Field General

A few hours after John Unitas died of a heart attack last week, Dan Marino was having dinner with the on-air talent and staff of HBO's Inside the NFL at a midtown New York City restaurant. Unprompted, Marino lifted his glass of merlot and said, "A toast...to Johnny U."

Marino's tribute to the man might have also served as a farewell to what Unitas did so wonderfully: direct the offense. In today's NFL it's clear that there will never be another Unitas. Another rifle-armed clutch quarterback might come down the pike (maybe even with a crew cut), but he won't have the control over play-calling and substitutions and the game plan that Unitas had. The game has become too complex, the defenses too specialized, the substitutions too numerous. Never again will a quarterback say to one of his coaches, as Unitas once said to offensive assistant Don McCafferty before a big game, "Just sit back and enjoy the game. I won't need any help."

Quarterbacks still call some plays in the two-minute or no-huddle offense, but not since Jim Kelly's final season with the Buffalo Bills, in 1996, has a quarterback called his own plays for an entire game. "So many factors work against a quarterback ever having that chance again," says Kelly, who was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in August. "You have to have a coach willing to put his job and the jobs of all his assistants and players on the shoulders of the quarterback; Marv Levy did that with me. You have to have a team that doesn't change much, because you all need to be on the same page to eliminate the mistakes, and I don't think that's going to happen now with all the free-agency movement. And you have to have a quarterback with big enough shoulders to handle all that pressure."

Kelly called most of his own plays under Levy, and together they developed the Bills' K-gun and no-huddle offenses. In the first half of the 1996 season, the Bills' plays were called by offensive coordinator Tom Breshnahan and quarterbacks coach Jim Shofner. The offense struggled, and the team went 5-3. Then Levy handed the reins back to Kelly, who ran his beloved K-gun—no huddles, few substitutions, three wideouts, one tight end and one back. Buffalo had big wins over the Washington Redskins at home and the Philadelphia Eagles on the road, finished 10-6 and made the playoffs.

To show how difficult it is for a quarterback to call his own plays, Kelly recounted what he had to do once a play ended and the 40-second play clock started. "Say it was second-and-eight," he said. "I'd hold a finger in the air, like a gun, so the sideline knew I wanted K-gun personnel if it wasn't already on the field. Then I'd look to see if [the defense] was subbing. If they weren't, I'd yell, 'Eight! Eight!' Tight end right with one wideout, and a slot receiver and split end to the left. Then I'd yell, 'Cow! Cow!' My hot read [the emergency receiver] would be to the tight end side. Then I'd yell, 'Ninety-three!' Outside receivers would run 10-yard outs and inside receivers six-to eight-yard option routes. Then I'd yell, ' Louisville!' The snap would be on three. Then I'd look over the defense. If I didn't like what I saw, I'd audible at the line. I was so lucky, because I had the smartest center in the world, Kent Hull, who could make every line call to account for [defensive] guys moving around, so I'd never have to worry about that. And I knew the tendencies of every one of my guys. I knew what worked. You think I'd have wanted to call my own plays with new guys to break in every year? No way."

Could any quarterback in the league today do it? "Maybe two guys," Kelly said. " Brett Favre, because he has the kind of guts I had, and Peyton Manning, because he's got the entire playbook in his head. But I doubt it'll ever happen. The game's just too complicated."

In the 1960s teams would play series after series with the same 11 men on the field. Atlanta Falcons coach Dan Reeves, whose career (as a running back) overlapped with Unitas's, said that while the substitution patterns are vastly different—the New England Patriots, for instance, used 18 defenders on one series against the Pittsburgh Steelers in their season opener—the sophistication of defenses is the real killer. "John might have faced two defenses and three coverages in a game," Reeves says. "Now teams have defenses for practically every down and distance. Why make a quarterback think about that when he has coaches on the sideline who can do it for him?"

It used to be that quarterbacks wanted the authority to call all the plays. Terry Bradshaw politicked for it in Pittsburgh and finally got the authority from coach Chuck Noll midway through his career. But you don't hear quarterbacks ask for it today. "A couple of years ago at the Super Bowl, somebody in the media polled all the starting quarterbacks in the league and asked if they wanted to call their own plays for the whole game," recalls Kelly. "The majority said no. There's just too much to see."

And we haven't even mentioned the financial imperatives. Miami Dolphins offensive coordinator Norv Turner, who has worked under demanding owners Jerry-Jones, Daniel Snyder and Alex Spanos, knows that the pressure from above cannot be ignored. Snyder is paying Redskins coach Steve Spurrier and six offensive assistants a total of about $6 million this year. How nutty would it be for Shane Matthews to even intimate he wants to call his own plays?

"These teams sell for $700 million now," Turner says. "Scrutiny is intense. There's so much on the line, and there are only 16 games. Do you want one player—maybe a young player who doesn't have nearly the information at his fingertips that the coaches on the sideline have—making the decisions that could determine whether all those people keep their jobs?"