Dick LeBeau
Dick LeBeau
Charles Richard LeBeauis an American football coach and former cornerback, who is the assistant head coach and defensive coordinator for the Tennessee Titans of the National Football League. He has been active at field level in the NFL for 57 consecutive seasons–14 as a player with the Detroit Lions and 43 as a coach. He was most recently the Pittsburgh Steelers' defensive coordinator and is considered to be one of the greatest defensive coordinators of all time. Considered an “innovator”...
ProfessionCoach
Date of Birth9 September 1937
CityLondon, OH
He's very quick, and he can make plays with his feet and his arm. He is also very accurate, and his ability to escape adds to his overall package.
Troy's got that rare ability to play at all levels of the defense - deep, intermediate, at the line and blitz. Those people just don't come along every day.
In his unique way, I think he creates not any better than those guys but in a different manner.
I haven't changed a bit over the years. I have tried to learn from all these people and have tried to dissect what makes them so successful. What is it that made them better teachers, better communicators?
I try to stay out of Troy's way. We establish parameters for him, and he has to be at a certain place at a certain time.
You can just do more with the 3-4 (than the 4-3). If there's any advantage, there's not as many 3-4 teams in the league right now and that gives us maybe a slight advantage. They don't play against it every week.
We always know where he's going. But I'm not always sure how he's going to get there.
As a defense, we didn't play very well in (the AFC Championship game) and that's going to be in the front of our minds, for sure.
The statistics will tell you that: They scored more points. That's usually a pretty good barometer for the effect that the rule changes had on the game for that year. The numbers, in this case, don't lie.
Nobody remembers who loses the Super Bowl. Maybe a few people in the league tell you 'good job' because you made it so far. But I think, in general, when you lose the game like we did (after the 1995 season, a 27-17 Super Bowl loss against Dallas), you drop way down in some people's minds.
Make no mistake, they've got a great quarterback. It's not easy to hold him under 20. Our guys did that and it gives you a great chance to win. It was the execution of our players. They did a great job with their timing.
All quarterbacks have to have time and space to operate. We'll do the same thing we always do: play zone pressure. And our guys play it very well.
They don?t hold the ball very long. It?s out of there quickly.
They do a good job of protecting the quarterback. So I thought instead of beating our head against the wall, we'd let our guys drop back and play some max-coverage. I thought they did a good job of that.