The defense, after toiling through a difficult season, was beginning to get a sense of its own powers—imposing its will on many games and picking up the offense when it was ineffective. Bobby Bell had noticed by late October, “This year, the morale of the defense is the best ever,” he said. “We stick together. If something goes wrong in a game, we don’t panic, we don’t go berserk on the field. We get together and work it out.”
The defense—designed by Stram but orchestrated by Tom Bettis and Tom Pratt—was superb at all three levels, from the dominating defensive line, to the agile, potent linebackers, to the marauding secondary, which easily led the AFL in interceptions for the fourth consecutive year.
The Chiefs’ defensive line played two primary fronts. One was the Triple Stack, which—depending on the formation—had the three linebackers directly behind three of the defensive linemen, or Jim Lynch moving up to the line outside of Aaron Brown. It was a way of disguising the assignments of both the defensive linemen and linebackers. The other front, known as Under, was used more in passing situations, and allowed the defensive linemen to focus on the pass rush, while the linebackers were responsible for underneath pass coverage. Both defenses were designed to be aggressive and confounding, concealing intentions and adding a moment of hesitation to elemental offensive duties like blocking assignments.
“We attack, we react, and then we finish,” said Pratt.
While the attitude mattered, the most important changes were the ones taking place among the personnel. The porous defense of the first Super Bowl season had been transformed in the intervening years into a younger, stronger, faster unit.
“There was very much a feeling that they had to prove to people that they were a good football team because of losing the first Super Bowl,” said Bettis. “We still felt very strongly about it.”
By the ’69 season, middle linebacker Willie Lanier had become the on-field leader, the person who called the fronts in the defensive huddle. The self-possessed Virginian exuded the quiet confidence of a man able to see beyond the horizon line. While he lacked the theatricality of Dick Butkus, many scouts felt he covered more ground and hit harder when he got there.
In his rookie year of 1967, Lanier suffered numerous frightening head injuries, most notably a concussion in a late-October game against the Broncos, during which he kept playing and later collapsed in the huddle. Lanier was unconscious for two hours, and the team physician, Dr. Albert Miller, confided years later that he’d lost Lanier’s pulse three times in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
Despite all that, Lanier played a week later against the Jets. Two weeks after that, while playing San Diego, he experienced acute double vision, and on one play, tackled the wrong John Hadl, coming up empty-handed. A subsequent appointment at the Mayo Clinic revealed an undiagnosed subdural hematoma.
By the beginning of the 1968 season, Lanier had changed his tackling style, leading instead with his shoulders; the altered approach would later be taught for generations to come. While he’d tackled headfirst in the past, the savvy Lanier of ’69 wrapped up his opponents— earning the nickname “Honey Bear”—and began wearing a distinctive helmet with water pockets lining the inside of the shell and a wide strip of foam padding bisecting the outside.
Lanier was flanked by the perennial all-league linebacker Bobby Bell, the best athlete on the Chiefs. Bell (despite having no use for Alvin Roy’s weight-training program) was a sculpted 6’4”, 228 pounds, with a twenty-eight-inch waist and a size 48 jacket. “He’s the only player I’ve ever seen who could play any position on the team, and you’d still win,” said Stram. If there was a fast tight end giving the strong safety Jim Kearney fits, there were times when Bell and Kearney would swap coverage responsibilities. These instances of freelancing could lead to intense questioning on the sidelines from Bettis. “Coach, tell you what,” said Bell. “Yell at us if we mess up. Otherwise, let us do it this way.”
On the other side of Lanier was Jim Lynch, his roommate and closest friend on the team. Perpetually underrated and the least celebrated member of the linebacking trio, Lynch was an accomplished player, excellent at defending the run, and adept at open-field tackling.
Going into training camp, there was one position still unsettled. At left defensive tackle, the veteran Ed Lothamer would be competing against the agile second-year player Curley Culp. Lothamer was hobbled by injuries during the preseason, and Culp rose to the occasion. The 6’1”, 265-pound Culp had been the NCAA wrestling champion before he was drafted by the Denver Broncos, whose coach Lou Saban tried to switch him to offensive guard, because he felt Culp lacked the height to excel as a defensive lineman. Stram had shrewdly acquired him via trade in 1968, and Culp won the job in August and seemed to improve weekly during the season. It wasn’t merely that he defied the stereotype of defensive linemen, but his excellence altered the way the position was evaluated.
Culp brought a measure of gravity and skepticism to his pursuits. “Now Curley had a different way,” said Buck Buchanan’s wife, Georgia. “He was nice as could be, but a serious thinker. He would analyze everything you say. If you said, ‘I think it’s red,’ he’d say, ‘Georgia, don’t you think that red has some blue in it?’ He marched to a different kind of drumbeat.”
The interior of the line was anchored by Buck Buchanan, the 6’7”, 285-pound man-mountain who exuded both ferocity and goodness. Almost everyone—even opponents— liked Buchanan, whose easy smile and authoritative manner made him a team leader.
On either end of the defensive line, the Chiefs had two players who were ostensibly opposites but actually had much in common. On one side was the energetic veteran, Jerry Mays, “Mr. Huzzah Huzzah,” all adrenaline and tenacity, who earned straight A’s as an engineering major at SMU. Mays was far more subdued off the field—he smoked a pipe, liked to play chess, and was something of a gourmand. On the other side was the blue-chip athlete Aaron Brown, who initially struggled to find his ideal position, first at defensive tackle, then at running back, before settling in at defensive end. Brown, from the University of Minnesota, was a bit of a nerd (he would later be an early adopter on computers). He also smoked a pipe, and enjoyed chess, frequently battling against Jerry Mays.
Shortly after arriving to camp on Monday, August 4, the first-round draft choice Jim Marsalis was called into Stram’s office and told that the starting left cornerback job was his to lose.
Marsalis, from Pascagoula, Mississippi, played football for head coach John Merritt and defensive coordinator Joe Gilliam, Sr., at Tennessee State. He was 5’11” and not quite 200 pounds. His mother, Bessie, had refused to see him play in either high school or college, worrying that he was too small. The Chiefs saw a gifted cornerback, a young master of the bump-and-run technique.
When Marsalis was beaten deep on the first play in his Chiefs preseason debut, he returned to the huddle and informed his ten veteran teammates, “Don’t worry about it. It’ll be okay.”
And it was.
Marsalis wore knee pads, but no thigh or hip pads, so he could change direction more easily. He soon impressed his teammates with his indomitable playing style and his compact, muscular physicality. “He could run as fast backward as forward,” said Jim Lynch, “and he’d be wailing on someone the whole time.”
The other cornerback, Emmitt Thomas, had become an expert at man-to-man coverage. He also had a rare skill on contested balls of outjumping the receiver he was covering.
Thomas was likely the fastest runner on the team and his rangy physicality gave opponents fits. He was someone that Dawson frequently consulted in practices about the effectiveness of the Chiefs’ new pass patterns.
At the safety position was the dimpled veteran, Johnny Robinson, known as “The Governor.” He looked like a matinee idol’s idea of a football player and was blessed with a canny sense of where a play was headed. Next to him was the strong safety, Jim Kearney, described by Lanier “as quiet as could be,” but also a reliable and pugnacious defender.
Every starter in the Chiefs’ secondary had begun their formative football career on the other side of the ball. Kearney played quarterback at Prairie View A&M, Thomas played quarterback at Bishop College, Marsalis played quarterback in high school in Mississippi, and Robinson began his pro career as a running back and receiver. As a group, they were exceedingly good at guessing what opposing quarterbacks were thinking.
“If I wanted to go to war,” said Bell, “I would start picking Jim Kearney, Lanier, Buck, Mays, Thomas—those are the guys I want on my side. When it comes to playing on gameday, when we were together, we were going to fight you. It was our bread and butter. You don’t come into our house and knock us around.”
The front four of Brown, Buchanan, Culp, and Mays applied consistent pressure, while Lanier (63) matured into one of the game’s great middle linebackers.
Defensive stalwarts, clockwise, Lanier, Lynch, Buchanan, and Culp.
Three-fourths of the ball-hawking secondary, from left, Thomas, Marsalis, and Kearney.
The two old pros of the defense were “the Governor,” Robinson, and the tenacious defensive end Mays.
