A Thinking Man's Guide to Pro Football

It’s safe to assume that when a sport featuring playbooks that run nearly two hundred pages in length, full of diagrams, graphs and vernaculars that can leave a NASA scientist puzzled, most of the audience hasn’t the slightest clue as to what’s really happening on field. Paul Zimmerman is not a member of this audience.

Nicknamed “Dr. Z,” Zimmerman was a long time New York Post turned Sports Illustrated columnist who had a renegade vibe, never shying away from expressing his opinion and delivering concise sentences full of thought providing insights that other sports writers would spend paragraphs explaining.

Dr. Z made a career of peeling back the curtain on pro football’s complexity, gaining prominence at a time when color commentators on TV didn’t have the laymen’s dialect to explain the games within the game, and when strategy books were only read by coaches. Only George Plimpton’s Paper Lion gave the fans a nuanced look at the game that they loved but didn’t understand.

A Thinking Man’s Guide to Pro Football, Zimmerman’s 1971 book that examined every vantage point of pro football, filled this void, educating the casual fan and the aficionados alike to make pro football more comprehendible.

Zimmerman lays the responsibilities out for each position (on and off the field), but doesn’t generalize them, opting to give an overview regarding the differences in styles. Raymond Berry’s technical route running garners a different coverage than a speedster like Don Manyard. Hard hitting middle linebackers like Ray Nitschke, Dick Butkus and Tommy Nobis epitomized violence, while Willie Lanier operated with a high level of intelligence against the passing game. Running quarterbacks hibernated in the post-Sammy Baugh NFL, until Fran Tarkenton resurrected the mobile signal caller in the era of pure pocket passers like Namath, Starr and Unitas.

As Dr. Z showed, the variables to schemes and styles in football has no boundaries.

Receiving praise from men who dedicated their lives to the gridiron, Zimmerman’s exploration has a slice of everything to satisfy the reader’s curiosity. On the historical front, he explains the strengths, weaknesses and evolution of numerous schemes, such as the T formation vs. the single wing, or how the modern 4-3 defense evolved from Steve Owens’ 6-1-4 defense, which in turn derived from Greasy Neale’s 5-2-4 Eagle defense. What separates Zimmerman from other armchair analyst, however, is how he dives into each position on the gridiron, adding context to the fundamentals of each position and how it has evolved alongside the schemes that make football strategy a complex game.

Take, for instance, the offensive line. Anyone familiar with Dr. Z’s work will know that his appreciation for linemen was second to none. In the book he dissects each position on the line, ranging from describing the duties for both pulling guards on Lombardi’s famous Packer Sweep, to writing about how center in pro football are often looked upon as being the weakest of the linemen. Zimmerman quotes Ron Mix, The All-AFL offensive tackle for the San Diego Chargers, as saying, “All he [center] does on pass blocking is help someone out. On running plays he throws cutoff blocks to on side or the other. Big deal. It just means falling in front of someone.”

But given Dr. Z’s sense of history and knowledge of how each position evolves with the times, he describes one Super Bowl match up that, looking back, ushered in a new era of playing center in the post-Jim Otto NFL:

The battle between a great offensive lineman and a fine defender can prove fascinating. If you watched the battle between the Minnesota Viking’s six-time All-NFL center, Mick Tingelhoff, and the Kansas City tackle that played him head on in the 1970 Super Bowl, you might have been an eye witness to a historical even - the end of the “greyhound” center, that small, agile lineman who had become fashionable in the NFL.

The Chiefs lined up in an ‘odd’ formation, placing a lineman directly over the offensive center, a variation that the AFL favored over the NFL’s traditional 4-3 defense…But Kansas City gave Tingelhoff either 6-7, 275-pound Buck Buchanan to cope with, or 6-1, 260 pound Curly Culp, and the battle turned into an overmatch, with Tingelhoff the loser.

While the history of formations and schemes are must read chapters for historians and coaches alike, Zimmerman shows the depths of his knowledge as he delves deep into the individual “tricks of the trade” at various positions that can make the reader look at a player in a different light, as he did when writing about Joe Namath and Johnny Unitas:

The deliberate underthrow is something that Unitas and Namath both perfected. A receiver goes deep, turns and comes back for the ball, at which point the defender gets his feet crossed up and falls down, and the offense is six points richer. In the press box, we’re saying ‘What luck. An underthrown pass and they get a TD out of it.’

The deliberate underthrow, if your timing is down pat, is a good way to beat that bump-and-go style where a cornerback stays with your receiver all the way, right from the line fo scrimmage,’ Namath says. ‘Once your man goes long, the cornerback has to run like hell to keep up with him, and the deliberate underthrow-the comebacker-will get him screwed up.’

An insight like this makes one curious as to how many under-thrown balls in a game are actually a product of a bad throw or an purposeful pass based of receiver-quarterback practice and film study.

In these sections of the book that explain the physical assignments, techniques and methods used to succeed, one would be hard pressed to find analyses on schemes and playing styles, especially coming from a man that never played in the National or American Football Leagues.

But being that this book is A Thinking Man’s Guide to Pro Football, Dr. Z’s analyses is best on display when he discusses the mental aspect of the game.

When speaking about coaches, Zimmerman makes it clear that formations and schemes, though there are hundreds of them, are confined. Rather, a coaches’ success isn’t predicated on bible-sized playbooks, but the ability to stitch together the personalities, talents and goals of 40 men.

‘All the coaches know their blackboard stuff, and sometime superior football intellect will give a man a win he shouldn’t have had - or maybe that he should have,’ writes Zimmerman. ‘But I prefer to look at a team as an extension of a man’s will.’

Zimmerman goes on to write about the likes of Blanton Collier, the championship-winning coach of the Cleveland Browns that succeed Paul Brown, who’s personality never got him much attention in the press, but like his early days as a Naval officer observing Paul Brown’s practices, Collier maintained a keen eye for detail, and allowed his results to speak for himself. Zimmerman also reflects on Weeb Ewbank, a milder man than his mentor Paul Brown, but was a shrewd talent evaluator, whose penny pinching days as a young man influenced his practices as a coach and general manager that led to conflicts with his star players.

There are the names that everyone recalls, primarily Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry. When asked about the difference between the two men when they were both assistant coaches on the Giants, Wellington Mara said, “Lombardi went from warm to red hot. You could hear him laughing or shouting for five blocks. You couldn’t hear Tom from the next chair.” Zimmerman connects the difference in their personalities and how they influenced their respective approaches to coaching, as Lombardi emphasized emotion and the mastery of basic plays and fundamentals that allowed them to be “killers”, while Landry was a theoretician, focused too much on complexity to scream and holler at players to motivate them to become killers instead of artisans.

As the pages turn, interesting tidbits from these coaches invite questions. When asked when he knows if his team is ready to play, Landry says he can’t tell until the Cowboys get a touchdown scored against them. If they come right back, they are ready to play. Paul Brown commented that he only showed upbeat movies before games after one of his players felt “terribly depressed” after watching Midnight Cowboy. When analyzing the emotional advantage of playing man coverage as opposed to zone, Zimmerman quotes basketball legend Bob Cousy as saying “When you give a young, competitive athlete a straightforward assignment…the guy will generally respond better than when you assign him a zone to cover. He get’s up for the man. He says to himself, “Dammit, I’m going to shut that guy down.”

Some of the materials in Zimmerman’s 51 year old book later may seem dated compared the current game, both in strategy and the physiology of modern athletes and coaches. But his examination into football’s DNA and the psychology of those involved provides a relic that gave the armchair quarterback a better sense of what he was watching. In an era of analytics, sub packaged defense and the return to prominence for running quarterbacks, one can only imagine what the late Zimmerman would’ve had to say about this ever evolving scientific game.

But one thing can be certain, Dr Z.’s book opened the door for the future writers, tv personalities, podcasters and YouTubers to break down schemes and evaluate the talent of today. And perhaps without him, the thinking man would still be trying to make sense of the spectacle we call America football.