BB: I don’t think so. I think going back to when I first came into the league, you just didn’t have as many personnel groups as you have now. A lot of times, those 11 guys never left the field. Like the Hail Marys from [Roger] Staubach back in the ‘70s, it’s just their regular offense, a guy running a go route. It wasn’t all those guys together jumping it and tipping it and that type of thing.
When I came into the league, you rarely saw - you saw a tight end, you saw two receivers, you saw two backs. Whatever, you had four backs, those four replaced those two, those two replaced the other two. If you had two tight ends, then your tight end replaced the other tight end. There were no two tight end sets. Even in goal line, short yardage on the one yard line, you still usually had two spread receivers, there were no third receiver.
There were a few teams that played some nickel defense, like the Redskins when George Allen was there but it wasn’t really nickel, it was just the defensive back came in for a linebacker. They played the exact same thing but it was just a DB instead of a linebacker having those coverage responsibilities so he was maybe a little more athletic and had a little more coverage skill. If something happened to him, they would just put their linebacker back in and just run the same thing.
It really wasn’t until like in the late ‘70s to early ‘80s when you had teams running two tight ends and one back and even starting to get into three receivers.
I remember being with the Giants in ‘81 and we didn’t even have a nickel defense. That was a big step. I can’t remember what year it was, maybe it was ‘82 or ‘83, we were like ‘Okay, we’re going to put in the nickel this year.’ It was like ‘Oh my God, this is going to be a big step, how are we going to do this?’ and terminology and all that. We didn’t even have that. You had maybe if it was third and ten, you had a third and ten call that was different than your first and ten call, I’m not saying that but as far as substituting guys in.
Therefore, what we have now in terms of depth is more of an issue. There were fewer players than but honestly there were fewer positions. Now there are more players but you have three receivers, you have two tight end sets, you have all your five DBs, maybe your six DBs, you’ve got your pass rush guys, which is the whole, it’s like college football where it’s expanding rosters to go on and on. You’ve got your backup punter, you’ve got your plus-50 punter, you’ve got your short field goal kicker, you’ve got your field goal snapper, you’ve got a punt snapper, you’ve got an onside kick guy, you’ve got four tight ends on this formation, you’ve got five wide receivers on this formation - it’s just more and more substitutional groups if you have more and more players. It gets further away from just the 11 guys that you had out there.
You can take it all the way back to the ‘50s in college football when you didn’t have free substitution, guys went both ways. You look at some of the old defenses there, why were teams playing a 5-3 and a 6-2? Because it was the same guys that had to play offense. You had to take your offensive players and put them on defense or more importantly, you had to take your defensive players and then fit them onto offense. If a lot of fullbacks looked like guards it’s because they were linebackers on defense.
The game, in terms of substitution and all that has expanded tremendously. Your depth now, you have to have, if you’re a three receiver team, you don’t go to the game necessarily with six receivers or if you’re a two tight end team, you don’t necessarily go to the game with four tight ends, so you can’t have a backup for each guy like it used to be. You have to have either different personnel groups or one guy backing up multiple spots, stuff like that.
Q: Was it Washington that kind of spurred all the different packages?
BB: I’d say they were ahead of the curve on that, yeah. George Allen was ahead of the curve on that. I think he also was one of the guys that started to take the middle linebacker out. They would take their outside linebacker, [Chris] Hamburger and slide him into the middle. You had a Sam, Mike and Will and your inside guy a lot of times was the least of those three coverage players. If you took your Will and bumped him into Mike and then put a DB in, which a lot of teams do now, similar thing, you’d just have a more athletic, better pass coverage on the field. Allen was, I would say, ahead of the curve on that.
Once the multiple receiver sets came in then defensively you have to match those. Really defensively you have to match what the offense does. If you can just put one group out there and defend everything, great. But it’s hard to do, it’s hard to do. They bring in bigger people, well somewhere along the line, you’re probably going to need to match it with bigger people. They keep bringing in smaller people, like in the ‘80s when Mouse Davis and June Jones and those guys ran the run and shoot offense where you’re in four wide receivers on every single down, the 3-4 defense just wasn’t built for that! The 3-4 defense is built for I-formation. Now you match that with another DB or maybe two more DBs, depending on how you want to play it. But the more of those guys they put out, then you have to have somebody to put out there and match them.
Defensively, you don’t control that. Offensively, you control who is on the field, you control what formation they’re in and to some degree you control who gets the ball. Defensively, you don’t have control of any of that so you have to defend whatever it is they do.
