The Quarterback Whisperer Read online

  That opening shock and awe immediately put pressure on Pittsburgh, which is another reason why I think quick-strike long balls early in games are so crucial. It sets a tone that can be hard for the other team to shake—their players know it, their coaches know it, even their knowledgeable fans know it. We seized on this early momentum against the Steelers. Kelly had 232 passing yards by halftime and early in the third quarter we held a 17-point lead.

  The game slowed down for Kelly. A gifted basketball player like Michael Jordan calls that being “in the zone,” and man, was Kelly in it. He started out on fire and played that way the entire game. He flung balls deep with accuracy at Heinz Field. He feathered intermediate-length passes with touch between defenders and into the arms of his target. And he sprayed fastballs all around the field that hit his receivers between the numbers.

  Kelly simply saw everything that the Steelers were doing and knew precisely how to solve every challenge they threw at him. For example, he understood, based on how they lined up, when they were going to blitz and who his hot read was going to be. Kelly was so into the game plan that he instinctively knew what play I was going to call before I radioed it into his headset. This may have been the easiest game I ever called.

  With three minutes left in the fourth quarter, we had the ball and were leading 33–29. It was third-and-12. The Steelers were out of timeouts. I thought a corner route to Dennis Northcutt would be open, and it was. If Dennis catches the ball, it’s a first down, kneeldown, game over. But Dennis tried to run with the ball before he had secured it, and the pass bounced off his hands and onto the snow-wet grass. The Steelers scored a touchdown with less than a minute to play and we lost 36–33.

  Dennis felt terrible about dropping that pass. I hate to play the “what if” game, but if we had beaten the Steelers we would have played the Raiders in the next round of the playoffs. The Raiders had three defensive backs out with injuries, and we were a three-wide-receiver offense. There is zero doubt in my mind that we would have lit them up like the night sky on the Fourth of July. We would have moved on to the AFC Championship Game and then, well, who knows? Maybe I would have even gotten an interview to become a head coach.

  But that game against Pittsburgh will always be special to me. Kelly threw for 429 yards, the most ever in a wild-card game and third most in NFL postseason history at the time.

  But Kelly’s magic for us didn’t end there. The next season, on September 21, 2003, we traveled to San Francisco to play the 49ers in an early-season game. Kelly had beaten out Tim Couch for the starting job, but our offense really struggled; we lost our first two games, and we fell behind the 49ers 12–0. Early in the fourth quarter we had the ball in San Francisco territory when I called a quarterback sneak on a third-down play. Kelly got hit hard in the leg and he was limping so badly he could barely walk. Still, he threw a two-yard touchdown pass to André Davis to narrow the score to 12–7.

  Kelly approached me on the sideline. “My leg is fucked up,” he said.

  “What do you want to do?” I asked. “Can you still play?”

  “I’m not coming out,” he said.

  Well, we got the ball back at our nine-yard line with time running out. Kelly could hardly move in the pocket, but he started throwing darts all over the field. Once again, it reminded me of Marler against Alabama; Kelly just carved up the 49er defense. His teammates could obviously see he was hurt—hell, the entire stadium could see that—but Kelly ignored his own pain because he knew his team needed him. He moved us down the field and with less than a minute to play he hit André Davis for an 11-yard touchdown pass. We won 13–12. On that final drive, as he was wincing and grunting in pain, Kelly had completed 12 of 14 passes.

  This was one of the grittiest performances I’d ever seen from one of my quarterbacks. He willed us to the win. Kelly’s entire life, dating back to when he was a skinny kid growing up in Tennessee and getting the piss beat out of him in Pee Wee football, had prepared him to succeed at this critical moment.

  We didn’t know it until we returned to Cleveland, but Kelly had played that entire final drive with a broken leg. An X-ray revealed that he had a hairline fracture in his right leg. Man, talk about toughness.

  “Everybody needs a guy that believes in him, and Bruce made me believe I could do anything,” Kelly says. “When it came to Xs and Os, Bruce made his money by designing play-action passes that could really hurt defenses. Even today he’ll play-action teams to death.”

  Hearing my old quarterbacks say things like this makes me realize one thing: I wouldn’t trade my career for anybody’s. Not anybody’s.

  Bruce is the master when it comes to play calling. He has this uncanny ability to know what to call at just the perfect time. He also puts a lot of play-calling responsibility on his quarterbacks. He lets you pick your favorite plays. And this is really important: He listens to you during the game and is open to suggestions. Not many coaches will do that. But there’s not many like Bruce in the NFL.

  –BEN ROETHLISBERGER

  CHAPTER 5

  PLAY CALLING

  My playbook? It’s as thick as an old-fashioned big-city phone book, brother. It has descriptions and sketches of about 300 plays with notes on when in a game to use each one. I’ve built it over the course of thirty years and I’ll use about a third of the plays in any given game.

  The pass plays in my playbook consist of nine basic patterns, which can be considered the core principles of my aerial attack. The pass patterns are:

  These nine routes literally contain hundreds of variations. The curl, for instance, can be run twenty-five different ways. So when putting together a game plan, I tweak the routes week to week. You always want to make sure that whatever your opponent believes you’ll run and has been preparing to defend on game day, they aren’t actually going to see once the opening whistle blows. This cat-and-mouse game between play callers and defensive coordinators never ends in the NFL.

  My quarterback operates on a read-rotation system. At the line of scrimmage he’ll diagnose the defense, and, based on what he sees, he’ll decide who will be his number one option receiver. If, for example, there are two deep safeties lined up in the middle of the field, he’ll know to attack the perimeter of the defense near the sidelines. If the defense lines up heavy on the strong side of the field—the strong side is the side where the tight end is lined up, usually to the right of the quarterback—the quarterback needs to immediately look to the weak side.

  Then, as the QB drops back to pass, he works through his progressions, looking first at the best option, then the second best, and so on—what we call a read rotation. My whole offense is based on receivers beating their defenders in one-on-one situations. If the receiver does that and the quarterback has time to make an accurate throw, every pass should be a completion every time. And by God I mean, every single time.

  My favorite play is called “88 Go.” We employ maximum protection for the quarterback and then I’ll send three guys deep, one down each sideline and one down the middle of the field. If all three receivers are covered, the quarterback has the flexibility to check down and throw to a running back flaring out of the backfield. I want a touchdown or a checkdown—the easy throw to the running back—with this play. But even this play has a run option for our quarterback built into it. If the coverage doesn’t favor us, then at the line of scrimmage the quarterback should check to a run play.

  “It’s not just everybody runs a ‘Go’ route with Bruce,” Carson Palmer says. “There’s something underneath the route for every possible coverage. Sometimes, based on the defense, you need to get the ball out of your hands quick and make the defense turn and chase. And Bruce’s offense gives the quarterback that flexibility. But the quarterback really has to study and put in the hours to understand where Bruce wants you to go with the ball in every type of situation that the defense will put you in.”

  Make no mistake: A successful offense is two-dimensional. It is fundamental in the NFL to run t
he ball. Ideally, I like to stay 50/50 in terms of passes and runs in a game. But the key is you have to surprise the defense, so we’ll often line up in obvious running formations—like three tight ends—and throw it. We’ll also line up in obvious passing formations—three wide receivers split out wide—and run a draw play. You always need to keep the other side guessing and off balance. You want them playing off their heels, not the balls of their feet.

  When designing a game plan, it’s important to self-scout and really be mindful of your own play calling. You don’t want to tip your hand or establish a pattern or develop tendencies for certain down-and-distance situations where you’re always calling the same play. So my staff and I are always reviewing our play calls of the previous two months and making sure we’re not repeating ourselves and falling into any sort of pattern of play calls that an opposing defensive staff could pick up on. Every week we’ll alter formations, we’ll line up receivers in different spots, and we might add a few trick plays. Variation is key in the NFL. We’re always looking for new ways to create mismatches for our best players. You always want your opponent to react to you—make him the puppet on your string—not the other way around.

  I’ll also incorporate a few new plays into the playbook each week. I want to throw things at defenses that they not only won’t anticipate but also can’t prepare for and practice on Wednesday and Thursday before games. The ideas for new plays can come from anywhere. A few years ago I was watching a small-college game on television when I saw an offensive play that I thought would never work. They were in the red zone and the quarterback faked a toss to his running back, then bootlegged to his right. All the linemen were pulling like it was running play to the left, so the quarterback was out there alone, a man on an island, fully exposed. In the red zone, defenses are very aggressive, and I was certain this quarterback was going to get flattened. But just before he got hit, he stopped, planted his feet, and arced a screen pass to his running back on the opposite side of the field. His back waltzed untouched into the end zone.

  I’d never seen that play run before, but decided to give it a try out at practice one Friday when I was the interim head coach for the Colts in 2012. I was amazed: We scored a touchdown. Our entire offense practically doubled over in surprised shock. They were as amazed as I was that it worked.

  The next week we were in overtime at Tennessee, the game tied at 13. We had the ball on the Titans’ 16-yard line and it was second-and-10. I went with my gut and called that play I had seen the small-college run, even though we had only practiced it twice on Friday, which was the first time the players had ever heard of this play. There was no reason to call the play other than I thought it would work. No risk it, no biscuit.

  Andrew Luck faked a pitch to Vick Ballard, then ran to his right. All of our linemen pulled left. Andrew threw the ball over a Tennessee defensive lineman—it cleared the lineman’s hand by about an inch—and Vick caught it cleanly, unopposed, and scored a touchdown to end the game. We won 19–13. Our players went crazy. Man, as a coach, those are the sweetest moments; you just don’t forget ’em.

  I’ll make about five or six gut calls a game. And they are rooted in feeling, in sensing how the game is unfolding and recalling something from memory that could work. The gut calls aren’t on the play call script, but we’ll have practiced them enough so our players will know how to execute the “feel” calls that I’ll make.

  In my view, play calling is an art form. You scout and research the tendencies of opposing defensive coordinators for hours on end. But they are aware of that, and they’ll often throw wrinkles into their defensive schemes that they’ve never shown before. That’s where the gut comes in. It’s the ultimate chess match, a battle of brains. That’s what makes coaching so damn fun.

  Coaching can be heartbreaking as well. To this day, I can’t set foot in the state of Alabama without being reminded of a gut call I made in the 1997 Iron Bowl between Alabama and Auburn. That was the day the trajectory of my career changed, the day that fundamentally altered my life—both personally and professionally. But looking back, I now consider it one of the best days of my career.

  I was the offensive coordinator at Alabama, my second stint with the Crimson Tide coaching staff. We’d had a lousy season. Heading into our game with Auburn, we were 4–6 and obviously weren’t going to be playing in a bowl game. The Tigers, conversely, were 8–2 and ranked thirteenth in the nation. So the only way to salvage our year was to beat Auburn in the blood feud that is the Iron Bowl, a rivalry between the state’s largest two schools that dates back to 1893.

  It’s hard to overstate the importance of this game to the people of Alabama. What makes the annual Alabama–Auburn game so unique is that fans of the teams grow up with each other, go to high school with each other, work together, socialize together, go to church together, go hunting together, and, in many cases, get married. And whenever a conversation stalls at the office cooler, at a local barbecue pit, or at a neighborhood bar, there is always one fallback topic that you can damn well guarantee will be discussed: Which team is better, Alabama or Auburn? College football fans might be the most intense in all of American sports, and it’s been my experience that the most zealous of those live in Alabama, where so much of the state’s identity is tied to its two elite college football teams. It’s repeatedly said that the state’s most recognizable figures are: (1) the Alabama coach; (2) the Auburn coach; (3) the Crimson Tide starting quarterback; (4) the Auburn starting quarterback; and (5) the governor, and he’s usually—strike that, always—a distant fifth.

  So in that highly charged environment we played the sixty-second edition of the Iron Bowl at Jordan-Hare Stadium in Auburn.

  After falling behind 6–0 in the first quarter, we scored 17 consecutive points. Our Crimson-clad fans in the stadium were whipped into a boiling froth. With 2:55 left in the fourth quarter, we had a 17–15 lead and the ball on our 20-yard line. All we needed was a few first downs and we’d pull off one of the biggest upsets in Iron Bowl history.

  I started calling running plays for our wonderful tailback, Shaun Alexander, who would go on to star for the Seattle Seahawks. On back-to-back runs Shaun gained 17 yards. I called Shaun’s number again on first down from our 37. The Tiger defense stuffed it for a one-yard loss. Auburn called a timeout. Now 1:35 remained on the game clock.

  On second down we again handed the ball to Shaun, who picked up three yards. It was now third-and-eight. I’m thinking if we get a first down, it’s kneeldown time. Game over.

  I’m up in the press box. The clock is ticking. I called down to the sideline, asking the coaches—specifically, head coach Mike Dubose—what everyone wanted to do. But I didn’t get an answer. Not a soul said a damn word. Later Dubose would tell a reporter, “I should have been more involved in that situation.” I had to laugh when I read that. Hell yes, he should have been more involved. The head coach is the ultimate decision maker on the team, and at the most critical point of our season, he opted for radio silence.

  Which was fine with me. I live for these situations. No risk it, no biscuit.

  I called a simple screen pass. Our quarterback, Freddie Kitchens, rolled to his right and then floated a perfect pass back to his left to fullback Ed Scissum in the flat. Our left guard made a perfect block. But our left tackle, who may have been the best player on our team, whiffed on his block. If he makes that block, Scissum runs for 50 yards and the game is over. But he didn’t make the block. Scissum got hit hard by an Auburn defender and fumbled the ball.

  Auburn recovered with 42 seconds left. The Tigers then hit a last-second field goal and we lost, 18–17.

  Man, the Alabama fans hurled verbal bile at me like sharpened spears. They were so irate you’d have thought I was personally responsible for all the famines and droughts in world history. But it was the right call. Sure, we could have run the ball up the middle, punted, and forced Auburn to drive about 60 yards with one timeout against our very talented defense. But my job as the
play caller is to make sure we win the game on offense, not lose the game on defense. I’ll go to my grave believing it was absolutely the right call.

  Four days after the Iron Bowl I was fired.

  Greatest thing ever, as it turned out.

  Friends of mine told me I should clean out my office in the dead of night to avoid the media. Hell no, I said. I was going to do it in the light of day and answer any question anyone had.

  I brought Jake with me to the office to gather my things. He was nineteen and a kicker at the University of Alabama–Birmingham. I wanted him to see the hard side of coaching. I knew he was thinking about pursuing a coaching career one day—and I wasn’t going to deter him from it—but he needed to understand that coaching can be a very challenging life.

  So Jake and I put my notebooks, mementos, pictures, and books into cardboard boxes and loaded up the car in front of the media. I answered all the questions with my chin held high. No, I told every reporter, I did not regret the play call. Sometimes in football plays don’t work out the way they are designed, it was as simple as that.

  A few weeks later, as I was sitting in my new house and wondering what in the world I was going to do with my life, I received a phone call from Jim Mora, the head coach of the Colts. He wanted to know if I would be interested in becoming his quarterback coach.

  He also mentioned that the Colts had the first pick in the upcoming NFL draft, and they were thinking about selecting a kid out of the University of Tennessee. He asked me if I knew anything about Peyton Manning.

  Yes, I did, I said. I mentioned that Peyton had recently torched us at Alabama for 304 yards passing and three touchdowns to lead the Vols to a 38–21 victory over us. I knew him well. Very well.

  One door closes, another one opens.

  And this was one heck of a door, because it turned out Peyton Manning would be standing on the other side. My football life was about to get very, very interesting.