The Score Takes Care of Itself (12 page)

On his right side he could see and react to a defender bearing down on him—throw the football away, scramble, or at least cover up for the impending blow. The left side was another story. It’s called the blind side for a reason.

Consequently, our blocker on the blind side became almost second in importance to the quarterback because he was Montana’s de facto personal security guard, the lineman of last resort. If he blew it, Joe got nailed with all sorts of unpleasant consequences: lost yardage, an interception, a fumble, or, worst of all, bodily harm.

Traditionally, a blind-side pass rusher—the outside linebacker—would be defused, blocked, or delayed by a running back or tight end. However, this was made more challenging as linebackers became bigger and quicker. But “bigger and quicker” doesn’t describe a man who arrived in the NFL in my third season: New York Giants outside linebacker Lawrence Taylor—“L.T.”—a player who appeared to have more of what it took to put an end to my increasingly successful passing offense.

As an outside linebacker—the blind-side attacker—Taylor was one of those players who changed the game forever because of his ferocious aggressiveness coupled with phenomenal physical gifts, all part of an astoundingly well-honed physique: 6 feet 3 inches, 237 pounds—most of it angry muscle.

He was a paradox: a massive human wrecking ball who was lightning quick and seemingly unstoppable because he could virtually flick a backfield blocker out of his way to execute an unimpeded assault on an often unsuspecting and defenseless quarterback. In 1985 Taylor executed a blind-side tackle that mangled the bones in the right leg of Super Bowl quarterback Joe Theismann. His career was over before the gurney arrived to transport him off the field to the emergency room. Everyone who saw it happen on
Monday Night Football
—the leg bones visible through the skin, blood spurting—remembers the nausea they experienced. And plenty of quarterbacks and coaches saw it.

It was a manifestation of the violence that Taylor created and the fear he instilled in a quarterback’s mind. He wasn’t bashful about furthering his malevolent image as a mindless brute who sought to mug the quarterback. He publicly bragged about his attack on Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Ron Jaworski: “I hit Jaworski . . . with an over-the-head ax job. I thought his dick was going to drop in the dirt.”

Among other things, Taylor was trying to instill fear in the minds of opposing quarterbacks even before kickoff—to get each one looking over his shoulder for Lawrence Taylor rather than for receivers. A quarterback who gets skittish or gun-shy is finished. It takes a lot to get into a great quarterback’s mind, to really scare him. Most are not afraid to take a hit. But that changes completely when you get hit by a truck.

When Lawrence Taylor joined the New York Giants under head coach Bill Parcells, I perceived the threat to our organization’s system very quickly. Taylor had the potential to shut down my pass-based offense. It was evident that its viability was directly linked to our ability to stop Lawrence Taylor from getting to Joe Montana’s body or into his mind.

Hoping that one of our running backs or a tight end weighing fifty pounds less than the Giants’ blind-side backer could stop him was unrealistic. Additionally, my system used the tight end and running backs as receivers. Tying them down to block would greatly diminish the potential of our pass-based offense.

A solution was imperative but not evident. The most likely candidate to take on the burden was our left tackle, Dan Audick, who was closest to the area Taylor would come stampeding through on his way to Montana. Unfortunately, Dan was no match for Taylor—he was shorter, not as strong or quick, and unlikely to do much damage. I decided to make a bold move—in reality, a countermove to L.T. and the damage he could inflict.

I decided to make our left guard, John Ayers, playing next to the
center
, the designated defensive player who would stop Lawrence Taylor. Immediately after the snap he would check to see if anyone was attacking over center and then step back and to his left in preparation for a serious collision.

John Ayers was bigger and stronger (6 feet 5 inches, 270 pounds) but not quicker than Taylor. Importantly, John seemed to have a low center of gravity, which made it very difficult to knock him off his feet or push him around. He was a formidable presence.

I put John under the tutelage of Bobb McKittrick, our extremely talented offensive line coach, who reconfigured our assignments in preparation for an NFC play-off game at Candlestick Park against the New York Giants and Lawrence Taylor. It would be a sumo wrestler (John Ayers) trying to stop the rampage of a Brahma bull (Lawrence Taylor).

And it worked.

At first, Lawrence didn’t even know what had hit him. Boom! When he realized that he couldn’t move John Ayers around at will, he even tried attacking from the other side to avoid our creatively utilized left guard. But now Joe Montana could see him coming and react accordingly. The blind-side threat was neutralized.

Regardless of context, competitive endeavors at the highest level are fluid and ever-changing and constantly present new challenges requiring novel solutions. The advent of a Lawrence Taylor in the NFL and its existential threat to my offensive philosophy is no different from the kind of challenges a company faces regularly from competitors. When a threat like this occurs, we cannot allow ourselves to hope for the best or wait to see how bad the damage might be. A leader must be perceptive and respond swiftly.

When Lawrence Taylor entered the NFL, not everyone understood how much his presence changed things. I did. In fact, because our system relied so heavily on the pass, more so than any other team in NFL, Taylor posed the greatest threat to the San Francisco 49ers.

I created a countermove within our organization that blocked the threat. At least momentarily. But all solutions are only temporary. They last until your competitor makes a meaningful countermove to your own countermove. At which time it’s your turn again. They key is to quickly recognize the nature of the threat and then to creatively and expeditiously respond to it. Otherwise, the game will be over before it begins.

“Roaring back!” would have been a perfect slogan for my third season as head coach of the 49ers: After a torturous and losing second season, the San Francisco 49ers responded in year three by winning the Super Bowl for the first time in their history.

Unfortunately, “Roaring Back!” was the official team motto, one I approved and liked, for the
second
season—a year in which we were outscored by almost one hundred points, suffered through that excruciating eight-game losing streak, lost key players to major injuries, and ended up in next-to-last place in the NFC West division with a 6-10 record.

One unhappy fan sent a special delivery letter to 49er headquarters suggesting that instead of “Roaring Back!” a more appropriate slogan for our second season would be “Don’t Get Your Hopes Up!” Nevertheless, my hopes were up at the conclusion of our second year. Here’s why and how it led to a Super Bowl championship thirteen months later.

Progress, or lack thereof, in sports and business can be measured in a variety of ways, some much more subtle than others. Often it takes a keen eye and a strong stomach to dig through the “ruins” of your results for meaningful facts. A season’s won-lost record (or your market share, sales figures, stock price) may not—will not—tell you what you need to know to be fully informed about the strength of your organization. Thus, I looked for clues that might indicate whether we were moving in the right direction at the right speed and, if not, what we needed to do to address the problems. In this instance, I wanted to determine what our second season’s 6-10 record really meant—good, bad, or otherwise.

I also knew from experience that it is often difficult to assess these interior, or buried, signs of progress or dysfunction, strength or weakness, because we become transfixed by the big prize—winning a championship, getting a promotion, achieving a yearly quota, and all the rest. When that goal is attained, a common mistake is to assume things are fine. Conversely, when you or the organization fall short of the goal, the letdown can be so severe you’re blinded to substantive information indicating that success may be closer than you would imagine.

Either way—delight or despair amid the accompanying din of fans (or shareholders)—you prevent yourself from searching for the truth hidden within the numbers. I could easily have done that myself, because the second season became absolute hell at times. You’ll recall that I decided to hand in my resignation on the flight back from Miami. Instead, I waited until the season ended to conduct a comprehensive evaluation that would give me an accurate perspective—a sort of “state of the union” report on my second year as head coach of the San Francisco 49ers.

I stuck my nose into the task of analyzing year-end statistics along with empirical evidence as it applied to my Standard of Performance. What I found, both encouraging and discouraging, set the stage for winning Super Bowl XVI thirteen months later.

Overall, we had won only six games during my second season, and even those wins had been overshadowed by our free fall during the eight-game losing streak. If those six victories had come at the end of the season, fans would have been eagerly anticipating the future. However, the wins had been split in two by the eight consecutive defeats. All that fans and many others saw was the long losing streak and the two losses that closed out our season.

What generally got overlooked was the fact that we had won more games—six—than in the previous two seasons combined (four)
.
Furthermore, before disaster struck—eight straight losses—we had beaten New Orleans, St. Louis, and the New York Jets. Then Atlanta had taken us down, then the Rams, Cowboys, Rams (again), Tampa Bay, Detroit, Green Bay, and the painful loss to Miami.

But two particular things stood out about the eight losses: We had eventually broken out of the losing streak with our spirits intact, and five of our defeats during the bad stretch had been by five points or less. (Winning those close games would have given the 49ers one of the best records in NFL that year.)

The 49ers went on to win three of our final five games, which was promising because in that late-season “nothing-to-gain” circumstance it would have been easy for players to throttle down their efforts. In spite of our miserable situation, the team did not quit. This was an important fact to assess in evaluating the emerging prospects and character of the players individually and as a unit. They seemed to have something special inside. Perhaps it was heart; perhaps it was my Standard of Performance. In fact it was both.

In continuing my year-end review it became apparent that our offense had started to jell—tied for eleventh overall in the NFL for points scored; up from sixteenth the year before; up from twenty-eighth (dead last in the NFL) the year prior to my arrival—a positive trend line.

The statistics also showed that quarterback Steve DeBerg, although intelligent and able, had a tendency to throw interceptions at crucial moments. This was a fatal flaw on his résumé; controlling the ball—i.e., few interceptions overall and none at critical moments—was central to my offensive philosophy of controlling the ball with the pass.

Conversely, the numbers indicated that as Joe Montana was gradually worked in as our starting quarterback he was 60 percent less likely to be intercepted. (DeBerg was intercepted 5.3 percent of the time when he passed; Montana, 3.3 percent.) Additionally, Montana had established himself as our acknowledged on-field leader when he led the extraordinary comeback against New Orleans. I had identified my quarterback of the future. This was meaningful: One of the most valuable components of our future success was now in place.

Another fact that was overshadowed by our 6-10 season was the loss of Paul Hofer, one of our primary offensive threats because of his great ability to both run and catch the ball. Paul had been injured in an early-season 59-14 loss to the Dallas Cowboys and was out for the year.

I knew that he would return fully recovered for the upcoming third season and greatly complement our emerging offensive stars: Earl Cooper, a rookie running back/receiver, was second in the NFL with eighty-three catches; Dwight Clark was third with eighty-two receptions. (This explains, in part, why Joe Montana led
all
NFL quarterbacks with a .645 completion percentage.) You can understand why I was delighted by those important statistics found in the ruins of our “bad” second season.

The defense was a different story. It had gotten worse since I had taken over and was one of the most porous defensive units in the NFL—only two teams had given up more points during the season than the 49ers—but here again I took a long and hard look at all the evidence and information.

Early in the season we had lost one of the best athletes on our team, defensive end Dwaine Board, in a victory against the New York Jets—he was out for the year. But I knew he, like Hofer, would return in the third season and dramatically improve our defense.

Nevertheless, my search through the ruins showed that unless we added major weapons to the defensive secondary, we would never be contenders, regardless of how many points we scored. Thus, I needed to bring in talented players to dramatically improve the defensive situation. I found this talent largely in three very special individuals—one rookie and two experienced pros.

The primary advantage to a lousy season is that you get to draft early. That’s one of the reasons a highly regarded player like USC’s Ronnie Lott was available to us. Because of his great speed, power, and intelligence Lott would be able to transform our weakest position—left cornerback—into one of our strengths. He also inspired those around him with his incendiary competitiveness.

In a sense, he was an “old pro” in a rookie’s body. (Additionally, we drafted Eric Wright and Carlton Williamson, tremendous defensive players who, along with Lott, brought a new spirit—almost collegiate—to the defensive side of our team.)