No-passing fad

Why is everyone in the AFC East on the defensive?

CANTON, Ohio -- I'm writing this from the Hall of Fame, where our Seniors Committee met to select not one but two ... yes, thank God, they've changed the rules ... Seniors Candidates to present to the selectors in January for enshrinement. The two selected were Bob Hayes and Bob Brown. Hayes was my guy. My other candidate, Benny Freidman, the great, old passer from the '20s and '30s, was eliminated very late in the session. I'll try again next year.

I have just concluded my training camp swing through the AFC East, but before I get into my camp notes, I'd like to comment on an item I saw in Wednesday's paper. The Jets' president, Jay Cross (Sports and the corporate world are two of the few places where an American president is chosen, not elected. What's that you say? In the collegiate community as well? And lots more places? OK, ignore the line), said that by charging fans $50 a year to stay on the waiting list for season tickets, he can find out which ones are really serious. And here's the observation that kills me: "We want to take these season-ticket holders in waiting and try to make them part of the family." You gotta love it, right? Just one big happy family -- that you have to buy into. Sounds like my ex-wife's family.

Patriots at Foxboro

My first stop was Foxboro, after moving out of Bryant College in Rhode Island, which puts the finisher on one of my favorite trivia questions. (Actually it was a better trivia question when the Colts were in the division.) Name the five obscure colleges at which the AFC East teams train. Patriots at Bryant, Bills at St. John Fisher outside of Rochester, N.Y., Dolphins at Nova University, Jets at Hofstra (OK, that's the only one that isn't so obscure), Colts at Rose-Hulman in Terre Haute, Ind.

The angle on the Pats, of course, is the defensive guys they've picked up, Roosevelt Colvin and Rodney Harrison. Actually that could be the angle on every team in the division -- keynote additions, all on the defensive side. With the Jets, it's the rookie they traded all the way up to the No. 4 spot in the draft to select, DeWayne Robertson. With the Dolphins, it's Junior Seau and Sammy Knight. And Takeo Spikes, Sam Adams and Jeff Posey are the Bills' imports. So what's the deal? Why all this defense? I mean, the offenses might have been tweaked here and there, but basically they're the same, or even a little weaker. The Bills lost Peerless Price, the Jets lost Laveranues Coles, etc. OK, Brian Griese was a Miami pickup, but it's still in a backup role.

Philosophical question No. 1 is: Why is everybody picking up defense this year? The second one involves the running game. Of last year's top 11 runners, 10 of them played on teams that failed to make the playoffs. That's a stat that defies belief. It's unforgivable, unwieldy, un-American. What the deuce does it mean? I've made a note to be sure to ask this of the deeper thinkers I come across.

Colvin surprised me because he looks racehorse-sleek for his 250 pounds. He's more like a space-LB, a cover guy. I looked at the 30-year old Harrison for signs of age. He has been in the league 10 years, has dished out a lot of crushing hits, and yet, in Bill Belichick's system of left-side, right-side positioning for his safeties, he'll probably have more range and coverage responsibilities, and get more work as a free safety type, with teams testing him by positioning the tight end away from him. Plus, he's coming off a bad groin injury. "Do you ever look at yourself in the mirror and check for signs of age?" I asked Harrison. "Do you ever look at old films to see if you can still do the same things?"

"Only all the time," he said. "It's all part of insecurity. Ever since I came into the league, out of Division I-A college, I've had to prove myself. It's why I stay in the weight room longer. I don't want to look in the mirror and see fat. I don't want to look at films and see myself slipping. I always ask my close friends to watch me out there. I'm always saying, 'How do I look? How am I moving?' It's all part of insecurity."

I asked Belichick my question about every team going for defense. "It's cyclical," he said. "Didn't everyone go for offense the year before?"

I asked Scott Pioli, the Patriots' player personnel director and a football theoretician, about that weird running backs statistic.

"Isn't that the strangest thing you every saw?" he said. "I've been trying to figure it out myself."

Having spent a lot of time with Joe Klecko, the old Jets tackle, and trying unsuccessfully to get him a sniff from the Hall of Fame selectors, I am most interested in his son, Danny, a nose tackle whom the Patriots drafted in the fourth round this past April. New England was weak up the gut last year, but at 5-foot-11, 283, Dan Klecko does not fit the mold of the massive, two-gapping middle man.

At practice one afternoon I saw him not in the middle at all, but lined up as an outside rusher, then as a stand-up linebacker outside, and each time he did the same thing, which, obviously, he's been told to do -- come down the line hard and fly to the ball and disrupt things.

A week later against the Giants, that's exactly what he did, 2 1/2 sacks worth. If there's a role for an aggressive, bright-eyed youngster to play, Belichick will find it for him. Didn't he move Tedy Bruschi all over the place? And Mike Vrabel? Klecko wound up with exactly the right coach.

On the drive home the Flaming Redhead and I caught a meal at our favorite restaurant in the area, Al Forno in Providence, R.I. So we were sitting in the parking lot, idling the motor to keep the air conditioning going, waiting for the doors to open at 5 p.m. You have to come early to get a seat on the patio, and you have to have a seat on the patio to get one of their special mint juleps. It's one of the goofy rules of the place. And then all of a sudden the air conditioner started making this horrible grinding noise, and my wife said, "I told you not to put those papers on the dashboard. Now one of them's fallen into the air conditioner and ruined it. That's a $500 job to fix it," etc. etc. I reached in to try to grab the offending object, but my hand was too fat, and I didn't really know where I was reaching, anyway.

Which put an early damper on our meal, the mood being relieved greatly by the arrival of those wonderful juleps.

Jets at Hofstra

I can't get away from it. I had to ask the GM Terry Bradway about the Coles-to-Washington move all over again. "It's really amazing," he said, "the way this Coles thing has grown a life of its own." So he explained it all over again, how the Redskins offer came from out of nowhere, etc. But I still think ... oh, hell, let's let it rest. Until Coles really lights it up in Washington. Robertson, the man I came to Hofstra to write about, speaks so low, a whisper almost, that you have to strain to hear him.

On the field, he got a big push, took on the double team, didn't make any tackles but made his presence felt. An ideal two-gapper in a one-gap system. Is this the savior? Too early to tell.

I asked some people why all the division teams are going for defense. I heard a lot of, "Well, you win with defense," which doesn't help at all.

Sunday, in the Meadowlands, as I watched the Jets-Bengals, I learned a terrible fact. The Jets, along with other clubs, have made football programs a thing of the past. The old Gameday, which was generated by NFL Properties in L.A., now exists on a local level. There is no more Properties, no more NFL Creative Services. They just closed up shop and fired all the people working there. Some teams, such as the Dolphins, have chosen to put out their own game programs. Some have not. The Jets hand out little flimsy things like theater Playbills.

This is a sad thing for an old program collector such as myself. Saving rare and antiquated programs was one of my first hobbies. I have a bunch of them, one of them -- a collegiate program, of course -- going them going back to 1881. Did you know that in the 1890s, some Ivy League programs used to be in hard cover, and they cost a dollar? That was huge money in those days, enough for a meal for two. And in New York, the programs of the 1930s and '40s, both college and pro, would have stories by many of the leading sportswriters of that era ... Grantland Rice, Paul Gallico, Bugs Baer, John Kieran. I used to devour them. The standardized, antiseptic Gameday marked the beginning of the end. Now it has come.

Dolphins in Fort Lauderdale

A visitor here was Ron Erhardt, architect of so many great NFL running games, including that of the Super Bowl XXV champion Giants. He was the perfect person to whom to pose my running back query. Ten of the top 11 missed the playoffs. What's the deal, Ron?

"A freak year," he said. "They come along every now and then."

I baited him a little. I mentioned a TV analyst who constantly harps on the fact that the running game is merely an annoyance these days -- window dressing -- and you win by being able to throw deep and often and accurately.

"It's what you usually hear," he said, "from people who don't know anything about it."

I swapped old New York stories with the Dolphins' PR Director, Harvey Greene. We got on the subject of Barney Kremenko, who was a hot-shot reporter at the old New York Journal-American when I was a copy boy there, about 500 years ago.

"My first job was working in the PR department of the New Jersey Nets in the ABA," Harvey says. "I was working for Barney. About my third day on the job he says, 'All I want you to do today is man the phones.' They're dead. Nothing's happening. I asked him if he wasn't sure there was some way I could help him. 'Just stick to the phones,' he said.

"'Well, nothing's going on,' I told him. 'There will be,' he said. 'We just traded Julius Erving to the Sixers. When they ask for their money back, tell them we're very sorry, but they bought tickets to see the team play, no matter who the players are.' Sure enough, about 10 minutes later all hell breaks loose. People are screaming into the phone, and I'm giving them the party line and they're yelling and cursing and demanding to speak to my supervisor. One guy called me names I'd never heard in my life. What a way to break in."

The Dolphins are Las Vegas' short-priced Super Bowl team. They look like a club without a weakness. Except that there's something about them that just doesn't sit right with me. They seem like a team with a hole in it somewhere. It's hard to put my finger on it exactly.

Everyone's excited about Seau. If he can still motor the way he did before last year's severe ankle sprain, fine. If...

I'd never talked to Knight before. I asked him how wrong he thought I'd gone, picking his old New Orleans teammate Fred Thomas as one of my all-pro corners last year. Everyone laughed at me for that choice, and now I read that he's battling for a starting spot.

"He played part of the year with a broken hand," Knight said. "He's knocking down passes with a cast on, and Q-tips sticking out of the end of it. Didn't even have a hand to use, didn't even have fingers. You know how tough that is? And that was going into his free agent year. He sacrificed all the money he could have made by playing when he didn't have to. I respect him more than any person I've ever played with."

I stayed at the Sheraton near the airport in Lauderdale. I had trouble sleeping and was up very early every morning. In the cocktail lounge there was a player piano. I had an eerie feeling, walking across the lobby at 6 a.m., as, from the deserted bar area came the tinkling of Tea For Two or Just a Gigolo. I looked over and there was this ghostly piano, with the keys moving, banging out the old favorites in the murky half-light.

In the wee hours I often catch up on my newspaper reading. I like to save little snippets of news that I get a kick out of. Maurice Clarett's high school coach set up a meeting for the kid with new Hall of Famer Marcus Allen. Clarett was a no-show. Perfect.

In USA Today there was a story about how Marvin Lewis will rebuild the Bengals. "It all starts with an attitude," was his quote. "We're better than we think we are." I am confused. Does this mean they think they're terrible? Is that the attitude it starts with? And do people really pay attention to what they're writing?

Before the the Bucs and Warren Sapp came in, a funny story was making the rounds, about how, during the offsesason three years ago, Dolphins rookie tackle Todd Wade ran into Sapp in a South Beach nightclub. He tried to introduce himself and shake hands with the Bucs' All-Pro. Sapp refused. Confused, Wade said goodbye and patted him on the arm.

"Don't you EVER touch me," Sapp yelled at the kid, and cursed him as he walked away.

"He got punked down on South Beach," Zach Thomas said. "I think it's pretty funny.

On Friday night, when the Dolphins met the Bucs, I saw Sapp in action for myself in the pregame. He slapped hands with Dolphins veteran guard Jamie Nails. He hugged veteran DT Tim Bowens. But then he refused to acknowledge second-year wideout Chris Jackson, who stood with his hand extended for three or four seconds. You have to to earn the right to speak to the great man.

The best player on the field was second-year Bucs linebacker Ryan Nece. Yeah, I know, he played when the seconds and thirds were out there, but still ... there was something about the guy that caught my eye.

Between trips we snuck over to the car repair place to find out the bad news about the air conditioner I've screwed up. "A nest," the guy says. "You had a nest in there. I cleaned it out."

A what? Says which?

"A rat or a squirrel or something. They get in there and build a nest, and it sounds like nuts grinding when you turn it on." Oh. That's $500 we saved.

Buffalo at St. John Fisher outside of Rochester

Head coach Gregg Williams is raving about his staff. "I'm 45 years old, which is exactly how many years Dick LeBeau (ex-Bengals head coach, now special assistant to Williams) has been connected with the NFL. I mean, our owner, Ralph Wilson, has only been in football 44 years. No one's got more years in than Dick LeBeau."

I tell him Wellington Mara has, maybe even Dan Rooney. "I mean as a guy who started out as a player," Williams says.

"Les Steckel is my running backs coach. He's been a head coach with the Vikings and an offensive coordinator with the Bucs. You know where he spent the last two years? Offensive coordinator for Brentwood High School in Nashville. There was a rule in his family that no kid would ever go to more than two high schools, and his boy had already been to one before Brentwood. So Les turned down a chance to get back in the NFL and stayed in Nashville. Didn't even want to be head coach at Brentwood because he felt it would be stepping on the toes of the guy who was there.

"He got to coach his son for two years. They won the state championship for the first time in their history. Isn't that a great story?"

"I've been coaching 33 years," Steckel said when I caught up with him the next day, "and this was the highlight of my career."

I told him it reminded me of the way Mao Tse-tung purged the intellectuals and pulled them out of their universities and made them go back to the soil and hoe potatoes and things. "I don't think I'm ready for the potatoes," he said.

Tim Krumrie, the former Cincy nose tackle, is the defensive line coach in Buffalo. The Bengals made a big mistake when they didn't hold onto him. He breathes fire. One day, early in the camp season, the D-line was getting a rash of nagging injuries. The latest to go out was ex-Buc Marcus Jones.

"One more guy goes out," Krumrie told Williams, "and I'm in." He was ready to put the pads back on and start whacking people.

I reminded Krumrie of the time I picked him on my Sports Illustrated all-pro team a couple of years ahead of the rest of the world, and then, when I went out to his home in Wisconsin to do an offseason piece on upcoming defensive stars, he told me, "Say what you want about the Brown family being cheap, but I have a $50,000 All-Pro bonus clause in my contract, and they counted your team the official one and I collected it."

"Then why am I picking up the tab for dinner?" I asked him.

Last week when I brought it up he didn't respond, but he reminded me of another incident.

"You remember when you wanted to pick up my cocker spaniel puppy," he said, "and I said, 'Be careful, she pees when she's excited.' And you picked her up anyway, and she peed all over you." I told him I didn't remember. I remember picking up dinner checks, not puppies.

Finally I caught up with LeBeau. I always got the feeling that he was kind of uptight when he was in Cincy, always under pressure. In Buffalo he was friendly and chatty. A perfect guy to whom to present my two questions.

Why the overload on defense in the AFC East? "Because every AFC East coach was a defensive coach at one time," he said. Hmm, can it really be so easy?

How about that running back situation? "A mathematical quirk, but not a quark," he said. "A sub-atomic particle. Two more times and it's a trend." And with that, I laid the question to rest.

Tom Modrak, the assistant GM and an old friend, and I are watching practice and talking about the Jeremy Shockey-Parcells thing. His first reaction to it was the same as mine was. Wonderment at the choice of expression. A homo? Does anyone ever call anybody a homo anymore? I haven't really heard that since I was in high school.

"I haven't either," Modrak said. "It was like being in a time warp. I mean using an expression like that would be like calling someone a Commie."

At our table Wednesday night in Canton were two great rivals, Bob Lilly of the Cowboys and Dave Robinson of the Lombardi Packers. Oh man, the stories.

"We're playing the Bears at the end of the season," Robinson said, "and we can clinch the division with a win. We're way up, something like 28-0, with only a little bit to play, and Phil Bengtson, our defensive coach, tells us to let 'em score, but not quickly. So we're laying back, and our corners, Herb Adderly and Bobby Jeter, are playing about 10 yards off the ball, and the Bears come down and kick a field goal with something like a minute left and we run the clock out.

"In the locker room, we're all celebrating. Lombardi comes in and he's furious. He kicks the garbage can and it goes up in a perfect arc, like a field goal. 'You guys quit on me!' he yells. We look around for Bengtsen and he's hiding somewhere."

Lilly, the Hall of Fame tackle and the greatest defensive player in the Cowboys' history, is talking about his GM, the late Tex Schramm. "I was underpaid my whole career in Dallas," Lilly says. "I'm getting ready to do my last contract, in 1972, a three-year deal, and Tex tells me he's going to give me a $20,000 bonus. This was a very rough time in my life. I'd been on a USO tour, and I was in the Philippines when I heard that my wife had run off and left me with the three children. My sister was taking care of them while I was away, but then it would be up to me, which I was ready for, but I had to get my financial life together.

"It was time to do my contract, and I had a friend who was a CPA, and I wanted him to help me with it, to work out the bonus arrangements and how it would affect my runaway wife. Tex heard I was bringing the CPA into the contract talks, and even though he knew my family situation, he withdrew the $20,000 bonus. 'That's because you want to bring an agent in here,' he said. Yeah, he was a great promoter and all that, but for the rest of it ... well, judge for yourself."

Sports Illustrated senior writer Paul Zimmerman covers the NFL for the magazine and SI.com. His "Inside Football" column and Mailbag appear weekly on SI.com. To send a question to Dr. Z, click here.

 

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