#13

 

BOB LILLY

The record shows the Dallas Cowboys started to become “America’s Team” sometime during the 1966 season. That’s the year they won the NFL’s Eastern Conference with a 10-3-1 record and earned a spot in the NFL Championship Game against the Green Bay Packers. Green Bay came down to Dallas and bested the Cowboys, 34–27, in a game that came down to a Packers interception of Don Meredith in their own end zone.

The Cowboys had some names on offense in those days—Meredith, Bob Hayes, and Dan Reeves to name a few—but Dallas was able to rise from rank expansion team to championship contender because of the strength of the defense. The architect of that defense was head coach Tom Landry and the star of that unit was defensive tackle Bob Lilly.

The NFL was largely a running league in the 1960s and Landry had come up with a defense that was designed to stop the run. Landry’s Flex defense took two of the defensive linemen off the line of scrimmage and dropped them back a step or two in order to give them a better pursuit angle on running backs. Nobody took advantage of that angle or that extra space more than Bob Lilly.

To say the Flex was Landry’s baby is accurate, but he got input into the defense from Vince Lombardi when both men were with the New York Giants in the 1950s. Landry was a defensive back and later an assistant coach with New York while Lombardi was also an assistant coach under Jim Lee Howell. The two talked often. Lombardi offered insight as to what defensive formations he thought caused problems and Landry told him which offensive schemes caused the defense problems. Interestingly, the emotional Lombardi would get quite upset if his offensive team got handled by the Giants defense in practice.

Landry knew the Flex was a solid formation but he needed the right players to make it work. The key came when the Cowboys drafted Lilly in the first round of the 1961 draft out of Texas Christian University. With size, strength, and incredible quickness, Lilly appeared to be a very special defensive end who could give the Cowboys the defensive push they needed.

Lilly played defensive end in his first three seasons but prior to the start of the 1964 season, Landry realized the Flex defense would get the boost it needed if Lilly moved inside to tackle. “Bob had all the characteristics you want in a defensive lineman,” Landry recalled during an interview prior to Super Bowl XXXII between the Denver Broncos and Green Bay Packers in January of 1998. “He was fast, smart, strong, and quick and while he had been drafted as a defensive end, we came to the conclusion that he could be a real difference maker at tackle. It would put him closer to the action and the Flex would allow him to take better angles to the ball.

“And as much as we thought it would work before we made the move, it worked out even better. Bob was so smart and intuitive that he had that extra edge and could ruin most plays. It was a good defense but what made it work so well was having great players and I don’t know how you can get better than Bob Lilly.”

Landry, of course, was a stoic leader during his long tenure on the sidelines and was hesitant to pass out the compliments. But Lilly always knew he was doing his job and that he was getting approval from perhaps the most demanding coach of his time.

Lilly was an 11-time Pro Bowl selection and a seven-time All-NFL first-team selection. He was the first Cowboy player to be placed in the Texas Stadium Ring of Honor and was a 1980 inductee in the Hall of Fame, his first year of eligibility. He had 94.5 unofficial sacks in his career (sacks were not counted officially until 1982) and made one of the most famous plays in Super Bowl history when he sacked Miami Dolphins quarterback Bob Griese for a 29-yard loss in Super Bowl VI.

That game, a 24–3 Cowboy victory, was the proudest moment of Lilly’s Cowboys career. “You’ll remember that we had lost the Super Bowl the year before [16–13 to the Baltimore Colts] and it was such a painful memory,” Lilly said. “Everyone had said the Cowboys couldn’t win the big one. But when we beat Miami, it showed we were a great team and we could win that big one. We got that monkey off of our back.”

Lilly, Joe Greene of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and Merlin Olsen of the Los Angeles Rams were all comparable players. Greene had similar quickness and speed to Lilly while Olsen was nearly as prepared and strong as Lilly. However, neither player could match Lilly when it came to consistency since he played in 196 consecutive games.

Modern defensive tackles like Warren Sapp and John Randle got their job done with penetration and intensity, but neither could match Lilly in strength.

“A man like Lilly comes along once in a lifetime,” Landry said in 1972. “He is something a little bit more than great. Nobody is better than Bob Lilly.”

As great as the Cowboys’ ‘Doomsday Defense’ was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Lilly believes that the unit’s time has come and gone and that it would have very little chance of succeeding against modern-day NFL competition. “More than anything else, the Flex defense was about stopping the run,” Lilly said. “Coach Landry came up with it at a time when teams were trying to run the ball at least 60 percent of the time. If they hadn’t been trying to run the ball that much, it wouldn’t have worked. Teams don’t do that anymore. The game changed in the late 1970s and the 1980s and it’s now completely different. Teams that try to run the ball as their primary form of offense can’t do it. You have to mix in the run and get some kind of balance but you have to be able to throw it. The Flex was all about getting the best angles to stop the run. That wouldn’t matter so much anymore.”

But it mattered then and Lilly dominated against the run like few others have been able to do.