Do You Love Football?! (10 page)

All I wanted to do there was take advantage of the opportunity.

When I first got the job, I had never even turned on a computer. Now I had one on my desk. I was expected to learn how to work it and how to draw up plays on it while Mike and all the other coaches went on summer vacation for a month. I was nervous. Suzette Cox, who was Mike's secretary, stuck around to teach me how to use the computer, but I wasn't the best student. Maybe that was why we didn't hit it off really well. I admit, I could have had a little better attitude, but there I was, ready to soak up this seemingly endless supply of football knowledge from the San Francisco 49ers, and they've got me sitting in an office learning how to use Super Paint 1.0. Guys from the Silicon Valley also came by to show me how to draw a play, how to save it, and how to store it. It was a long, hard process for someone who was completely computer illiterate.

Drawing plays for the 49er offense, in which you could run the same play three hundred different ways, made it that much tougher. You could have Brown Right A Right or Y Shift to Brown Right A Right. You could have Blue Right E Motion or Blue Right E Counter Motion. You could have a whole dozen separate drawings of just 2 Jet Flanker Drive. All summer I'd walk in there at four or five in the morning, draw day and night until I collapsed, then come back the next day to draw some more.

After a while I started getting pretty good on the computer.

Once I learned my way around the building, I started checking out the amazing library of information there. It was a football coach's gold mine. The 49ers not only have all the game plans of the Bill Walsh era saved; they also have all of the videotape of Bill Walsh and his assistant coaches installing offensive plays with the players at training camp. When I wasn't sitting in front of my computer, I'd go into an empty meeting room with a blank notebook and watch Coach Walsh install 200 Jet X Slant or the late Bobb McKittrick, who was still the offensive line coach when I was there, install 17 Bim and 19 Handoff Crack and 19 W.

Then, on the computer, I set up my own private files of plays and concepts of things that I liked. For instance, I'd enter "16 Power" or "25 Protection" and type in the notes I had heard Bobb say about them. Later I would add files of things Mike Holmgren would say in offensive meetings and everything George Seifert would say to the whole team.

When I was at Tennessee Mike was the quarterbacks coach for LaVell Edwards at Brigham Young University. He was coaching guys like Steve Young and Marc Wilson in an offense that was throwing for eight hundred yards a game. He helped BYU win a national championship in 1984. But two years later, when Mike left to coach quarterbacks for San Francisco, he was under the gun because now he was working for Bill Walsh, the mastermind of offensive football. You talk about heat.

Yet Mike handled it well. The fact he had been a high school teacher and was so comfortable in his ability to communicate with players helped him tremendously. Mike could take something that was very sophisticated, very complex, and present it in a simple, basic fashion that even I could understand it-and I was new there. It wasn't a forty-five-minute lecture. He had a knack for conveying his thoughts in twenty-five words or less.

He didn't start rambling and talking about things that were irrelevant to the question that you had just asked. He was always to the point.

When Mike installed plays, he never left any doubt about what players had to do or how they were supposed to do it.

There were no gray areas in his presentation. He was the same way when he worked with his quarterbacks. It wasn't like a golf lesson where you go out there and pretty soon you've got so many coaching points, you can't even take the club back. Mike wouldn't go into a detailed critique about Joe Montana's footwork or stance. He would just say, "Joe, you're okay getting away from the center. Stretch your drop. Your drops are too shallow." That's all Joe needed to hear. It was very cut-and-dried, which kind of surprised me, because everything I had seen the 49ers do was so precise, their execution was so extraordinary, I just assumed Mike had to spend countless hours on basic, fundamental technique-type things.

At six-foot-five, Mike is quite an imposing figure. When he installs a game plan, showing each play and its corresponding number on the overhead projector, he always exudes confidence.

"Picture Number 73 is going to be a touchdown Sunday," he'd say matter-of-factly, about a pass play designed to have Joe throw to Jerry Rice, who would just blow past some poor DB trying to cover him one-on-one over the middle. "Pay attention, men. It's 76 X Shallow Cross. Roger's going in motion to the weak side. The free safety is going to jump the tight end on the hook route, and Jerry Rice is going to be there for a touchdown.

It's going to happen, men. Circle it now. Star it. It's a touchdown."

I would sit there and go, "Man, it's seven to nothing already What's the next picture?"

But that's how you install plays. Confident. Concise. Crystal-clear. No one does it better than Mike Holmgren.

One of the few strengths I know I have is judging a situation when it is time for me to disappear. That would usually be the case in the quarterback meetings or wherever Mike was talking one-on-one with Joe Montana, the greatest quarterback and best and baddest dude of all time.

I felt that the Holmgren-Montana relationship was private-or at least should have been treated as such-and I didn't want to infringe on it. I wasn't there for the previous two years when they won Super Bowls, and I kind of felt like some of the things they were talking about were a little bit personal. They didn't know me, so there was no reason for them to think that I could be trusted to hear those kinds of conversations. I'd be wondering if, when Joe spoke about certain topics, he was thinking,

Man, I hope this guy doesn't go tell John Taylor that I didn't like his route on the Dino in the red zone. The last thing I wanted to do was have either one of them feel awkward because of my ass sitting in there.

It also was a little bit awkward because Steve Young, who had joined the 49ers a few years earlier in a trade with Tampa, was a very frustrated backup at that time. We had known each other while Steve played quarterback for the Buccaneers when my dad was their personnel director. My dad had a little bit not a lot, but a little bit-to do with the Bucs acquiring Steve out of the USFL with the first pick of a supplemental draft in 1984. Steve had some rough times in Tampa, but I can't imagine him being any unhappier than he was at that time in San Francisco. He was always clashing with Mike. Now, remember, Mike coached Steve at BYU. They had a lot of success together and they were best friends, but Steve was so frustrated because here was this well-lubricated machine that was just rocking with Joe out there, and Steve was on the sideline just watching, cheering.

Steve was a truly great player himself. He had the talent to be an outstanding quarterback, which was obvious to anyone who saw him play. He was a good enough athlete that he probably could have held his own at some other positions, but he wasn't even holding for extra points. He seemed to feel hopeless about the whole situation.

"I'm never going to play here," Steve would say.

Then he'd start lobbying to get on the field any way he could: "I want to be a receiver . . . I want to be a gunner on the punt team." Actually, Steve did end up playing in a couple of games

as a fourth receiver, although he didn't have any catches. That did nothing to make his situation any more bearable or to ease the tension between him and Mike. Finally Holmgren came to me one day and said, "I'm done with him. You coach him."

"Really?" I said. "Okay."

I knew Mike wasn't actually putting me in charge of Steve Young; that was still Mike's job. But I saw the fact he was letting me help him out a little bit as a tremendous responsibility,

because for the first time in my life I would be working directly with an NFL quarterback. I would be doing some actual coaching. Even if Steve almost never saw the field, it was my job to help Mike in helping Steve be ready to play in every game, just in case Joe got hurt. Steve and I would meet late in the week to go over the game plan. I would give him quizzes to help him remember all of those 150 pass plays in there. I also would give him all the encouragement I could.

"You're going to get your chance," I said. "You're going to play great. Why are you here? Why don't you just have your agent trade your ass? I know why. Because you want to be the quarterback of the 49ers."

Steve began to trust that I was genuinely interested in seeing him improve and land the dream job that was only a heartbeat away, even if it seemed so much further than that. With Joe headed for a second straight league MVP award, the distance might as well have been measured in light years.

The 49ers were as dominant as ever that season. We had a 13-1 record going into our last two games. We already were the NFC Western champions and had a first-round bye for the playoffs. Joe was bothered by a lower abdomen strain, so he wasn't even in uniform for our next-to-last game, against New Orleans. Steve got the start, and even though we ended up losing, he ran for 102 yards, making him only the second quarterback in 49er history to rush for more than 100 yards in a game.

For the regular-season finale in Minnesota, the plan was to let Joe start and play the first half, so that he would get some tuneup work for the playoffs, then let Steve play the second half.

The Vikings had a good team. They had some talented players on defense-Chris Doleman, Keith Millard, Carl Lee-and held a 10-0 lead at halftime.

I knew Steve had some concerns as we stood on the sidelines just before he would enter the game at the start of the third quarter.

"What do you think, bro?" he said.

"You're going to kick ass, man," I told him. "You're going to kick ass."

I wasn't in any position to offer him much more than a little encouragement, because I wasn't involved with any of the sideline communication with the quarterback. Mike and the other position coaches handled that. On game day my two main responsibilities were to be the "get-back coach" and to help out our special teams coach, Lynn Styles, with substitutions. Every team has a "get-back coach," whose job is to constantly tell all the people on your sideline to "get back" behind the designated borderlines for coaches and players so that the team doesn't get a five-yard penalty.

The officials make a big deal before the game of reminding both head coaches where everyone is supposed to stand, and that absolutely no one besides their players is to be on the field.

When that happens, the officials get pissed, because they want a completely clear path so they can run up and down the sides of the field without having to take their eyes off the action. And, without fail, it happens at least once, causing the side judge or the referee to yell to the head coach, "You'd better tell these players to get back!" Coach Seifert would yell, "Gruden! Get these guys back!" Usually it's never the starters inching their way toward the field. It's almost always the third corner, the nickel back, the extra linebacker-situational substitutes waiting their turn to go into the game. But whenever I'd go tell them to get back, they'd tell me, "Shut up, man. Get out of my face."

On third down I would have to yell, "Punt return alert" or "Punt alert," so that Lynn's guys would be ready to go into the game. If someone playing special teams got hurt, I had to make sure the backup knew that he was "L-3" (third man in from the sideline to the kicker's left) or "R-4" (fourth man in from the sideline to the kicker's right), on the kickoff-coverage team, or the right guard on the punt team. "You'd better be ready," I'd warn them. Of course they, too, would tell me to shut up and get out of their face.

Against the Vikings Steve ended up throwing his first touchdown pass of the season, a fourteen-yarder to Jerry Rice, midway through the fourth quarter. With the Vikings still up by four points, Steve ran a beautiful two-minute drill. He hit six of seven passes, including a thirty-four-yard strike over the middle that John Taylor caught for a touchdown with twenty-nine seconds left. We end up winning the game 20-17 and finishing with a 14-2 record. On the plane ride from Minnesota I was sitting alone, as usual, going over my notes. All of a sudden offensive lineman Harris Barton came up and said, "Hey, bro, Steve and I are going out tonight and you're going with us." I couldn't believe it. You talk about a big-time deal: I was invited out to a fancy restaurant with Steve Young and Harris Barton-and they were buying. It doesn't get much cooler than that.

Later I did kind of get a little bit uncomfortable, wondering if Joe maybe thought I was kissing Steve's butt. That wasn't the case at all, and in the long run it really didn't matter. Steve felt good about what he had accomplished in that game, and he wanted to show his appreciation.

To this day, that story about Steve helps me in dealing with backup players who want to be starters and believe that the only way to get there is on another team. "If you're in a place you want to be and you're in a system you want to be in, don't underestimate that," I'll say. "Wait your turn. I've seen a guy do that. Sure enough, when Joe Montana got hurt, Steve Young lit it up, man. Now Steve Young is on his way to getting into the Hall of Fame."

The biggest thing Mike wanted to accomplish each week was to make sure that Joe liked the plays that Mike would be calling on Sunday. Mike wanted to make sure that Joe felt good about the game plan. As a coach, you're going to change formations and add new plays, but you'd better make sure that your quarterback is sold on what you're doing. That's what all coaches are salesmen. You've heard a coach say after a loss, "Well, we had a hell of a plan. We just didn't execute it." What he's really saying is, "We probably didn't execute it because our players didn't understand it, and they made mistakes." If the players didn't understand it, chances are they didn't like it, which means the coach didn't do a good enough job of selling it.

If you've worked on that game plan all night on Monday and Tuesday, when you walk into that first big meeting of the week with your offense on Wednesday, you want it to get their attention. You want them to like it. You want them to be excited about it. So Mike would hit Joe with an endless barrage of questions: "Do you like Waggle Right Double Out Waggle Right Drag Hook? Do you like it? Do you feel good about the setup?" If Joe nodded his head, Mike would say, "Okay, good.