Sid Gillman. Josh Katzowitz
all the linebackers and all the secondary men,” Gillman said many years later. “By putting one guy in motion, with this (blitz) setup, it disrupted their entire system of coverage. We hit them lucky at the beginning of the ball game, and we went on and on and on.”
Lincoln could see how effective the game plan could be the week before, sitting at his locker and listening to Gillman work himself into a frenzy. “Look,” Gillman said to his team, “if you get in this formation and he gets that goddamn read, you’re going to be there and I promise you it’s going to be a touchdown. This is going to happen. Then, if they continue to show this, we’re going to give them a false read. It’s going to work.”
Gillman was absolutely right. It worked, and it worked better than he could have imagined.
In the first series, San Diego exploited New England safety Ron Hall and made him cover a speedy receiver as opposed to the slower tight ends he usually shadowed. Gillman did this by lining up tight end Dave Kocourek next to left tackle Ernie Wright on the opposite side of the line of scrimmage where receivers Lance Alworth and Don Norton positioned themselves. Hall had to shift over to help on Alworth and Norton. Meanwhile, Paul Lowe, the halfback, and Keith Lincoln, the fullback, were split in the backfield. On the first play of the series, Rote could see that a blitz was coming, and while the Patriots came hard after Rote, he faked a toss to Lincoln and faked an inside trap to Lowe. Two Patriots weren’t fooled by the first fake but went for Lowe on the second fake. Instead, Lincoln slipped away and found himself open for an easy 12-yard catch (early in the second quarter, the Chargers ran the exact same play and gained 24 yards).
Twelve yards was a great way to start the game, but Gillman wanted the big play. He wanted the Patriots to overreact and overpursue—exactly what they did in blitzing and trying to tackle Lowe, who did not have the ball.
On the second play, the Patriots brought Hall closer to the line of scrimmage and made the defense an eight-man front (four linemen, three linebackers, and Hall, the safety). With Alworth and Norton still split right of the line of scrimmage, Lowe went in motion toward the right side to overload it. This was a huge problem for the Patriots, who were not ready for the extra movement. Rote then handed the ball to Lincoln on an inside trap that went to the left side, where there were no linebackers or defensive backs. They all had been shadowing Alworth and Norton and, then, Lowe in motion. Lincoln ran for 56 yards.
During the course of their two meetings in the regular season, Gillman had used his running backs mostly as blockers to stave off Boston’s blitzers, but the motion and the fake handoffs upset the equilibrium of the Patriots.
“The whole game plan was [centered] around [eventual Hall of Famer Nick] Buoniconti and blitzing,” Alworth said. “When he moved one way or the other, it was wrong. It wasn’t his fault. It was strictly Sid’s design.”
Said Lincoln: “We showed them motion. That’s a half-step we had on their linebackers, but it was enough. How brilliant is that? Sid saved that. He could have used it earlier in the year.”
But he didn’t. Instead, Gillman waited for the perfect time to spring his brilliance. And four minutes into the title game, Lincoln had 123 rushing yards on two carries, and the Chargers led 14–0. It’s a good thing Lincoln’s legs had felt heavy beforehand. If he felt completely healthy, he could have really hurt the Patriots.
Two years earlier, Lincoln wasn’t sure he would be in this position in the first place, because after finishing his college ball at Washington State, he was a man headed to defense. “I’m just about convinced the boy is a pro misfit,” Gillman had said. “I don’t believe he runs good enough to play halfback, he’s not big enough for a fullback.”
Those comments came before he actually watched Lincoln in person at Chargers practice. Before, Gillman’s scouting report was based on his filmwork of Lincoln in a Washington State uniform and what he saw of Lincoln in the College All-Star game in Chicago where Lincoln played as a defensive specialist and didn’t receive especially good reports from coach Otto Graham. But what Gillman witnessed firsthand changed his mind.
Then, suddenly, Lincoln was “a tremendous prospect” who could “run against the wind.” Lincoln even got Gillman to admit, “I was completely wrong.”
The Patriots didn’t have to look at Lincoln on film to know how effective he could play. The ass-kicking they were receiving at the hands and feet of Lincoln in the title game was proof enough.
On the third series of the game, the Patriots finally got the Chargers into a third-and-long. Boston knew Gillman was going to call for a pass because that’s what Gillman always did on third and long (and first and 10, on second and short, and on and on). This was why the Patriots had game-planned the way they had—to stop the ability of Rote to pass. The Patriots blitzed but kept four men in the secondary. Lowe went in motion and one of the defensive backs had to follow. Lincoln ran an inside trap, and he hit the hole right where that defensive back had been stationed. It went for 11 yards and a first down.
Perhaps that’s when Gillman knew there was no chance the Patriots could stop his team. On the next play, the Chargers called for a “Toss 78 Y-Man 0,” a pitch to Lowe running behind tackle Ron Mix. Patriots cornerback Bob Suci was the unfortunate soul who was blocked by Mix twice on the play—10 yards apart, mind you—and Lowe went around the end for a 58-yard touchdown. For San Diego, it was the third score in 10 plays, only three of which were passes.
The man in motion addition was only part of the game plan’s genius. It was also the way Gillman and his longtime line coach Joe Madro had devised at least three different ways to attack every hole at the line of scrimmage, meaning the team could run its base plays over and over again without any of them looking the same.
“Let’s say we were going to run off tackle with Mix leading,” assistant coach Tom Bass told Ron Jaworski for his 2010 book The Games That Changed the Games. “We could double-team block it and kick out with the fullback. That’s one way. Another would be for Ron to block down along with the tight end, then pull for the kick out with a guard. Or we could block down with the tight end and pull Mix for the kick out. It’s all the same play, going to the same area, but with three totally different looks. It was confusing as hell for the defense.”
After the game, Larry Eisenhauer admitted the Chargers had embarrassed the Patriots defense—and Eisenhauer clearly was not a man who embarrassed easily. What was even worse was that Boston had no idea what was coming and no idea how to stop it. The offense didn’t fare any better against San Diego’s defense, meaning the Patriots defense kept taking the field without getting any rest.
Still, Boston never abandoned their game plan. According to the calculations of Jaworski and his co-author, Greg Cosell of NFL Films, the Patriots blitzed on 14 of San Diego’s first 26 plays. On those 14 plays, San Diego averaged 14.6 yards gained. Still, the Patriots couldn’t stop themselves. They kept blitzing and blitzing and blitzing.
Though Gillman never let up on Boston—in fact, he tried two on-side kicks in the final minute of the game with his team leading by 41 points—he didn’t mind cutting his halftime speech short. At that point, he knew Boston had been flambéed, and since the always-entertaining Grambling marching band was playing halftime, Gillman stopped talking, walked out the door to the field and muttered, “I want to watch the band.”
In the second half, the Chargers continued stomping the Patriots all over the field, finishing with 51 points and 610 total yards. Lincoln carried the ball 13 times for 206 yards, caught seven passes for 123 yards, and scored two touchdowns (a performance that inspired the Los Angeles Times’ Jim Murray to write, “alone, it almost equaled the two-year rushing total of the German army in 1939–40.”).
“The 1963 AFL championship is a game any coach or fan should study to see what perfection is on a football field,” Bass said.
As the embarrassed Patriots trudged off the field following the destruction, linebacker Tommy Addison, the team captain, looked at Boston Globe reporter Will McDonough and said, “I’ve never been