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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Our guys did a great job with their disguising and their timing.
Our coaches were good to us. They treated it more as a bonus for us. We didn't work too hard and we got some time off.
He looked like he was 100 percent to me. They said he's 90 percent. If he's got more than that, he's pretty good.
There is a finite number of blitzes you can come up with. But it?s sort of like music. There?s a finite number of tunes, but we probably haven?t come close to exhausting them all yet.
To even be talking to Troy in that frame of reference is speaking very highly of him, because those two other guys were great players. I began to see a lot of the things that they did that Troy could do, and I think Troy has a ways to go.
He runs real, real fast. And he's very instinctive. He just can diagnose and get to the right spot.
He's a lot faster runner than you would think for a man of his dimensions. But his real strength of course is anchoring and inverting the line of scrimmage and letting us play around him.
He had a couple (of) injuries early in his career that kept him from growing at a normal pace. But soon as he stayed healthy, which he has, he just really became a fine defensive lineman.