Banned From the Roxy

In case you missed it, this is your new defensive coordinator of the Tennessee Titans:


Jim Schwartz may have taken on the NFL's uphill battle of the young century: namely, make Detroit relevant for the first time since George Plimpton's book Paper Lion.

But Schwartz did leave his own pair of shoes to fill at Tennessee.

Working closely with a defensive minded head coach in Jeff Fisher, Schwartz constructed a ferocious defense that evolved from the Gregg Williams's blitzing style 4-3 of the late 90s Oilers/Titans into a 4-3 that rarely blitzes but was just as brutally effective.

Schwartz did it first of all with great players. Having Albert Haynesworth, Keith Bulluck, and Jevon Kearse in his prime would makes any defensive coordinator's job that much easier.

But Schwatz also did it with advanced statistics that attacked the why's and how's of the game by first looking at what worked then working backwards, establishing trends on paths conventional football logic might never tread.

It took awhile for the ethos to take hold in Tennessee. A couple playoff runs early in the decade sapped the roster, led to a short spate of rebuilding... but the Titans of the last couple years gleefully threw conventional logic by the wayside and embraced a loose approach to the game. Whether calling an onside kick while clinging to a close lead or adjusting their fourth down decision making to include field position as well as distance, the Titans chased victories attacking all phases of the game.

A lot of Tennessee's recent success is directly due to their dominant defense. With Fisher, the longest tenured head coach in the league, there will always be an emphasis on dominant defense. But each coach under Fisher has put their stamp on Titans.

And now Chuck Cecil, once one of the most feared defenders in the league, gets to put his stamp on the next edition of the Titans defense.

Chuck Cecil was one of my first home team heroes. The Green Bay Packers of my childhood were anything but scary for opponents in the 80s – outside of Charles Martin’s disgusting hit list. And the team certainly wasn’t successful.

But as apathy with the Packers’ contemporary conundrum crested high, Cecil arrived onto the scene to return a relevance however minor to Green Bay.

Drafted in the fourth round, Cecil made his mark early with a series of vicious hits, first in training camp then on the football field, plunging ever forward with his head, repeatedly cracking open the bridge of his nose like a pomegranate, little beads of blood trickling out garishly for our amusement.

Even in Green Bay’s surprise 10-6 1989 campaign, Cecil was a dose of brutal reality in an otherwise unreal year. Don Majkowski maybe have been the Majik Man – what I wouldn’t give to find that t-shirt – leading improbable fourth quarter comeback after comeback. But it was Chuck’s busted honker more than Tim Harris’s sack celebrating six shooters that underscored the price tallied of this miracle success however brief.

Unfortunately, the head-first assassin spearing tackles also exacted a price of their own. Repeated concussions robbed Cecil of years off his violent career.

Cecil’s on-field antics got him notice, got him fines, got him a cover article in Sports Illustrated.

The dangerous hits also got Cecil a big-at-the-time contract with Arizona after the 1992 season. My young self was outraged when the Packers didn’t pay up for their biggest defense star (that outrage was soon mollified after Green Bay signed Reggie White to a monster contract).

But after one year, Cecil was out of a football for a year, the toll taken on his brain and neck. He came back for a season with the Houston Oilers amidst the quickly crumbling relationship between the franchise and the city.

As time went by and the uncritical passion of my youth evolved into complicated love/hate relationship I have with the game today, I began to see Cecil’s brief career in a different light, one out of the halcyon glow of youth, one more attuned to the harsher hues of the game and the toll it takes on the body. There's a delicate balance between playing the game with requisite violence and pushing that violence too far. Sometimes things just happen on the football field, sometimes they happen for a reason.

It’s not that Cecil should be vilified. He played the game hard and with a commendable physicality. But he pushed the line on what was acceptable, taking a step further into turning his protective gear into weapons. If he wouldn’t have done it, someone else would have. Indeed, there were those before him, Jack Tatum for example, and he had plenty of contemporaries… some might even consider Roy Williams and the horse collar tackle a spiritual successor in the unbroken line of vicious safety play of which Cecil can claim descent.

Cecil was merely the poster boy. During Cecil’s day, he was at the center of a legitimate debate about how to play the game. He was playing it the only way he knew how, smartly and violently, to overcome lack of size and speed.

Size and speed were taking over the game. The NFL was in flux. Defenders, especially backs, were still working around the restricted contact initiated at the end of the previous decade and how to deal with the West Coast Offense which thrived on underneath timing routes made possible by the limited contact. Ferocity in the middle of the field was an almost necessity to disrupt the careful ballet of a timing offense. It’s a legitimate goal, how it’s achieved, though, required delineations, delineations which would come over the course of the Cecil controversy.

I’m not saying Chuck Cecil will instruct his Titans defense to tackle with the crown of their helmets and incur a rash of neck injuries and concussions amongst his players and their opponents.

I’m not saying that the Titans defense will play dirty under Cecil.

Since his playing days Cecil’s been a successful coach of the Titans secondary for much of this decade. No doubt he’s matured, taken a longer look at the game and how to play it.

While I don't expect the Titans to replicate Cecil's now clearly illegal hits on the football field, they may take on some of the desperation with which he played the game. Under Gregg Williams, there was a firebrand quality to the Titans defense fitting its coaches personality. Under Schwartz, they were physical, precise, and inspirationally simple in part a reflection of their coordinator.

What qualities the Titans defense takes under and from Cecil remains to be seen. His job will be much more difficult if Tennessee can't re-sign its best player in Haynesworth. But whether Prince Albert re-signs or not, I can't imagine the Titans flagging in ferocity.