As I’ve said here before on brownsdailydose.com, Peter King is the best NFL writer of his time.
Nobody is even remotely close to him.
With that in mind, then, Browns fans would do well to check out his Monday Morning Quarterback (MMQB) column on sportsillustrated.com this week. There is plenty of cool stuff about the team – both the current one and the ones from back in the day.
The coolest piece in the column – and one of the coolest I’ve seen anywhere in a long, long time – involves Tennessee Titans defensive coordinator Dick LeBeau, who, when he celebrates his birthday on Saturday, will be the first 80-year-old coordinator in the history of the league.
LeBeau grew up in London, Ohio as a big fan of the Browns and starred as a defensive back at Ohio State for head coach Woody Hayes. He was the latter of two fifth-round picks of the Browns in the 1959 NFL Draft (the first one was Colorado guard John Wooten; in the second round, the Browns selected LeBeau’s Buckeyes teammate, offensive tackle Dick Schafrath of Wooster, Ohio). LeBeau got lost in all the talent the Browns had then and never made the club, but went on to the Detroit Lions and became a Pro Football Hall of Fame cornerback.
King asked LeBeau a number of questions during a podcast, one of which was, “What’s the best wide receiver you ever covered?”
“Paul Warfield (of the Browns, Harding High School in Warren, Ohio and Ohio State) was as good as any of them,” LeBeau said. “I covered Bob Hayes, who was a great player and an Olympic 100-meter champion. When he ran, half the stadium shook because he was so powerful. As a guy trying to run with him, you just had to watch and feel, and you knew when he was opening up, and you knew damn well you better give him some room. But Paul, you couldn’t do that with him, because if you took your eye off him for a second, he was already five yards somewhere else and there was never any physical exertion, seemingly, that this guy is really trying to run hard. Paul was like Fred Astaire in football cleats, man.”
LeBeau was asked how he found the zone blitz, which he brought to the NFL in 1984.
“I was … out on a scouting mission for the Bengals in the early ’80s,” he said, “and I was probably only talking to [LSU assistant coach] Bill Arnsparger for 15 minutes, but I admired what he had done as a defensive coach and some of the various movement patterns that he had started, and I’ll never forget this, but he said, ‘All I was looking for was a safer way to create pressure.’ And that sentence was the atom that split for me, because I was going to Texas and I had an airplane flight and I got the gal to give me a supply of cocktail napkins and I started drawing right away on a safer concept of pressure. Blitzes up to that time were all what we call zero coverage, where everybody had a guy and you overloaded the protection by sending an extra guy … I thought, Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to get that pressure at least from one half of the defense and still keep a free safety where if something went wrong, he could tackle the guy and we could play the next down? I’m not sure that’s what Bill meant, but that’s how it focused into my mind right away.”
Finally, LeBeau was asked about calling plays at 80.
“I never think about it,” he said. “I’m just a football coach and I’m going to try to do my job. I never think of stuff like that. The secret for being able to work this long is I have had some wonderfully good players. I could name a ton of them that have played well for me and kept me working. I have great genes. My mom was 96, my dad was 88, my dad’s sisters all went way into their 90s. LeBeaus are hard to get off the planet.”
