Rams coach relies on grand schemes and fast thinking to run down opponents

By Kevin Paul Dupont, Globe Staff, 2/2/2002

EW ORLEANS - Wait now, can this be right? Can this be the Mike Martz of Mike Martz's Magical & Maniacal Football Show, the guy who has his Rams whizzing frenetically on offense like 11 famished acrobats who just piled off a bus in front of Billy Joe's All-You-Can-Eat BBQ Buffet?

The look and demeanor of the St. Louis coach just don't fit the product. The 51-year-old Martz is stately, a summa cum laude graduate of Fresno State, his broad face and blue eyes trimmed in frameless glasses, his neatly-cropped white hair brushed back in a sort of Clintonesque perfection.

''Mike Martz,'' said veteran offensive lineman Tom Nutten, ''is silent power. Yeah, he's quiet, but he doesn't have to say much. He just gives you the look.''

The view most of the world gets to see of Martz is the occasional TV scan of the sidelines, which often finds the onetime UC-Santa Barbara tight end in the obligatory NFL coach's rant. Away from the field, as witnessed during Super Bowl week and confirmed by many of his players, he is a calm, collected presence, a Civil War buff who likes a joke and speaks in a soft, almost soothing monotone, befitting, say, a history teacher or orthopedic surgeon.

If there is one part of his personality that fits what he puts on the field, it's in what he drives: a Porsche.

''But don't tell him I told you that,'' one of his players said the other day. ''That kind of relates to the way we play - a wide-open style, be ready to go. But he's one of those guys who works really hard, too. His is always the first car there, and always the last car there.''

The fast car. The offense on speed dial - the mark of a man who has shaped the most consistent high-scoring team in professional football. Game plan: everyone just go. Go short. Go deep. Go over the top. Go, go, go. Fly on the accurate arm of Kurt Warner and the winged feet of Marshall Faulk. The Rams have scored 500-plus points for three straight seasons, something never before accomplished in the NFL, and the common theme is Martz's masterful offensive schemes, these days with Bobby Jackson the offensive coordinator.

All of it sounds like a guy who, once home at night, might be busy in the kitchen cooking, maybe while listening to jazz, while at the same time flipping through the pages of a book with his left hand and clicking the remote with his right.

Asked if the energy in his offense could be traced to other parts of his life, Martz said, ''I don't know, I am the wrong guy to ask that question. I don't know how to answer that, to be honest with you. I am pretty, uh ... if you were around me during the day in the offseason, you would be pretty bored, I think.''

Tricks of the trade

Born in Sioux Falls, S.D., the grandson of a Russian potato farmer, Martz and family moved to Stockton, Calif., when he was 8. His father, Ted, was a turret gunner in World War II. By 1960 the Martzes moved again, this time to San Diego, and within a two-week span, his father walked away for good and one of his four brothers, also named Ted, was killed in a car crash. In a September 2000 story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Martz said he figures he saw his father only once in the 24 years since he left the family until the day he died in 1986.

The Martz that Patriots coach Bill Belichick sees is a master of offense and counteraction. Considered a genius on his side of the ball, defense, Belichick sounds as if he has found his match on the gridiron chessboard.

''We try to make adjustments to problems we've been having, and he's already moved on to something else,'' said Belichick, who has the job of trying to outsmart Martz in tomorrow's Super Bowl. ''He has made the next jump, and he is attacking you in areas that were strong but are now weak because he has shifted your defense - and he's back attacking your weak points. I think he's a coach that (A) has a great system; (B) does an excellent job of game-planning week to week; (C) does a great job of making a game-day adjustment based on what is going on on the field.''

For the record, and perhaps not surprisingly, Martz has a similar view of Belichick's ability to adjust.

''Defensively, usually they match your personnel groupings - it shocked me when we first saw them because [Belichick] didn't do that with us,'' recalled Martz of the Rams' visit to Foxborough Nov. 18. ''We had two tight ends and a receiver in there, and he had seven defensive backs in the game. That was a little unsettling. Since that time, he has done some of those things that keep you on your toes.''

To the point it even illicited a little humor from Martz.

''That should be illegal,'' he said. ''You shouldn't be able to do that.''

His game plan is tricky, full of gags, a Sunday afternoon sleight-of-hand stunt fashioned from a game of Three Card Monty right off a Manhattan sidewalk. He's playing Arena ball in the NFL. And, oh, those scores. Like 42-10 over Miami, 48-14 over Carolina, and that 34-14 win over the Jets that had Martz ordering, get this, an onsides kick when the score stood 31-7. Shows some arrogance, doesn't it?

Not so tricky on the first count, said Martz.

''The things you guys call gimmicks, we just call plays,'' said a matter-of-fact Martz, addressing the media Thursday. ''Like halfback passes, and some of those things that are called trick plays - those are cyclical, they come up every 4-5 weeks. And I think when they work, there is a lot of attention. But there are a lot of things that when they don't work, no one pays any attention.''

As for the second count? No intention of being deemed arrogant, according to Martz.

''I do worry about insulting people,'' he said, ''and that's not our intent. But we do take probably an aggressive approach to things, and I think that's interpreted as being somewhat arrogant, and I understand that, but that's not our intent to be disrespectful to anybody.''

Case in point: An Oct. 8 shutout in Detroit, 35-0, had the Rams hammering away at the Lions right to the end.

''When the defense has had that gallant a performance,'' explained Martz, ''I felt we owed to it to the defense to keep them off the field, and to do whatever we could to continue to make first downs. That's my rationale for it. I know that can be misconstrued as an intent to do something else, but when the defense plays that well, you've got to reward them - and to use the offense gave them the opportunity to preserve that shutout.''

The worst of times

Perhaps none of the Rams' weekly fireworks would be on display if Martz hadn't been discharged with the rest of Larry Marmie's staff at Arizona State in 1991. Martz spent nearly a decade in Tempe, arriving as quarterbacks and receivers coach in '83 and staying on the job through three head coaching administrations.

''We had four small kids when we were all released,'' recalled Martz, who was 40 when he found himself out on the street. ''I couldn't find work. I couldn't get a job. At that point, you start thinking how are you going to support your family? That probably was as close as I've come to giving it up.''

For years, though, Martz had thought about making the transition to pro ball. Chuck Knox offered him a job with the Rams, then in Los Angeles, but it was a volunteer's role, working with tight ends and breaking down film. Unemployment being the necessity of invention, and considering he had some walkaway money from Tempe, he soon was a fortysomething unpaid assistant, supporting a wife and four kids, ages 7-16, on the severance package from Arizona State.

''Well, it was like a grad assistant's job, but it's not that unusual - there are a lot of guys in this league that went through what I had to go through,'' said Martz. ''It's not particularly unusual, not a big issue. I think that happens with a lot of people, when you have to change gears and stay with something you love - and you just move on with it. But it was a tough time. Anyone who has been out of work, and can't find work, you know that's tough - sometimes it can be kind of distressing.''

Mike and Julie Martz knew lean times from the past. They were married in the early '70s, while both still were in college, and it took Mike a summer's worth of doing yard work and painting houses to come up with the $120 to pay for wedding and engagement rings.

They both attended Madison High in San Diego and met in '68, while Mike, recovering from a neck injury as a senior linebacker, was volunteering as a coach with the girls' flag football squad. Julie was a spunky defensive back. How many NFL coaches can say they are married to former high school football players?

In 1975, the Martzes were parents for the first time, living off Mike's $185 a month from his day job as a grad assistant at San Jose State and the extra dough he picked up working 24 hours a week as the night janitor at a local church. They still needed food stamps to make ends meet, according to the story in the Post-Dispatch, and mom and dad feasted on bowls of cereal three nights a week for dinner so newborn son Chris could get his daily squares.

Prior to making Tempe home in the fall of '83, Martz worked at a different college almost every year after starting his career as an assistant with Bullard High in Fresno, Calif. He spent '74 at San Diego Mesa CC, another at San Jose State, followed by two more seasons with Mesa, and then on to Santa Ana, Fresno State, Pacific, and Minnesota. All along the way, he taught and preached offense, the elements of which first enchanted him as a boy in San Diego, watching Don Coryell's San Diego State Aztecs.

''I just knew as a kid that I was going to coach,'' said Martz, who also says he considers himself first and foremost a teacher. ''I can't explain it. It's something I've just always had a real passion for. When I was a junior in high school, I talked to my high school coach about getting into coaching, and I knew I wasn't an athlete that was going to go very far in this game. But I just enjoyed the game, and had a love for it that I couldn't imagine doing anything else, I guess.''

Now he's known as silent power, or as another Ram player refers to him, ''a CEO for a coach - all business.'' From that first job as an unpaid assistant on Knox's staff, Martz worked his way up to quarterbacks coach, then wide receivers coach with the Rams, quarterbacks coach with Washington for two seasons, and in '99 to offensive coordinator under Dick Vermeil - leading to a Super Bowl ring.

Staying a step ahead

When Vermeil walked after winning the big one, Martz was bumped up to the first head coaching job in his career.

''I had no real big desire to be a head coach,'' said Martz. ''I had seen so many guys go through this, and then it just destroys you, because there are so many things you don't have input into, and it allows me to have the input. Whether it was right or wrong, or it was good or bad, at least they [Rams management] listen to you, and give you opportunity in some respect to do it the way we want as a staff.''

The Martz way is with attitude and speed. In a game that for the most part favors conservative offenses, he sees a 100-yard roadway with infinite playmaking possibilities, not a ''CAUTION'' sign to be found anywhere.

Under Martz's tutelage as offensive coordinator, the Rams put up 526 points in '99, the third-most in league history. The next year, his first as head coach, they added two touchdowns to the total (540). The Rams piled up 503 points this year, while trimming points allowed from a league-worst 471 to 273, a dramatic drop of 42 percent.

''He is definitely one of the most intelligent minds when it comes to offense,'' said Nutten, among the linemen who helped Marshall Faulk total 1,382 yards on the ground this year. ''I've never been in such an aggressive offense, from high school to college to professional. It's just a lot of fun to play in that atmosphere, when anything can happen at any particular moment. Sometimes you wonder, `Where does he come up with these plays ... how does he think of that play?'

''His mind is just three steps ahead of everyone else.''

But even Mike Martz of the Mike Martz Magical & Maniacal Football Show knows theory and practice must meet in one place, at 11 separate touch points. Without Warner and Faulk, Torry Holt and Isaac Bruce, and a bunch of other players great and small in this year's 6,930-yard pass-and-run offense, all the game-planning and scheming doesn't add up to silent power. It more likely adds up to silence.

''We don't do what we do if we don't have the players,'' said Martz. ''And because you have these guys, you do them a tremendous disservice to not be bold and aggressive in your approach. What you have to do most is let these guys play.''