Offensive war
Patrick Mahomes, Andy Reid and the Kansas City Chiefs have their backs against the wall. It’s halfway through the fourth quarter of Super Bowl 53, February 3, 2019, and the Chiefs are losing to the underdog San Francisco 49ers, 21–10.
The Chiefs are here because of their high-powered offense. Today, that offense is failing them. But finally, with just over six minutes left in the fourth quarter, things start to click.
Mahomes stomps his foot once and calls hike. Star tight end Travis Kelce takes off from his spot in the slot as soon as the ball is snapped, running a classic seam route. The uber-athletic Kelce beats a much smaller defensive back to the end zone. By the time he turns around, the ball has already left Mahomes’s golden arm. The flailing defensive back tackles Kelce before he can grab it. Pass interference. Ball to the one. First down.
A play later, Mahomes finds Kelce wide open in the back of the end zone. The Chiefs are back in it. The 49ers go three-and-out on their next drive. Mahomes gets the ball back with just over five minutes left.
Seven plays later, the Chiefs are ahead. San Francisco stalls out on their next drive, and Mahomes and the Chiefs score again. This time it only takes two plays. Whoever said “defense wins championships” never watched these Chiefs on offense. Three touchdowns in under five game minutes to win the Super Bowl.
So much of that victory can be back to one former resident of Oxford, Ohio, Sid Gillman. The famous “West Coast” scheme that Andy Reid installed to help Kansas City become one of the best offensive teams ever? The guy who invented it idolized Gillman and built it from concepts that Gillman devised. The seam route that Kelce ran to get the Chiefs rolling? Many say Gillman invented it. Gillman loved his tight ends. At a time when most tight ends were just blockers, Gillman thought a good one was the secret to an explosive offense. Reid built his offense around the tight end Kelce. Reid himself can trace his coaching lineage directly back to Gillman.
Gillman spent his life innovating the offensive side of football. His influence over the sport can be seen all over the modern football landscape. High-powered spread offenses, film review and strength training are just some of the concepts he created, or at least made popular. Gillman is the only coach ever to be inducted into both the Professional and College Football Halls of Fame, despite the fact that he never won a Super Bowl or National Championship.
Many call him “the father of the modern passing game.” He started his career at Miami University, where he built great teams and destroyed bridges.
At Yager Stadium, Miami’s football arena, a row of statues dominates the south side of the concourse. You won’t find Gillman among them. Even on the day those statues were unveiled, Gillman was being bad-mouthed in Oxford.
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Mel Olix graduated from Miami in 1950 and was inducted into the Miami Athletics Hall of Fame in 1971. Olix played quarterback for Gillman for two years. He was invited to a college all-star game after his senior season, and at one point during the festivities, he was cornered by a pair of college football legends: Hall of Famer Rip Engle, who had just hired Joe Paterno to his staff at Penn State, and Illinois coach Ray Eliot, who would win the school’s only national title the next year, in 1951.
They wanted to copy Gillman’s offense. They asked Olix to explain it.
“That was the only reason I was invited,” Olix later said. “That’s all they wanted from me.”
That offense that Engle and Eliot wanted to copy had worked wonders for Gillman at Miami by that time. Gillman went 31–6–1 during his four seasons at the helm of Miami. In his final season, in 1947, Miami finished 9–0–1 and beat Texas Tech in the Sun Bowl on New Year’s Day in 1948. His teams barely practiced defense.
Gillman’s passing attack was so effective partly because it was one of the first to use the whole field, vertically and horizontally.
The single wing formation was the first popular formation in football. It features an unbalanced line with two tight ends and a wing back on the strong side. The ball is snapped directly to the tailback, who tries to run behind the strong side.
In the 1940s, the T formation became more popular. In the T, the quarterback lines up under center while three running backs line up behind him. A balanced offensive line makes passing easier because the quarterback can count on equal protection from both sides. Frank Leahy won four national championships at Notre Dame in the 1940s using the T, and by 1946, Gillman had adopted it for his Miami team.
In the normal T formation, the linemen would form up tight around the center, with little space between them. In Gillman’s T, however, the linemen spread out, covering nearly twice as much space. This made the defensive front spread out too, giving Gillman’s offense bigger gaps to work with.
Gillman would line his tight ends up away from the offensive line and send them on routes downfield at a time when the tight end was almost exclusively a blocking position. His receivers would line up outside the numbers, which spread defenses wider than they were used to at the time.
“The field is one hundred yards long and fifty-three yards wide,” Gillman once famously said. “We’re going to use every damn inch of it and force the other guy to defend all of it.”
Gillman would put his backs in motion to confuse the defense and diagnose whether he was facing man or zone coverage. He’d throw to his backs in the flat or even send them on routes downfield. His offenses would often send more receivers downfield than defenses knew how to cover.
Gillman believed you could control the passing game with a good tight end. He would line his tight ends up around the hash area, which forced defenses to cover the inside of the field and opened up space for the other receivers. He was a pioneer of the seam route, where a tight end lines up in the slot (between the outside receiver and offensive line) and runs straight up the field, occupying at least one safety and giving at least one receiver single coverage on the outside.
By the 21st century, Gillman’s tight-end innovation had spread throughout the game. Many of the NFL’s most successful recent championship teams have relied heavily on a star tight end. Kelce, Rob Gronkowski of the New England Patriots dynasty and Shannon Sharpe of the Baltimore Ravens and Denver Broncos are just a few examples.
The prevailing wisdom among football people has always been to establish the run game to set up the passing game. Even today, most coaches live by this standard. Gillman, on the other hand, used his passing game to set up his rushing attack.
“”We felt that if we could pass successfully, we could run the draw play, which you see so often,” Gillman once told NFL Today. “Then we could force a heavy rush, and then we could have the trap play … the late screen, the slip screen, the speed screen — and we had all of those and we could score.”
The teams that do that today have the best offenses in the NFL.
Even Gillman’s terminology has survived until today. He was the first one to label the three types of receivers “X,” “Y” and “Z.” That is now ubiquitous in football. He also created a route tree, a system that gave a single-digit number to each type of route. Go to any high school football practice today and you’ll hear the receivers begging to run Gillman’s “9” route, a streak up the field.
Gillman was so captivated by the offensive side of football that he hardly seemed to care about defense.
All week long, Gillman’s teams would work on offense, offense, offense, inserting Gillman’s crazy new plays and drilling them until they were second nature. Finally, late on Thursday (or sometimes late on Friday, depending on who you ask) before a Saturday game, after another full day of practicing offense, Sid and his team would focus on the other half of the game. For a few minutes, at least.
Sid would take his team and show them where to line up on defense. They’d do a crash course, and soon Sid would turn his focus back to offense.
“We would work all week on offense, and about Thursday night, he’d say, ‘OK, we’ll go work on defense now,’” Paul Dietzel, who played for and coached with Gillman, said. “He’d take us, show us where to line up on defense. Then, he’d say ‘OK, back to offense.’”
Ara Parseghian, another recruit of Gillman’s to Miami, remembers the defensive game plan as even more of an afterthought than that.
“I remember on a Friday we’d go out for a light practice,” Parseghian said. “He sat down with the team and told us what we were going to do on defense tomorrow. Well, tomorrow was the game, and that was the first we’d heard about defense that week.”
Don’t mistake Gillman’s disdain for defense for laziness, or a lack of will to win. Gillman and his teams slept, ate and breathed football. He often prioritized winning over anything else. When Gillman could, he would skirt the rulebook or ignore it all together.
All of Gillman’s players were required to take classes in football theory. At Miami, his teams practiced throughout the year, which was against the NCAA’s rules. As the story goes, if a player on his Miami team made a particularly good tackle in practice, Gillman would send him to a restaurant Uptown for a free steak meal. At Gillman’s next head coaching job with the Cincinnati Bearcats, he was even more brazen. He’d call each of his players into his office every week to review their film from the previous game. Make a jarring tackle? You might get $5. If you knocked the guy down but your technique wasn’t perfect, you probably only got $2.50.
Thurman Owens, whom Gillman once called “pound for pound the best defensive lineman in UC history,” would sometimes leave Gillman’s office with $50 in hand.
In his first season at Cincinnati, Gillman’s Bearcats were set to open the season against Nevada. Gillman sent a young assistant, Jack Faulkner, to Reno. There, Faulkner disguised himself as a student and tried out for the football team. And made it. He practiced with the squad, and after every practice he would send Gillman notes. When it came time to register for classes, Faulkner high-tailed it back to Ohio.
While Gillman was paying his players for what he saw on film, most of the rest of the football world hadn’t even started watching.
Gillman was one of the first coaches to take advantage of game film when creating his game plan. His cousin, Don Guttman, owned a movie theater, and one summer he ordered his projectionists to cut out all of the football clips from the reels and save them in tin cans for Sid. It was illegal, but Guttman didn’t care. Maybe it ran in the family.
Gillman came home for the summer and was delighted. Guttman said it was nearly impossible to get his attention because he would always be running the plays back and forth. Gillman spent much of the summer going through film and making notes on index cards.
Once, sitting for an interview, Gillman said: “We were probably the forerunners of film observation in college and pro football.”
His wife Esther, who was sitting next to him, said: “You were.”
Sid responded,“Well, whatever.”
And Esther said, “You were, dear.”
Each week when he was the head coach at Miami, Gillman would drive to the Tallawanda theater in Oxford. He would collect the RKO newsreels, cut the football highlights and then go to the handball courts at Withrow Court to break down film. He’d watch the Miami film as well as film from around the country, always looking for ways to make his beloved offense better.
Today, Gillman is known as one of the game’s great innovators. Back then, he was known as a great copier. If someone around college football was running a new play and seeing success, it was never long before it was in Gillman’s playbook.
Gillman’s copying skills got him his next job after Miami, under the legendary Army coach Earl Blaik. Gillman saw a play Michigan ran on film, an effective speed sweep, where the entire line moves one way and a back tries to run behind it. Gillman reworked the play to run out of his signature T formation, and Blaik was enchanted.
For Gillman, film study wasn’t work. One time in the 1960s, when Gillman was head coach of the NFL’s San Diego Chargers, he was watching film with a colleague, Bum Phillips. After hours in front of the screen, Phillips was falling asleep.
“Hey Bum!” Gillman barked. “This is better than making love!”
Phillips jolted awake and glared at Gillman.
“Sid, either I don’t know how to watch film, or you don’t know how to make love,” he replied.
Even when Gillman was in his late 70s and out of the game for good, he would pore over game film. His study housed more than 500 cans of film — gray cans for passing plays, blue for runs. He didn’t need a color for defense. Gillman would spend hours and hours splicing raw footage together to make highlight reels. You want to see how the best run the comeback route? Fear not. Gillman would walk over to one of the gray cans and pull out a tape. Pull up a chair and you’d get to watch an hour or more of the (in Gillman’s opinion) greatest to ever do it running Gillman’s “three” route, one after another after another.
Gillman wrote notes on loose-leaf paper, which he then put into loose leaf notebooks. He accumulated roughly 100 notebooks in that study, some of them with 150 pages or more. All about offense.
Even through the twilight of his life, Gillman couldn’t help but study offensive football. Sometimes, in later years, Gillman would wonder why he was still spending so much time studying film.
“What else would I be doing?” he’d answer himself. “It’s my life, what keeps me going.”
Gillman was so infatuated with football’s progress that, unlike most other old, successful people, he didn’t miss how things were in his day.
“Everyone’s interested in the past, the good old days, the Golden Age,” Gillman said. “God almighty, football is so much better now, the technique, the players. The games are great now. I’m part of the good old days, and they weren’t worth a damn.”
Gillman’s spot on the cutting edge wasn’t just related to offense. His Chargers were the first professional team to hire a strength trainer in 1963.
“We really got the jump on the rest of football back then,” said Ron Mix, a Chargers Hall of Fame offensive tackle. “…it gave us a huge strength advantage in games.”
Most coaches at the time discouraged weight training because they believed it would harm flexibility. Gillman didn’t let himself get bogged down by this false conventional wisdom, and today, every team has multiple strength coaches and million-dollar weight rooms.
Gillman also had an incredible eye for talent.
Miami University is renowned nationally for its coaching lineage. The school produced Pro Football Hall of Fame coaches Paul Brown and Weeb Ewbank, for instance, in addition to more recent Super Bowl winners Sean McVay and John Harbaugh.
On the south side of Miami’s Yager Stadium, there are 10 statues of Miami football coaching legends. Of the ten, four are men whom Gillman recruited to Miami during his four seasons as head coach. According to Miami’s athletic department, Gillman is not honored because he didn’t graduate from Miami.
Gillman recruited Ara Parseghian and Paul Dietzel to his Miami team for the 1946 season. Both players were coming off service in World War II. Parsheigian became the head coach of Miami in 1951, and from 1964–1974, he coached Notre Dame to two national championships. In 1980, he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. Dietzel wound up winning a national championship too, as head coach of Louisiana State University (LSU) in 1958.
Bill Arnsparger and John Pont are the other two. Arnsparger went on to win an SEC championship at the helm of LSU in 1986 and a Super Bowl as the defensive coordinator of the 1972 Miami Dolphins, considered by many to be the best team in NFL history. Pont led Indiana University to its second (and last) Big Ten championship and the Rose Bowl in 1967, maybe the most impressive accomplishment of anyone on this list.
The story of how Dietzel ended up at Miami reveals something about Gillman’s will to win. In 1942, Dietzel enrolled at Duke University after receiving a football scholarship. His girlfriend, Anne, was headed to Miami for a spot on the cheerleading squad. Soon after enrolling at Duke, Deitzel received a notice that he had been drafted. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps.
He ended up piloting a B-29 Superfortress on missions in the Pacific theater. There he received a stream of postcards from Oxford, Ohio — from Anne, but also from Sid Gillman, who somehow figured out who he was and that his sweetheart went to Miami. Gillman figured that he could convince Dietzel to join his girlfriend in Oxford, and Gillman was right.
When Dietzel’s statue was erected on the south side of Yager Stadium in 2010, Anne was right by his side, although Gillman was many states away.
Recruiting to Miami isn’t the only way that Gillman’s keen eye for talent shines through history. When he was an assistant coach at Army, his next job after Miami, he built a relationship with a young Fordham assistant coach. When Gillman left Army in 1949 to take the head coaching job at Cincinnati, he recommended that Blaik replace him with this friend, then 35-year-old Vince Lombardi. And in 1958, at a meeting before the NFL draft, an old friend, Jerry Atkinson, pulled Gillman aside and asked for a recommendation for the next head coach of Atkinson’s Green Bay Packers. Gillman drew Atkinson into another room and once again singled out the man after whom the Super Bowl trophy is now named — Lombardi.
Al Davis, a three-time Super Bowl champion and the legendary late owner and general manager of the Oakland Raiders, got his first break from Gillman, too. In 1960, when Gillman was hired to coach the Los Angeles Chargers (who would move to San Diego in 1961), he hired Davis as his backfield coach. More people will know of Davis than Gillman. He would go on to become one of the most successful football people ever. He never forgot how Gillman changed the game.
“Every major-college pass offense, and a lot of those in the NFL, stem from Gillman,” Davis said years later.
In 1963, Davis got his first head coaching job with the Oakland Raiders. He took Gillman’s high-powered scheme with him to Oakland. In 1966, Bill Walsh, the legendary San Francisco 49ers coach who devised the famous West Coast Offense, got hired by the Raiders as a running backs coach.
Walsh later described the approach he learned working for Davis’s raiders as “the foundation of my philosophy of offense.”
“It was a fully dimensional approach…,” Walsh would later say about Gillman’s scheme. “A typical NFL team might have three or four pass patterns for the halfback, but the Raiders’ system had as many as twenty, and even they didn’t use anything close to Gillman’s whole playbook. To develop an understanding of it took time, but once learned, it was invaluable.”
That was just another instance of Gillman’s fingerprints on the modern game. Many current teams still run the West Coast Offense, including two of the last three Super Bowl champions, the Los Angeles Rams and Kansas City Chiefs.
The Air Coryell offensive system is also still in use in the NFL today. Actually, most people will say it’s one of only three in use in the NFL today, along with Walsh’s West Coast Offense and the Erhardt-Perkins system, a more run-focused scheme.
Air Coryell is a system devised by former Chargers coach Don Coryell. It’s a fast-paced offense that attempts to beat the opponent mainly with medium and long downfield passes. This scheme too can trace many of its ideas directly back to Gillman: spreading the field, sending more receivers downfield and making quick passes to make up for having fewer blockers. Coryell was the coach at San Diego State while Gillman was coaching the San Diego Chargers in the early sixties. Coryell and his assistants, and sometimes his team too, would go to Gillman’s Chargers practices and absorb what they could. A little more than a decade later, in 1979, the Air Coryell System was officially born.
People like to measure a football coach’s influence by his coaching tree. The coaching tree is like a family tree, except instead of kids you have assistants who became head coaches. There have been 56 Super Bowls played in the history of the NFL. Twenty-eight of them were won by a head coach directly descended from Gillman. Any of the four-in-a-row that Marv Levy’s Buffalo Bills lost in the early 1990s would have been added to that total. In today’s NFL, Andy Reid of the Kansas City Chiefs, John Harbaugh of the Baltimore Ravens, Sean McDermott of the Bills, Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers and Mike McCarthy of the Dallas Cowboys are just some of the head coaches who can trace their lineage directly back to Gillman.
To summarize: Gillman is the only coach ever inducted into both the College and Pro Football Halls of Fame. Yet he never won a Super Bowl or National Championship. Of the three offensive systems in popular use in the NFL today, the two most effective are direct descendants of Gillman’s philosophies. The men who invented both of them looked up to him. Many of his offensive philosophies themselves shape today’s football landscape, more than forty years after his coaching career finished. Of the 56 Super Bowls, exactly half were won by members of Gillman’s coaching lineage. He was the first NFL coach to hire a strength trainer. Today, the only thing football people do more than lift weights is watch film. Gillman was the first coach to do that too, or at least the first to popularize it. He was the first one to give Vince Lombardi a shot. Same with Al Davis, Bo Schembechler, and Ara Parshegian.
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I hope I’ve convinced you at least that Gilman was an incredible innovator who is deserving of praise and reverence, at least football-wise.
Yet Gillman wasn’t inducted into the Miami University Athletics Hall of Fame until 1991, over 20 years after many of the men he recruited to Oxford were already enshrined. By this time, he had already been named to both the College and Professional Football Halls of Fame.
Gillman was effectively blackballed for some 40 years after he coached his final game at Miami.
At the ceremony where those statues south of Yager Stadium were revealed, back in 2010, Lucy Ewbank, the then 104-year-old widow of Miami coaching great Weeb Ewbank said this about Gillman (who died in 2003): “You can have him. [Gillman] owed everybody in Oxford when he left.”
After the 1947 season, Gillman left Miami to become an assistant coach at Army, who had won national championships in 1944, 1945 and 1946. According to Gillman’s son, Sid was promised the Army head coaching job when Blaik retired.
“He wouldn’t have considered leaving Miami for even Purdue,” Gillman’s son said. “But Army was a big deal.”
Gillman spent one year as the line coach at Army. Interestingly, this was the first year Army played with two platoons, a set of defensive players and a set of offensive players. They were one of the first to do this. It wasn’t Gillman’s idea, but where he went, innovation followed, apparently.
It soon became clear that Blaik wasn’t going to retire anytime soon (he ended up coaching Army until 1956), so Gillman decided to move on.
Now here is where he really irritated a lot of Miami people.
Gillman ended up taking the job as the head coach at the University of Cincinnati for the 1949 season. When he did, Miami’s head coach and an assistant, George Blackburn and Joe Madro, resigned from Miami to join him at Cincinnati. Some players from Miami’s 1948 Mid-American Conference Championship squad jumped ship to the Bearcats, too.
In 1948, before the Gillman-to-Cincinnati saga, Miami beat Cincinnati 43–19 at Nippert Stadium in Cincinnati. In 1949, after Gillman, Blackburn and Madro fled to the Bearcats, Miami lost 27–5.
Gillman continued to torment Miami for the rest of his Cincinnati tenure, which lasted until 1954. Parseghian, who became Miami’s head coach in 1951, said it was tough to recruit against Gillman. With the schools being so close, they were often going after the same players. Gillman’s willingness to ignore the rules, and Parseghian’s inability to do so at Miami, made it impossible for Miami to keep up. After Gillman left for the NFL, Cincinnati was suspended from NCAA activities for a year because of his practices while there.
Gillman burned most of his bridges back to Oxford in the years following his tenure at Miami. Miami had one mediocre season in 1949 after Gillman pilfered its program on his way to Cincinnati, but quickly got back to winning. Woody Hayes, who went on to win five national championships at Ohio State, led the team to a 9–1 mark in 1950. Parseghian took over after that and went 39–6–1 in his five seasons as coach. He beat Cincinnati for the Victory Bell in 1954, Gillman’s last year there, and again in 1955, before moving on. The 1954 game started a long reign of dominance for Miami in the UC vs MU rivalry. From that day, Miami won 17 of the next 22 rivalry games.
Miami football bounced back from Gillman’s actions, and so did some people’s attitudes (although some, like Lucy Ewbank, would take their resentment to the grave). In 1977, players from Miami’s 1947 9–0–1 Sun Bowl-winning team wrote a stack of letters to Miami urging administrators to let Gillman in the Hall. Miami’s vice president for development and alumni affairs, John Dolibois, penned a quick note to Athletic Director Dick Shrider that said: “I was literally besieged at the Sun Bowl party about Sid Gillman. I now agree … that his time has come.”
The time hadn’t actually come yet for one of the greatest minds in football history, one of the most influential people ever to call Miami home. Finally, 14 years later, he was inducted into the Miami Athletics Hall of Fame.
A note on sources: Sources included Josh Katzowitz, Sid Gillman: Father of the Modern Passing Game (2018); Doug Farrar, The Genius of Desperation: The Schematic Innovations That Made the Modern NFL (2018); and Ron Jaworski, Greg Cosell and David Plaut, The Games that Changed the Game: The Evolution of the NFL in Seven Sundays (2011). I also consulted Miami University Library’s Special Collections; a feature that Paul Zimmerman wrote on Gillman for Sports Illustrated in 1991; and a 1987 Los Angeles Times article by Bob Oates, “Miami of Ohio: A coaching factory.”
