12. The Play Caller-Coach or Quarterback?

This is a burning question that puts me squarely on the hot seat. It created a crisis in my career that led to my detachment from the Los Angeles Rams, the result of a difference of opinion with coach Sid Gillman as to who should call the plays on the field—he or I?

But before airing my own personal feelings on the issue, I think we should hear the views of a former great quarterback who should know more about it than anyone else—Commander Otto Graham, now head coach and athletic director of the Coast Guard Academy at New London, Connecticut.

Anyone who has ever seen the Cleveland Browns in action knows full well who calls the plays. It's head coach Paul Brown, the wizard of Massillon, the magician quarterback at Miami University of Ohio, and the most successful coach in professional football.

The trademark of the Cleveland Browns is the two messenger guards shuttling in plays from the bench. Coach Brown, on the sidelines, gets suggestions from an assistant, Paul Bixler, sitting high in the press box. He digests the suggestions, and if they seem logical or coincide with his own ideas, the messenger guard trots out to the quarterback with the order of the moment. In his ten years with the Cleveland Browns, how did quarterback Otto Graham react to these orders?

"The whole truth about Paul Brown and Otto Graham has never been printed," Otto said. "I have never been opposed to a coach calling the plays. It's simply a case of how badly you want to win. In high school, the boys are green, and they often need help in the way of suggestions. In college, the question is whether you play football as a sport or a big business. How badly do you want to win? Does your livelihood as a coach depend on winning?

"My personal philosophy is that football is a sport and not a big business. At the Coast Guard Academy, we play the game as a sport and, as far as is humanly possible, I let my quarterback do his own thinking. But if the boy is totally inadequate as a play caller, and I have no one else behind him, I try to help him out. Football is a guessing game, how­ever, and all things being equal, I think the quarterback's guess is as good as the coach's.

"Now for Paul Brown and myself. For years there has been a standing misconception. For the first five years when I was with the Browns, I called three-quarters of the plays. In the latter part of my career, Brown called all the plays.

"I did not enter any violent objections. But Brown didn't believe in automatics (plays called at the line of scrimmage) and I did. Very often I encountered situations where a shift in the defense called for a change in the play. I was not allowed to call it. I think this rigidity of thought can harm a team.

"Also, it is not good for the quarterback. He becomes an automaton. He stops thinking. He comes to depend too much on the play caller. It makes for robot football."

At the opposite end of the pole from Paul Brown is Lawrence T. (Buck) Shaw, who coached the 49ers and the Eagles, and hardly ever inter­fered with his quarterbacks. How does Shaw feel about the coach versus the quarterback as the field general?

"I am all for letting the quarterback run the team," Shaw said. "When I got Y. A. Tittle for the 49ers, I was told that he was a poor play picker. But I worked with him on the plays, and I soon found he could call a play as well as anyone.

"I understand that when Frankie Albert, himself a quarterback, took over the 49ers from me, he decided to call the plays for Tittle. The results weren't good; the 49ers dropped game after game until Albert dropped his play calling.   Under Tittle's calls, they started to win.

Brown has defended his play calling on the theory that a coach in the stands, or on the sidelines, can see more of the general picture than a quarterback lining up behind the center.   Does Shaw agree?

"I think a quarterback can learn more from his own players about the defense's weakness," Shaw said, "than anybody sitting up in a press box. And from his stance behind the center, he has the entire field laid out in front of him."

Despite my differences with Gillman on play calling, I am not going to argue entirely against success as typified by Paul Brown's method. But Brown's method was not Gillman's method.

When Gillman, a college coach, took over the Rams in 1955, he did not call any plays. The next year, he called them all the time. But, in 1957, he called them only by quarters, or intermittently, according to how the game was going. When a play I called turned sour, he would turn and spread his hands eloquently to the audience as if to say, "Well, folks, that's one the coach didn't call."

I never objected to taking a suggestion from the bench or a spotter upstairs. A quarterback should always give a suggestion a try and see if it works. I never considered myself infallible. But I did object to being part ram and part goat.

Like Otto Graham, I can see justification in a college coach calling the plays if he has an inexperienced kid at the controls and the awful necessity of winning if he an¢^ his family must eat. But, in the case of the profes­sionals, the quarterback is more mature when he makes the leap from campus to cashier. The coaches have time to work with him exclusively, and if he doesn't learn in a fairly reasonable time how to pick defenses apart on his own, he has no part in pro football.

Under coaches Shaughnessy, Stydahar, and Poole, the Rams had two or three quarterback meetings a week on top of all the other meetings. When we got through with our probings, we knew the defensive personnel as well as the coach of the rival team did. From scouting reports and by studying films, we knew whether the defense played the receiver loose, or played him close; whether they were good tacklers or poor tacklers; their defensive tendencies on first, second, or third down, and whether they were a blitzing defense or a passive defense.

Steeler Coach Buddy Parker and his great quarterback, Bobby Layne, follow this procedure. Parker never calls the plays but he does a magnifi­cent job of "prepping" his quarterback for a game. He lays out a pattern of attack—what ground and aerial plays should be used in a given situation against a certain type of team.

Layne is noted as a fine caller of automatics, and even if I don't rank with him in that respect, I'll go along with him as to their value. During a pre-season game against the Rams in 1960, which the Eagles won, 20-7, I rubbed off 12 calls I had made in the huddle in favor of automatics on the line of scrimmage. The Rams' defenses were such that I could have stayed all night on the scrimmage line and never gone into the huddle.

It's a true saying that the only way to know a wife is to live with her. The same holds true of an opponent. You have to know him on the field of battle. I have had so much luck with information from my pass receivers and my offensive linemen that I cannot imagine a coach on the sidelines or up in the press box having such close rapport.

But, you cannot argue wholly against success, and nobody can gainsay Paul Brown's success with his personal play calling. Perhaps his success is due to the fact that he is an old quarterback himself, and that once having made a decision, he has the courage to stand by his convictions. There are a lot of coaches who do not know enough about quarterbacking to assume the responsibility.   Paul Brown apparently does.

Actually, and I think statistics will bear me out, the greatest years of Brown's success occurred when he had his strongest defenses.   I am not taking any credit away from Graham, Mac Speedie, Lavelli, Motley, and the others on offense—or even Brown's play calling. But it was the defense, and Lou Groza's toe, that bailed them out from many a bad situation and turned defeat into victory. In their infrequent, comparatively poor years, it was not the Browns' offense that lapsed; it was the defense that had let down.

Amid the welter of pros and cons for the coach or the quarterback calling the plays, I think there is one point that has to be made—one issue that cannot be straddled. Either the coach or the quarterback should be given the job of taking entire responsibility for calling the plays. There should be no half-way measures, except in those vital instances when advice from the sideline, after being examined on the field, proves to be of value.

Throughout the long history of football, the quarterback has been considered "the brains." Percy Haughton, the famous Harvard coach, thought so much of his quarterbacks that he issued a flat order against any of them running. "I pick them for their brains," Haughton said. "They are my generals. I don't see any sense in running the risk of damaging a brain."

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