From the back of the room, Buccaneers coach Tony Dungy watched star defensive lineman Warren Sapp argue with defensive coordinator Monte Kiffin and his position coach Rod Marinelli.
The film of the Bucs’ 24-13 victory against the Vikings in Week 7 was being reviewed.
Sapp said he didn’t loaf, that he helped chase down running back Robert Smith on a 57-yard run.
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But Sapp’s coaches disagreed. He loafed.
“I remember that one distinctly,” Dungy said. “Warren arguing about that and getting upset at Monte Kiffin.”
Sapp didn’t know Dungy was in the room.
“They’re getting a lot louder and boisterous,” Dungy recalled. “And I just said, ‘Warren, if Monte says it’s a loaf, it’s a loaf.’ And the whole room went silent. That kind of set that tone for everybody.”
It was a pivotal moment for Tampa Bay’s 1996 season, which was Dungy’s first in charge of the Buccaneers. The team had talent — Sapp, linebacker Derrick Brooks, safety John Lynch, running back Mike Alstott and more — but its culture needed to change. Together, Dungy, Kiffin and Marinelli created their system for grading what they saw in practices and games. Lovie Smith was Dungy’s linebackers coach.
“It was a measuring stick for trying to get energy and effort and efficiency and high energy,” Dungy said. “And the big thing on ours and that everybody worried about was the loafs because all the positives could get subtracted by one loaf, and guys used to argue about that tremendously.”
Sapp’s effort on Smith’s 57-yard scamper down the left sideline was an example. He sprinted after Smith, who eluded Lynch near the sideline.
“I ran down one of the fastest guys in America, and you gave me a loaf,” Dungy recalled Sapp saying.
But it still wasn’t good enough. Bucs cornerback Martin Mayhew forced Smith out of bounds.
Dungy remembered what Marinelli told Sapp: “Well, in my book, Warren, if I run the tape and I see you change speeds, it’s a loaf. If you slow down, that means you’re loafing. But if you speed up, that means you weren’t running hard in the first place and that’s a loaf.”
Sapp, the No. 12 pick in the 1995 NFL Draft and a future Hall of Famer, had a standard to meet.
Everyone did.
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“Everybody lived to that standard,” Dungy told The Athletic. “Everybody got graded the same way. It was a high standard. And guys would come in and argue: ‘I should have gotten credit for this. I should have been in on this play. How’d you give me a loaf?’ And they were very sensitive about it. But it created a high bar, and that kept it going.”
It’s a high bar the Bears’ leadership hopes to establish.
The Bears’ simultaneous searches for their next general manager and head coach were spearheaded by adviser Bill Polian, the former Bills and Colts GM and a Hall of Fame executive. But chairman George McCaskey established two guiding principles, Polian said.
No. 1: “We were going to institute the deepest and widest search in order to not only fulfill the new mandates of the Rooney Rule, but we’d go beyond them.”
No. 2: “We wanted to get the best man. Don’t get caught up in whether it’s an offensive guy or a defensive guy or whatever theories are out there. Let’s get the best head coach we can, and let’s get the best general manager we can.”
For their next GM, the Bears used the same protocol in their interviews for the 13 candidates. A uniform approach would lead to answers.
“What we wanted to find out was exactly how (conversational) and confident they were with how to instruct a personnel department, and that included a great deal of detail on grading and grading scales and critical factors with respect to position,” Polian said. “That led to what it was designed to do, which was to lead to philosophical questions and what positions are most important, what positions are fungible, (and) that’s tied directly to salary-cap operation.”
Ryan Poles, the Bears’ GM hire, later described it as going back to “scout school.” He appreciated and enjoyed the approach. Polian described it as the “nuts and bolts” of running a personnel department.
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“(Poles) was very, very confident and understood exactly what the present personnel marketplace looked like, how it would be affected by scheme, how it would be affected by the salary cap,” Polian told The Athletic in a phone interview. “He understood and knew how to operate within the parameters of all those various factors that determine how you populate your team.”
The next step — or the “outgrowth,” as Polian called it — was understanding how such philosophies led to not only cap operation or personnel selections but also the relationship with the head coach. GM candidates submitted their lists for coaching candidates to the Bears. Colts defensive coordinator Matt Eberflus was included by Poles and others.
“You’d be surprised; while not homogeneous, the same names cropped up time and time again,” Polian said. “So it wasn’t unanimous, but certainly there was a plurality of the same names. So we felt good about that going forward. And we certainly felt good about that with respect to Ryan when we zeroed in on the people that he wanted to talk to.
“And it was going to be his decision. George made that clear to him and everyone else. If we chose the general manager before we chose the head coach, which was our preference, then the GM was going to make the decision.”
When Bucs assistant head coach/defensive backs coach Herm Edwards left for the Jets in 2001, Dungy’s search for his replacement brought him to Mike Tomlin, the secondary coach for the University of Cincinnati at the time. Dungy said he had heard some “good things” about him.
“And because of that, I heard some good things about Alan Williams,” Dungy said.
Tomlin and Williams played together at William and Mary, and Dungy’s Bucs hired both of them. Tomlin took over Tampa Bay’s defensive backs group. Williams became a defensive assistant.
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“He was a lot like Mike,” Dungy said.
When Dungy was fired by the Bucs after the 2001 season, Williams was the only assistant allowed to follow him to Indianapolis from the outstanding defense Tampa Bay had built over five seasons. Polian, then the Colts’ GM/team president, hired Dungy that year. Dungy recalled Williams’ reports as being “immaculate” when he was an assistant for the Bucs. He hired Williams as the Colts’ defensive backs coach.
“He did everything perfectly,” Dungy said. “He was just ready. He wasn’t flashy but just sound, solid and just what you’re looking for.”
Together, Dungy, Williams and defensive coordinator Ron Meeks — who had worked with Smith in St. Louis — installed the loafs-based grading system in Indianapolis. Smith left the Bucs to be the Rams’ defensive coordinator in 2001. The Bears hired him as their head coach in 2004.
The Bucs’ loafing grading system spread across the NFL.
“That’s how you win in the NFL,” Dungy said. “People will look at schemes and the offense and motions, and there’s a lot of things that come and go in the league. But you still win by not beating yourself. You win with energy and effort — and especially on defense. If you don’t hustle, if you don’t execute your technique and you don’t play all-out hard, you better have tremendous players if you’re going to win.”
Eberflus’ HITS philosophy resonated with the Bears and Polian. The loafing grading system had returned, albeit under an acronym based on hustle, intensity, taking the ball away and playing smart.
“It’s exactly the same,” Polian remembered thinking. “I was very familiar with it.”
It was similar to what the Colts had under Dungy, and the Bears implemented under Smith. The Bears were drawn back to it.
“It’s all put in place to quantify a lot of things — quantify production, No. 1, but really quantify effort,” said Dungy, whose Colts defeated Smith’s Bears in Super Bowl XLI. “That’s the thing you’re looking for is to get that extra effort. …
“If some guys were concerned about why they weren’t playing or why they didn’t get as many snaps as someone else, well, here it is. We’ve got a very objective system. If you were in X number of plays, you get X number of pluses or X number of minuses. It was not subjective. It was objective. And that’s what we wanted to get.”
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All teams grade their players. But not all head coaches are the same.
“There are what Paul Brown called the eternal verities, the eternal truths about this game, and even though systems change and the game evolves, the eternal truths don’t change,” Polian said. “Hustle and speed and the ability to bring force to knock the opponent down on defense is what the game at its core is all about.
“And if you live that philosophy — if (you’re) 100 percent effort all the time and everything we do is the price of admission, not something you get a gold medal for — then you come up with a team that plays the way we played in Indianapolis and the way Lovie played in Chicago and the way Flus’ team will play in the future in Chicago.”
Williams, the Bears’ defensive coordinator, learned it from Dungy. He’s one of four defensive assistant coaches who followed Eberflus from the Colts to the Bears. Eberflus learned it from Marinelli over five seasons together in Dallas. He then expanded it with the Colts with Williams on his staff.
“Matt was the first person that kind of put it into an acronym for guys, an easy way to remember,” Williams said. “But also, he’s developed a good way to measure it. So when you talk about a standard and meeting that standard and then being able to look at the film and grade that standard, and holding guys again to the standard, the HITS philosophy is a great way of being able to measure it.
“So with the hustle, the intensity, the takeaways and playing smart, we have a way of being able to gauge ourselves from one game to another or one season to another, in terms of ‘Are we improving or are we falling short?’ So (it’s a) great way of doing that.”
When quarterback Justin Fields was discussed in interviews — whether it was with Poles and Eberflus or other candidates — the Bears maintained a collective open mind.
“It’s not what we wanted to hear; it’s what made sense,” Polian said. “We didn’t have any predisposed ideas that we wanted people to meet some standard other than excellence. And everyone agreed: We don’t know what Justin will become.
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“He wasn’t ready to play when he was thrust in there this year. And any rookie who is in that situation can’t help but struggle. He got to learn what the National Football League is all about — the hard way. And now, let’s see if we can’t get him on the right path, both schematically and technically, to make him the best quarterback he can be. He’s got talent to work with, but it’s unproven and unformed at this point.”
What Polian, the author of “Super Bowl Blueprints: Hall of Famers Reveal the Keys to Football’s Greatest Dynasties,” will scoff at is the idea that it takes solely an offensive-minded head coach to achieve that in the NFL.
“Well, let me think: A guy named (Chuck) Noll was a defensive coach who worked pretty well, albeit, as Terry (Bradshaw) himself outlines in the book, with plenty of bumps in the road with the Steelers,” Polian said. “A guy named Dungy did OK with Peyton Manning, didn’t he? I rest my case. No, I won’t rest. A guy named (Don) Shula did OK with a guy named (Dan) Marino. I rest my case.”
But there’s more. A guy named Bill Belichick won plenty of games with a guy named Tom Brady, and a guy named Mike Tomlin also fared well with a guy known as Ben Roethlisberger. Guys named Mike Vrabel and Ryan Tannehill are doing OK together, too.
How Eberflus’ HITS philosophy and loafing grading system apply to the offense, particularly Fields at quarterback, must play out.
But it can be done. Just ask Dungy.
“You get the same thing,” he said. “It’s not always hustle with the quarterback. But did you get us in the right play? First of all, did you execute the game plan? Did you carry out your fake? Did you execute the throw? Whatever the categories are, did you get a plus in that situation?
“You might have done things right, you might have executed the throw, but we had planned to go to this play if we saw this defense. So you get a plus for the great throw, but you get a minus for getting us in the wrong play.”
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Standards must be established and kept — for every player. That starts with Eberflus. Dungy knows him well from Bible study groups.
“I’m excited for him,” he said. “He is carrying out the philosophy that — Lovie and I, Rod, Monte, when we get together, we always say there’s not too many who still believe this, believe in what we do and how we do it — that you can win with effort, that you don’t have to fool people. Matt’s carrying the torch.”
It worked once before in Chicago.
“(Eberflus is) a straight shooter,” Polian said. “There isn’t a soul who has worked with him who doesn’t tell you that he’s dedicated, hardworking, confident, enthusiastic, disciplined and a great communicator. And that’s what you need in a head coach.”
(Top photo of Matt Eberflus: Michael Allio / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
