How Jon Gruden became America’s football coach
Jon Gruden has one of the most recognizable faces in professional football, partly because he hasn’t worn a helmet since 1985, when he began his transformation from feckless college quarterback to triumphant professional coach. In 1998, he was named the head coach of the Oakland Raiders; in 2003, at thirty-nine, he won the Super Bowl with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Sports Illustrated chronicled his “spectacular” rise, and People anointed him one of the “beautiful people,” although his appearance was more impish than debonair—he was known as Chucky, because of his devilish squint, which made him resemble the psychotic doll from the horror movie “Child’s Play.”In 2009, after a particularly disappointing season, the Buccaneers fired him, but, instead of moving on, he stayed put, and prospered. Gruden, who is now forty-eight, remained in Tampa, with his wife and three sons. He rented an office in a local strip mall, where he began presiding over irregular gatherings of a group that he calls the Fired Football Coaches Association. (He keeps boxes of F.F.C.A. visors and T-shirts in the bathroom, stacked in the shower stall.) Gruden’s office contains one of the country’s greatest collections of football videotapes, sorted according to a complicated taxonomy of his own devising. He says, “You want to talk about two-minute offense? Ball security? Nickel jam? Red-zone touchdown passes? Quarterback fundamentals? Read options? Three-down nickel blitzes? Checkdowns? Wildcats? I got it all down here.” (...)
Gruden wakes up early, at three-seventeen (an arbitrary alarm-clock setting that stuck), and on a recent Thursday morning he arrived at the F.F.C.A. at around three-forty-five, pulling his white Mercedes into the empty lot. He wanted to learn everything he could about the New England Patriots and the Kansas City Chiefs, who were playing in the following Monday’s game. Gruden spent the morning examining “melts,” video compilations that allow him to view every play from just about every angle.
He is fit and reflexively physical, with a habit, common to coaches, of accentuating his statements with pokes, taps, and gentle shoves. But he has trained himself to sit still for hours, holding a professional-grade remote control called a Cowboy clicker, watching plays forward and backward, at full speed and in slow motion. He works in silence, except for his own occasional remarks. Every week, as he gets to know the two teams, he quickly comes to view their achievements and blunders as his own. “That wasn’t very good,” he murmured, after one uninspired Chiefs sequence. “That wasn’t our best effort. Wonder what happened.” Then he hit rewind and watched the play again.
There is no rational way to explain the amount of time that Gruden invests in each “Monday Night Football” broadcast: he spends days memorizing the names, numbers, and tendencies of all fifty-three players on both teams, even though little of this information makes it onto the broadcast. Once he has a sense of each team, he starts editing, creating a series of four-minute demonstration reels, known as “cutups,” to share with his producers and fellow-broadcasters, partly so they can create highlight clips for the show, and partly so that he can be sure they know what he’s talking about. When he is finished compiling a cutup, he sits with the Cowboy clicker in his left hand and a mouse in his right hand, so that he can run back and forth over the plays and draw emphatic arrows and circles, while he records an audio commentary track. These commentaries, for internal use only, are both loopier and more technical than what’s broadcast on “Monday Night Football.”
by Kalefa Sanneh, New Yorker | Read more:
Illustration: Dan Adel
