BILL“TIGER” JOHNSON had a huge influence on my career as a player and a coach. Tiger was my first line coach in the NFL. He would go on to become the Cincinnati Bengals head coach. He was an intellectual who demanded we aim for perfection. He held us to a very high standard. And he wanted you to think.
He was very much the technician and quite fundamental. We repeated the same technique over and over – perfected our footwork, body position, and our assignments. He, of course, emphasized staying low. The man with the lower pads wins.
But he also gave us what he called our bag of tricks. He would even pat his hip with his hand when talking about it to demonstrate an imaginary bag. He said if we knew our tricks better than the other guy, nobody could beat us.
For example, I learned exactly where to put my head on each running play. If I was going to block for a run to the left, I knew the defensive player was going to go into a certain place. So I could stick my head in a way to make him overplay. If I stuck my head to the right, he would lean that direction. Then I would move him to the right using his momentum against him. It’s a little like Greco-Roman wrestling or judo. It was counterbalance. You could get someone leaning a certain way, then you would flip them with your upper body. You would finish driving them with your feet. Since the ball would be going left, I had him.
All of that was intriguing to me.
I took a thinking approach as a player. I enjoyed the intellectual part of becoming as good a technical blocker as I could. I profited by learning the methods by precision thinking. It gave me a foundation for performance, rather than to just go out and play or to be the most aggressive, toughest son of a gun there ever was.
Instead, I wanted do it the best I could fundamentally. That came from my analytical side. It was important in my development as a player. And when I fell into coaching, I could take the approach I used as a player and project it into what I taught.
Tiger was blunt about mistakes. I had done well against the Detroit Lions’ renowned defensive tackle Alex Karras. In fact, the first time I ever started against him I got a game ball. So things were going along fine when I played him. Then we played the Lions in San Francisco. The first pass we threw, Karras went by me like I wasn’t there. He hit John Brodie and cut his eye. I had a bad day. We lost.
When we would watch the film the following week, I’d always dread having to look at plays I’d screwed up. I would get so nervous my armpits would be soaked. They were especially drenched that day. I didn’t have to wait long before Karras’s sack would come up. I got braced for it to appear on the screen. When it did, Tiger ran the play back seventeen times. All the while he kept letting me know how badly I’d done.
“Mudd, he’s throwing you around like a rag doll.”
He must’ve made his point, because I still remember it.
I was fortunate to have a great teacher.
Excerpted with permission from View from the O-Line: Football According to NFL Offensive Linemen and an Uncommon Coach by Howard Mudd and Richard Lister (Sports Publishing, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, 2016).
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