How Troy Polamalu and Ed Reed Changed NFL Defenses

Ed Reed and Troy Polamalu seem to have supernatural powers — they're everywhere on the football field at once, omnipresent demigods determined to knock your chinstrap off. Their range of skills is remarkable: total tackles, interceptions (Reed led the NFL in picks in 2010 despite playing only 10 games), and even sacks (Polamalu owns the record for most sacks by a safety in an NFL game, with three). They play slightly different positions — Reed is a free safety and Polamalu is a strong safety — but that distinction means little to opposing coaches and quarterbacks. To them, Reed and Polamalu are men of mayhem, hungry for prey. Their success is a credit to their talent and work ethic, but also the result of defensive strategies that have helped them make their marks.

Football defenses have been reacting to offenses for more than a century, and there is very little in today's game that wasn't around 50 years ago. Indeed, almost all modern NFL defenses are indebted to the 4-3 defense — referring to four defensive linemen and three linebackers — that Hall of Fame coach Tom Landry invented while serving as defensive coordinator for the New York Giants in the 1950s.1 This pro-style 4-3 defense continues to evolve — along with its cousin, the 3-4 — but Landry's basic scheme of a dynamic seven-man front supported by four flexible secondary players remains to this day.

For the sake of brevity, allow me to oversimplify some history and jump forward a few decades from the inception of Landry's 4-3: By the mid-1980s, offenses had gained an upper hand on the formation. Defenses struggled to simultaneously deal with power football — that of fullbacks, tight ends, and pulling linemen — and increasingly efficient passing offenses like the one designed by the San Francisco 49ers' Bill Walsh. The best-known (and, for a time, the most effective) response to these developments was the "46" defense implemented by Chicago Bears defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan. The theory behind the 46 was that offenses seized the advantage because defenses let them dictate terms. For 30 years, defenses more or less tried to match and mirror offenses based on personnel and alignment, but they couldn't keep up. Ryan planned to negate this advantage by force — the 46's simple guiding principle was to kick ass.