Distant Replay (Andy Reid analyzes the 1958 Championship game)

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Here's a treat for you Eagles fans out there...

:eaglesuck:

How the greatest game in football history looks 50 years later, through the eyes of a modern NFL head coach

by Mark Bowden

Watching game film with Andy Reid, head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, can make you woozy. He lounges behind the wide desk in his office, feet up, using a wireless control to freeze the image of a play on a screen at the opposite end of the room, and then starts rolling it forward and backward, forward and back, first the whole play and then only portions of it, forward and back, forward and back, until he has pieced all the moving parts together.

Reid is a very big man, a former collegiate offensive lineman, and when I met him last spring, he was in full off-season mode: tan, relaxed, and draped in a colorful Hawaiian silk shirt large enough to display the entire Amazon rain forest. Reid was coming off another winning year—the Eagles had made it to the second round of the postseason playoffs just months earlier—and he was already well into his preparations for the next season. Pro football is a year-round occupation these days, so he was doing me a favor by agreeing to help me with research for my book, The Best Game Ever, an account of the celebrated 1958 NFL championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants.

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Reid’s insight told on the first offensive play of the game. Colts coach Weeb Ewbank had designed a trick play, so secret that in his pregame meeting with his team in the visiting locker room at Yankee Stadium, he had mouthed the play call to them, fearful that the room was bugged. Observing the opening formation, Reid noted with surprise that all but one of the Colts linemen were positioned to the left of center Buzz Nutter. “This is a completely unbalanced formation,” he told me. “You can’t even do that today.” The rules would no longer permit it: “You have to have some guys on the line of scrimmage.” In the backfield, fullback Alan “The Horse” Ameche, a Heisman Trophy winner at the University of Wisconsin, was lined up behind quarterback Johnny Unitas; right halfback Lenny Moore was three steps to Ameche’s right; and left halfback L. G. Dupre was split far out to the left side of the backfield.

Unitas didn’t give the Giants a chance to set up in a recognizable defensive formation, even if they had one for such a bizarre look. He bent over, and Nutter immediately snapped the ball. Moore took the handoff—and was tackled for a loss.

“So they came out with a trick play in mind, and it really wasn’t all that good,” Reid said, chuckling. The main reason the play failed, he pointed out, was a missed block by Dupre, a speedy back whose initials, which stood for Louis George, had earned him the nickname “Long Gone.” While Moore took the handoff from Unitas and followed Ameche around the left side of the Colts line, Dupre’s job was to race forward and hit Harland Svare, the Giants’ right-side linebacker, taking him out of the play. But the film tells the tale: “He didn’t get the crack [block] right here,” said Reid, using a red laser to point at Svare dodging Dupre, “and he kind of screws the play up.” Svare races into the backfield, forcing Moore to step in front of Ameche, his blocker; the two briefly collide, and then as Moore tries to recover and race to the outside, he is pulled down for the loss.

“And then, the fullback forgot the snap count,” Reid said, rolling the play back to the beginning again. Sure enough, on the snap of the ball, Ameche remains in a set position until Moore actually takes the ball from Unitas. “He forgot that it was a quick count … That’s that Wisconsin education right there.”

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