Uneasy lies the head that wears the headset
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The Steelers were 55-25 while Bruce Arians was offensive coordinator from 2007-11.
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When Tony Dungy was named head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1996, he reached out to one of the assistants with whom he had worked on Chuck Noll's staff to be his offensive coordinator. But Dick Hoak, who was a running back coach with the Steelers for 35 years, declined the offer.
It is a decision Hoak never has regretted.
Why?
Because, of all the jobs in the National Football League, none should carry a health warning or occupational disclaimer as much as offensive coordinator, the Mr. Yuk of coaching positions.
"If you did something wrong in a game, they don't look at the 59 plays you did right," Hoak said. "They looked at the one play that went bad."
Offensive coordinator might be the most reviled position in professional sports. They are second-guessed more than a weatherman, and their play calls get more scrutiny than a campaign promise. Want to start a discussion and see a talk show break out? Just mention offensive coordinator.
In stadiums routinely filled with 65,000 or more people, the offensive coordinator is the only coach who needs to understand that 64,000 of them think they can do the job better.
"Everybody has an opinion about it -- you should have passed, you should have run, you should have thrown deep, you should have thrown short," Hoak said. "Everyone thinks they can be an offensive coordinator."
Since Bill Cowher became coach in 1992, the Steelers have had three offensive coordinators go on to be head coaches -- Chan Gailey, Mike Mularkey and Ken Whisenhunt. With the possible exception of Whisenhunt, none of those coordinators had as much success as Bruce Arians, who spent the past five years running the Steelers offense. For that, though, Arians didn't have his contract renewed last week.
Talk about being second-guessed.
"I've always felt when you make a play call, 50 percent are going to like it and 50 percent are not," said Mularkey, who is in his second stint as a head coach after being hired two weeks ago by the Jacksonville Jaguars. "You can't please everybody, and the first person you can't please is you, because, if the play didn't work, you don't like it before anybody else does. You are your own worst critic."
With the departure of Arians as his offensive coordinator, Steelers coach Mike Tomlin spent part of last week at the Senior Bowl looking for a possible replacement -- an indication he might be willing to go outside the organization to fill the position.
Tomlin, likely did not need to go that far to search for a coordinator. Not when there are thousands of them right here in Western Pennsylvania who show up for Steelers games every Sunday -- something Arians painfully discovered.
"When you don't have success, everybody feels like they have an idea of what will work," said Whisenhunt, who was the Steelers offensive coordinator for three seasons before becoming head coach of the Arizona Cardinals in 2007. "I understand that. That's why our game is so popular."
During Whisenhunt's tenure from 2004-06, the Steelers won 39 games, went to back-to-back AFC championship games and won a Super Bowl. Maybe that's why he escaped criticism -- certainly more so than any other offensive coordinator in recent memory.
It was not a whole lot different with Arians. From a success standpoint, that is.
In the five years he ran the offense, the Steelers went to two Super Bowls, won one and had three 12-win seasons. In 2011, the offense ranked No. 12 in the league and had four players selected to the Pro Bowl.
In what was a telling prelude to what was to come, however, team president Art Rooney II noted that the Steelers ranked 21st in points scored, even though 11 of the 16 regular-season games were against teams ranked among the top 11 in defense.
Arians, 59, was not offered a contract to return in 2012, a decision that appears to have been initiated by Rooney and not Tomlin, who told Arians on several occasions he wanted him to return. The team announced he was retiring, even though Arians indicated he wanted to return next season.
Then, ESPN reported Saturday that Arians has agreed to become the Indianapolis Colts' offensive coordinator.
His departure was met with welcome relief from his many critics, most of whom would blame him and not the defense if the Steelers lost, 83-10.
"I think you understand that in this business," Whisenhunt said. "Listen, the popularity with our sport is at an all-time high. Criticism is part of your job, but it's also why you have such fan interest, because people do care. You understand that. I understand that."
Mularkey did not escape the criticism when he was the Steelers offensive coordinator from 2001-03 -- even from his head coach.
Mularkey replaced Kevin Gilbride as coordinator at a time when the Steelers had missed the playoffs three consecutive years -- their longest post-season drought under Cowher. In Mularkey's first season, the Steelers went 13-3 and made it to the AFC championship, where they lost to the New England Patriots despite being heavy favorites. Under Mularkey, quarterback Kordell Stewart was the team's MVP and nearly won the award at the league level, too.
The following year, the Steelers went 10-5-1 and made it to the AFC divisional playoff round, where they lost in Tennessee on a controversial penalty on cornerback Dewayne Washington for running into kicker Joe Nedney.
By '03, Mularkey had become so enamored with the passing game that quarterback Tommy Maddox attempted 519 passes that season -- a club record that still stands. But the Steelers fell to 6-10, and Mularkey was widely criticized for disdaining the run, a point that never was more evident than when the Steelers attempted 38 passes in a blizzard in a 6-0 loss against the New York Jets.
After the season, Cowher admitted that he, too, had been smitten with the passing game and the Steelers had strayed too far from the run.
"If you don't produce, it's completely on you -- what didn't I do to make that one play work?" said Mularkey, who had been the Atlanta Falcons offensive coordinator for the past four seasons. "I always ask myself, 'Was it me? Was it the defense? Was it the player, putting him in position to fail? Was it the scheme?'
"One play can prove to be the difference, not just in a game, in a season. Maybe one play in those games can determine if you make the playoffs. I know how critical each play is when called."
Above all else, offensive coordinators need to be able to do three things -- develop schemes, formulate game plans and call plays. All three work in concert.
The game plan is devised based on the schemes and how they match against the opponent. The play-calling is based on which schemes will work best against a defense, even when the defense changes its look. That's why coordinators have anywhere from 125 to 150 plays on the call sheets they carry on the sidelines. They have to be prepared for anything, and sometimes in a hurry.
"I know myself, I felt like on Friday, when the whole plan was in and I could shut the door, I felt like I could sit behind that door and play that game before the game was played," said Mularkey, who will not call the offensive plays for the Jaguars. "If something happened, I was prepared. With the time you have to call plays, you got to be prepared for every call, down and distance. I know I spent a lot of hours on Friday going through those situations.
"I enjoyed Friday because it was the most relaxed I'll be. I can put my thoughts to something so, if that happens, this will be called."
Said Whisenhunt, who still calls Arizona's offensive plays: "You have to trust your preparation. I always felt like Friday afternoon was the game for me. That's when I [go] through the call sheet and prepare for every situation, so, when they come up, you're prepared. Sometimes, it's a feel where you have what you think will work against an opponent, but it's all about the preparation during week, what you anticipate, time you put in."
There is one other advantage to the Friday prep: No fans to second-guess your play selection.
Defensive coordinators are not immune to criticism or public outcries of dismissal. Typically, though, defensive coordinators are the target of vitriol only when their unit suffers as a whole. Each defensive call is not picked apart or dissected like a frog in biology class, not like what happens with offensive coordinators.
"Because that's the easiest position to criticize," Hoak said of offensive coordinators. "There are 63,000 people who think they can call plays and call them better than the guy calling them. But, of the 63,000, only 3,000 think they could have called defensive plays."
Was it always this way? Perhaps. But the number of critics and offensive coordinator wannabes seems to grow each season, their skepticism and unmitigated disdain enough to warrant a panel on "Nancy Grace." Mularkey thinks he knows why.
"I think fantasy football plays a factor why people can become a critic; the Madden video games where you can be a genius," he said. "You think, 'Why not call this or why not call that?' There are a lot of reasons.
"People have the right to be critical."
First Published January 29, 2012 12:00 am
