Battle of wits
ARLINGTON, Texas — Every so often, Dom Capers pulls out the humongous, handwritten playbook from his first year as a defensive coordinator in the NFL. He likes showing it to younger coaches to emphasize how much more labor went into designing plays before such things became computerized.
Dick LeBeau remembers that exact playbook quite well, too.
“I was the guy that had to draw it,” he said, chuckling.
That's only the beginning of the tale about an important document in recent NFL history and the close relationship between the defensive signal-callers who will be matching wits in the Super Bowl, LeBeau for the Pittsburgh Steelers and Capers for the Green Bay Packers.
Both born and raised in small towns in Ohio, they became friends in the mid-1980s, when they were coaching defensive backs on different NFL teams and often scouting the same college players. They became colleagues in 1992, when Bill Cowher became coach of the Steelers and hired them on his inaugural staff, Capers as defensive coordinator and LeBeau in charge of the secondary.
Capers and LeBeau lived together for six months, spending most of their time building that playbook. It was quite a chore, and it became so thick because they weren't sure whether they would use four linemen and three linebackers as Cowher preferred, or three linemen and four linebackers as Capers preferred. That meant every play had to be drawn twice, once for each defensive front — and LeBeau did all the drawing.
Capers' 3-4 won out, and they soon discovered it worked best while using a wrinkle advocated by LeBeau: the zone blitz.
What started as a way to counter the Run ‘n Shoot and West Coast offenses that were dominating at the time turned into the start of a defensive revolution that's swept across much of the league, re-establishing the Steelers as an NFL power — and a defense-first power, at that — and earning these coaches widespread respect as being among the best in the game.“I think history has proven that we had some good ideas,” LeBeau said.Just look at what their clubs did this season.The Steelers allowed the fewest points in the NFL (232, or 14.5 per game), and the Packers were a close second (240, or 15.0)LeBeau and Capers use the scheme differently, tailored mostly to their talent.But even that is pretty similar.The Steelers have a dynamic linebacker in James Harrison and a big-time playmaker in the secondary in Troy Polamalu, while the Packers have a dynamic linebacker in Clay Matthews and a big-time playmaker in the secondary in Charles Woodson. Polamalu was the AP Defensive Player of the Year, with Matthews the runner-up. Woodson won the award last year, and Harrison the year before that.“This is probably the only Super Bowl ever that the players from either team could jump in the defensive huddle and understand the terminology and probably run the defense,” LeBeau said. “I'm sure the nomenclature is different, but they could figure it out.”
