang.

"Let's go out to dinner," Paul said.

Little did I know that I was dealing with a real late-night kind of guy, one of the all-time grinders in the history of the business. Paul and his wife, Elizabeth, picked me up and we ate at a nearby restaurant. When it got to be around midnight, I began to feel a little tired and a little concerned because we hadn't really talked much about football up to that point.

"Let's go back to my house," Paul said, looking fresh, like he was ready to start a new day. He has one of the greatest personalities I've ever been around. Always up. High energy. Positive.

No fear. Elizabeth is the same way.

Paul had one of those old, huge homes with the classic architecture that you don't see much of anymore, right on campus. The university had thrown it in as a perk when he took the head coaching job. It must have had seventeen bedrooms and stood five stories tall. I mean, this place was so big, it needed elevators.

Inside this huge house was a huge office that had film projectors and grease boards, everything he needed to keep working after hours. Paul used it as his laboratory, which would serve as the blueprint of the laboratory that I would put in my house in Tampa many years later. That was where the interview would take place.

"So, Jon," Paul said, "what are you guys doing against two-deep?"

I was ready for that, because I had studied all of the 49ers' audibles for Cover Nine, which was how we referred to two-deep zone coverage: Jet Right T 15, 50 Bingo Pick, 20 Y. I went up to one of the grease boards and started drawing these plays.

I could draw the fronts, the coverages, the progressions of the quarterback's reads. I was ready.

"Ho, ho, ho, ho," he said, stopping me in mid-diagram. "Tell me about the feet of the quarterback. Tell me about his footwork as he reads these plays."

I didn't know how to respond because, although I had looked at all of those audibles, I never learned them from the standpoint of the quarterback's technique. Just then it dawned me that I wasn't nearly as ready as I thought I was. I suddenly remembered what Joe Montana had told me about Coach Hackett before I left: "This guy knows what he's talking about.

And the interview is going to be an attack. He's going to attack everything that you think you know, and you'd better be ready for any kind of question as it pertains to the quarterback. Any kind of question! If you think you love quarterback play, wait until you meet this guy."

I wasn't even close to ready. Coach Hackett went on to ask me even more basic questions that I couldn't answer, like exactly how a quarterback should take the snap from the center. And it made sense for him to want to find out how much I knew about these areas because I was being interviewed to coach quarterbacks, as well as receivers. I was supposed to be a guy who could technically teach an eighteen-year-old kid from Aliquippa, or wherever he was from, how to get underneath the center and then get away explosively. I had to be able to teach him about the simple acceptance of the snap, beginning with how far apart his feet were supposed to be. Are you going to have a heel-to-toe relationship? Are you going to be square in your footwork? Are you going to take a punch step and then reach, or are you just going to screw that left foot in and pivot off of it? I had never thought about those things.

Being around Coach Hackett was like being around a walking, talking textbook on quarterback play.

What I had discovered during that interview was that I had learned a lot of good plays and a lot of good protections and a lot of good schemes, but I needed to become more technical as it pertained to the quarterback. I needed to learn more about the mechanics of quarterback play. I had been watching and listening to Mike Holmgren talk to Joe Montana and Steve Young about watching out for this blitz and that blitz, and I wasn't really thinking about the mechanical aspects of the job. Mike did have some daily footwork lessons, but it was nothing like what you would give some eighteen- or nineteen-year-old kid.

And why would it be? He was working with two of the most talented quarterbacks in the history of the game. Plus maybe I was just so consumed with strategy that I had slighted myself by overlooking the fundamentals of the position.

Either way, I think Coach Hackett sensed that and he went in for the kill.

When I flew back from Pittsburgh I was convinced that I knew nothing about quarterbacks, that I was a total moron. But I couldn't have done too poorly, because he did tell me that I had the job. I couldn't wait to get back to tell Cindy the good news when she picked me up at the airport. I was ready to ask her to marry me because I had what I felt was my first legitimate, bigtime coaching job. I had been a grunt at Tennessee, a grunt at Southeast Missouri State, a grunt at Pacific, a grunt at San Francisco. When I got the job at Pitt, I felt I could be a good husband.

I could be a professional workingman. I was twenty-seven at the time, a few years sooner than I had planned to marry but close enough.

But when I landed, no one was at the airport to pick me up.

I couldn't afford a telephone, so I had no way to check if Cindy was at my apartment. I just figured that she had left me. I could just hear her saying, "I've followed this guy to Southeast Missouri. I followed him to the University of the Pacific. Now we spend all the money that both of us have to fly me all the way out to San Francisco, and he can't even be here with me?" I didn't have any cash for a cab, but I did have a credit card, which I was able to use to rent a car and drive myself home. As soon as I walked in the door, I found Cindy crying. It turned out that "Uncle Buck" had broken down on her way to the airport. It was really cold, as it tends to get in San Francisco, and she had almost frozen to death trying to get back to my apartment. A day or so later, I drove her to a jeweler. I took almost all the money I had saved, about $1,200 or $1,300, and I got her a .45-carat marquis-shaped diamond ring in a nice little setting. Cindy wore that ring until after my final season as head coach of the Raiders, when I replaced it with a much bigger diamond.