"Let's put it this way," he said, "It's always the same face, but with different makeup. There are only so many places you can run on a football field against any pro defense, and only so many ways you can run there, but Stram strives mightily to mask where his team will go and how it will arrive at the point of attack. I like to see Hank Stram in the stacked defense and the 18 different offensive sets we use and the 300 and something plays we can run off those sets." I think football teams reflect the personality of coaches, and I like to think my personality is reflected in the variety of the Chiefs' attack and defense. What we try to do is to create a moment of hesitation, a moment of doubt in the defense. "Well, the '70s will be the decade of difference - different offensive sets, different defensive formations. In effect, what they said was here we come, see if you can stop us. During the '60s the good teams - the Green Bay Packers, for example - came out almost all the time in the same set and ran the play. "The decade of the '60s was the decade of simplicity. "This game will match the offense of the future against the offense of the past," he said. He sorted through the multiple options of the vastly complicated Stram offense as deftly as a computer and came up with the right call on almost every occasion.īefore the more than 80,000 spectators assembled in New Orleans under cloudy skies - there was a threat of a tornado - Stram explained a bit of his philosophy of football. Len Dawson, who before this game was considered a rather namby-pamby type of quarterback, given to collapsing in a heap before any kind of rush, faced the famous charge of Minnesota's Four Norsemen coolly and threw with marvelous aim, completing 12 of 17 passes for 142 yards and a touchdown. The Chiefs' lines - on both offense and defense - gave the Purple People Eaters a world-champions case of indigestion. His strategy was implemented by what must be recognized now as the finest team in pro football that is what the winner of the Super Bowl is. Of course, Stram did not do this all by himself. Hank Stram, coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, threw some of his fanciest formations at the Minnesota Vikings in the Super Bowl and beat them for the championship of the football world by a humbling margin, 23-7. Unlikely-looking little man who favors red vests, checked trousers and infinite variety last Sunday put the art of invention back into football.
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