Everyone in the room, even the security guards, is falling asleep. Patti Tagliabue knows how to kill a room. It is two days before Super Bowl 38, and Tagliabue is monotoring his way through another State of the NFL media conference when someone asks a question about the rather lenient--closer to World Wrestling Entertainment--officiating in the AFC championship game between the Patriots and Colts.
Tagliabue says, in his mind, the officiating was fine, no different than what it had been in the Colts-Chiefs playoff game one week before.
"Nothing happened between the Kansas City game and the New England game with officiating that affected the Colts' performance," he says. "What affected the Colts' performance was the fact that the New England defense was on the field, not the Chiefs'."
Did he just say what I thought he said? Did the commissioner of the NFL just rip the Chiefs' defense? Suddenly, there is energy in the room. And everyone ... starts ... laughing.
Tagliabue's face reddens. To his left, Chiefs founder Lamar Hunt, Chiefs president Carl Peterson and a couple dozen Chiefs players and officials sit in shock. They have come to Houston to celebrate Chiefs guard Will Shields' selection as NFL Man of the Year, not to be victims of a Paul Tagliabue celebrity roast.
Tags is mortified.
"And that's not, uh, not, uh, to be taken as pejorative in front of Mr. Hunt," Tagliabue says. "That's the reality."
More laughter. Chiefs linebacker Shawn Barber stands up, like he is going to go after the commissioner. Chiefs quarterback Trent Green quietly seethes. Tagliabue tries to disentangle himself, but he can't. He talks about the differences between the Patriots and Chiefs defenses. Laughter. He talks about how the Patriots cause fumbles and the Chiefs don't. More laughter.
Now it is official. The Chiefs' defense, already the main reason a team that led the league in scoring the last two seasons did not win a single playoff game, is now an NFL-sanctioned laughingstock.
"I plan to tell the commissioner that while we don't intend on changing many players, we have hired a new defensive coordinator," Peterson says. "And I believe Gunther Cunningham will change the way we play football."
At the very moment Tagliabue is ripping the Chiefs' defense in front of the nation's media, Gunther Cunningham is sitting in a room at Arrowhead Stadium. He is typing up his new playbook. It has been only three years since Cunningham was unceremoniously dumped as the Chiefs' head coach, but he isn't thinking about that. He is thinking how he is going to get his entire playbook into one three-ringed binder.
"It's absolutely enormous," he says of his War and Peace-sized manual. It's more than a playbook. It's Cunningham's treatise on playing defense, a collection of everything he has learned in 22 years of coaching in the NFL, plus 12 years of coaching at the college level and one in Canada. The book includes techniques, charts, graphics, famous quotes, war stories and personal thoughts. "No one has ever done anything like this before," he says.
What he does not say is that few coordinators ever have had to do anything quite like this. The Chiefs are gambling on Gunther. Kansas City's offense, powered by six Pro Bowl players last season, is only the fourth since the 1970 NFL-AFL merger to lead the league in scoring two years in a row. But oh, that defense. In 2002, the Chiefs gave up 399 points; only four teams allowed more. Peterson and coach Dick Vermeil found three new starters in the free-agent market (Barber, defensive end Vonnie Holliday and cornerback Dexter McCleon) and had two others (defensive tackle Ryan Sims and safety Jerome Woods) return from injuries. They felt the infusion of players would make the difference in 2003.
The defense showed moderate improvement as the Chiefs started 9-0. Then, it went into cardiac arrest, allowing 45 points twice and 218 rushing yards and five touchdowns to Clinton Portis. It gave up an astounding 5.2 yards per rush for the season, the worst by any team in more than 25 years, and ended the season in a humiliating heap after a 38-31 playoff loss to Indianapolis.
Two days after the season, Vermeil reluctantly accepted the resignation of defensive coordinator Greg Robinson. Barely a week later, the Chiefs rehired Cunningham.
"I'm not asking Gunther to be a savior," Vermeil says. "No man can do that."
"Do you plan on making any other big changes on defense?" he is asked.
"No," Vermeil says.
From 1995 to 1998, Cunningham was Kansas City's defensive coordinator; the Chiefs finished 13-3 in '95 and '97, mostly because of their ferocious pass rush and hard hitting. Peterson hired Cunningham to replace Marty Schottenheimer as head coach in 1999, but after two trying and turbulent seasons, Peterson fired Cunningham so he could hire Vermeil, his longtime friend. There were hard feelings. "I was bitter," Cunningham says. "I was angry. I'm not going to lie to you."
Cunningham went to Tennessee to be linebackers coach, and at first he had a difficult time recapturing his coaching passion. "Gunther, for lack of better words, was pretty beat up when he got here," Titans coach Jeff Fisher says.
Cunningham always had been a screamer, a facemask grabber, a five-star curser, but in Tennessee he stood back. He watched a lot. When he did shout and curse, it did not have the same resonance. "You could see he was not himself," Titans cornerback Samari Rolle says. "It was like he was playing a role."
Slowly over three seasons, Cunningham found his old self. He connected with a bright, young linebacker, Keith Bulluck, who, like Cunningham, did not know his father growing up. Cunningham's ability to get the most out of hard-working young players has marked his career. "You are going to be a great player in this league," Cunningham told Bulluck, "or I'm a failure."
"Gun opened my mind," says Bulluck, a Pro Bowl selection last year in his fourth NFL season. The Titans' defense stuffed the run. Cunningham began to feel alive again.
When Peterson called and asked if Cunningham was willing to come back to Kansas City, Cunningham thought about it for about three seconds. "Yes," he said.
A few days after he is hired, Peterson calls Cunningham into his office. He has a desperate plea.
"Please, just make us respectable," Peterson says. "I don't care if we're in the top 10 in defense or the top 15. I mean, that would be nice. But just make us respectable. Just give us a chance."
Cunningham is disgusted. "Even the word 'respectable' makes me sick to my stomach," he says. "We're not coming to be 'respectable.' We're coming to take your heart."
Cunningham's first goal is to get the defense to play football again. Robinson's schemes were complicated and quite often baffling--and the players didn't respond well to them. "It was like playing chess," Woods says. "Man, we're not rocket scientists. We're football players. All we know how to do is knock the crap out of people."
So, Cunningham has brought in
his attacking brand of football. "There are only two rules to my defense," he says. "Run downhill, and show up. That's what I tell our guys. Run at the offense and show up around the ball. Do those two things, we'll be a good defense. Don't do them, you won't be playing here."
Of course, to teach those two rules, Cunningham has written a 400-page playbook. But gone are the crazy schemes. Gone are the goofy blitzes. In their place is Cunningham's simplified approach.
First, the Chiefs will have their corners play press coverage. This defense was so shattered the last two seasons that eventually Robinson felt his only option was to drop the corners into soft zone coverage, making the Chiefs easy pickings. Cunningham believes cornerbacks Eric Warfield and McCleon are good enough to play on the line. He hopes this will free the safeties--Woods, who played in the Pro Bowl after last season, and hard-hitting Greg Wesley--to create havoc. "We have two real good safeties" Cunningham says. "They both could be Pro Bowlers. They should be the strength of this defense. I think in the past, they got away from what makes them good football players. They need to attack the run and make receivers think twice before catching the ball over the middle. That's part of the attitude of this defense."
Continued from page 1.
Second, Cunningham will have his linebackers attack. The biggest complaint of players a year ago is they were taught to hesitate, wait for the play to develop. By that time, though, the running back was gone. "Watching their linebackers is a joke," one opposing players says. "They stand there and hope someone will run into them."
"Our linebackers are going to run to the ball" Cunningham says. "We've got speed there. Scott (Fujita) can really run." Cunningham smiles. "And you know me. We're going to blitz. We're not going to back down when we're in trouble. My approach has always been the tougher things get, the more you attack."
Third--and this will be Cunningham's biggest challenge--will be getting more aggressive play out of the line. The Chiefs have expected former No. 1 pick Sims to develop into a dominating tackle, but his play has been spotty. Sims and end Eric Hicks nearly came to blows in the locker room after the Chiefs allowed 45 points to the Vikings last season. Cunningham thinks Sims, John Browning and 350-pound rookie Junior Siavii will be good enough inside to make plays and tie up enough blockers to help Hicks return to his dominant level of 2000, when he had 14 sacks in 13 games.
Understand, this is what Cunningham wants to do. The players are excited. "You can see a new look in the eyes of the defensive guys," fullback Tony Richardson says. "It's like they've been reborn. They feel like they are allowed to play football again."
Three years ago, the Rams brought in Lovie Smith to turn around a dreadful defense. In his first year as coordinator, the defense played well enough to help carry the Rams to the Super Bowl. But the Rams added talent too, including perennial Pro Bowl cornerback Aeneas Williams. The question remains: Can Cunningham do this all by himself? This is, after all, a defense that gave up almost 12,000 yards over the last two seasons--and the same 11 starters from 2003 are expected to start.
"Gunther's good," one NFL player says. "But come on. He doesn't play linebacker. I hope they're not expecting miracles over there."
But they are expecting miracles--Cunningham more than anyone. "From what I've seen, and I know it's early, we have enough talent," he says. "We have some good players. What we need is an identity. I'm not going to lie to you; this was a shattered group when I got here. They acted like they were 3-13 last year, not 13-3. They were embarrassed. I told them, 'We don't have time for that nonsense. We are going to be a good defense. We have to be a good defense.'"
Cunningham grimaces. "It's like Winston Churchill said. We have no option."
On the last play of a practice in May, Cunningham goes for broke. He gathers his defense and says, "This is it, boys. All-out blitz." Then he backs up to watch. He is scared to death.
"If it doesn't work, I've lost them," he says plainly. "I'd have to start all over again, building up their confidence. These last two years--this was a shell-shocked bunch. I needed to tell them what we're all about."
The blitz works. The two safeties break through and swarm Green, the play is blown up and the defensive guys jump on each other and scream. Cunningham stands back and smiles. "It's a beginning," he says. "We've got a long, long way to go."
The Chiefs aren't going to become the '85 Bears. But with the best offense and special teams in the NFL, as Peterson points out, they don't have to have a dominant defense. They just need to be something more than a commissioner's punch line. With Cunningham, they'll be that. Even in a spring practice, you can see that. TSN
SECOND EFFORT
Chiefs fans hope Gunther Cunningham's second tenure as defensive coordinator is as successful as his first.
From 1995-98, Cunningham's first stint running the Chiefs' defense, the team allowed the fewest points in the league twice (1995 and '97); had six top 10 finishes among rushing defense, passing defense and overall defense in those seasons, and sent five defensive players to the Pro Bowl: linebacker Derrick Thomas (three times), cornerback Dale Carter (three times) and end Neil Smith, tackle Dan Saleaumua and cornerback James Hasty (once each).
Unfortunately for Cunningham, he could not find a defensive coordinator as able as himself in 1999, when he succeeded MarLy Schottenheimer as the team's head coach. Since then, the Chiefs have failed to crack the top 10 in any of the main defensive categories and have had only two Pro Bowl representatives on defense (Hasty, after the 2000 season, and safety Jerome Woods, after the 2003 season). A comparison of the Chiefs' defense to NFL averages over the past decade:
CHIEFS NFL AVERAGE
Run Pass
1994 16 10
1995 3 5
1996 13 22
1997 7 16
1998 18 7
1999 11 16
2000 17 20
2001 27 14
2002 24 31
2003 30 20
NFL rank Seasons under Cunningham
Note: Table made from bar graph.
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