Two and a half weeks ago, the Denver Broncos’ ravenous defense chased down Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Martavius Bryant in a playoff game and shoved him out of bounds. Bryant barreled into a Broncos coach wearing a headset, sending him flying.
That coach, a portly, white-haired, 68-year-old defensive coordinator named Harold Wade Phillips, brushed off his trousers and stayed on the sideline. The Broncos beat the Steelers, and Phillips said a few days later that Bryant actually got the worst of the collision because he would not be playing again until August, which was not just funny, but true.
Wade Phillips was already whipping up another game plan to thwart New England quarterback Tom Brady, and the Broncos were just stout enough on January 24 to hold off the Patriots, 20-18, to earn his first trip to the Super Bowl in 26 years.
The Broncos, and quarterback Peyton Manning, were whipped by the Seattle Seahawks, 43-8, in Super Bowl XLVIII in the Meadowlands two years ago, but Phillips was not with them then. He was merely trying to keep his career alive.
Phillips would spend one full year out of football, then got a break when Gary Kubiak, the head coach for whom he worked in Houston, was named as the Broncos head coach 13 months ago. It was a shrewd move: Denver led the NFL in total defense for the first time ever.
Manning, who turns 40 next month, will commandeer a lot of attention before Super Bowl 50, because it very well might be his last game. The Broncos are not being given much of a chance to beat the Carolina Panthers, a six-point favorite in Las Vegas.
Phillips will surely need to concoct a way to slow down the multitalented Cam Newton and a Carolina offense that has scored 24 first-half points in each of its last two games. (The Panthers also got a first-half interception return for a touchdown against Seattle.)
“They asked me if I had seen a quarterback like Cam Newton,” Phillips said at a news conference last week in Denver. “There isn’t one like him. I haven’t seen one like him. None of us have. He’s a tremendous talent. He’s put it all together. I’m sure he’s going to be MVP of the league this year.
“It’s another big challenge for us. You go from [Pittsburgh’s Ben] Roethlisberger to Tom Brady, think it won’t get any tougher, and now you’re going against Cam Newton.”
For the Broncos to win their first Super Bowl since 1999, when John Elway played his last game, Phillips’ defense will have to deliver. Phillips has been to the Super Bowl before as a Broncos’ defensive coordinator, but Denver was routed by Joe Montana and the 49ers in 1990.
Phillips may be an old hand, but he is also persistent and inventive. He has apparently improved his play-calling in the last 26 years, because opposing quarterbacks, even Brady, seem to be confused lately by the Broncos. A person practically needs a chalkboard to understand the following explanation of his coverage plan.
“Good thing they’re confused. That’s good. I’m pretty confusing, usually,” Phillips said. “We play a matchup zone, and people think it’s man-to-man. Then we play man-to-man, and we play some basic zone. We started a long time ago. Basketball started playing matchup zone. They used to play zone, 3-2 zone, and everybody stood there in their spot. All four guys went to one side so people started moving them over there to play matchup zone.
“That’s what we came up with a long, long time ago. We say: ‘Hey, you’re playing this zone, but when a guy comes over there, you match with him. You pass it off, just like in basketball. When another guy comes there, you go there.’ That’s the simple way to tell you how we played matchup zone. We play a lot of match zone, but people think we’re playing man-to-man. Hopefully that confuses them. It probably confused you already.”
Phillips is the son of a football coach, and not just any coach. His daddy was Oail (pronounced “Awl”) Andrew, or OA, Phillips, who was better known as “Bum” since he was a boy in Orange, Texas, a town near the Gulf coast, right on the Louisiana state line.
Bum Phillips wore a white Stetson hat on the sidelines (except when his teams played indoors, when he politely took it off) and was about as colorful as a football coach can be. When Phillips died at age 90 in October 2013, his obituary included plenty of funny Bum quotes, including one compliment he paid to either Bear Bryant or Don Shula, or possibly both coaches:
“He can take his’n and beat your’n,” Phillips said. “Or he can take your’n and beat his’n.”
Bum Phillips fathered six children, but Wade was his only son, so there was little doubt that he’d play football and become a coach. (It is handed down: Wade Phillips has one son, Wesley, who is the tight ends coach with Washington.)
Wade Phillips’s Twitter feed is @sonofbum. His tweets, not surprisingly, are about football: “Funny how ‘experts’ don’t know a blitz (6 rush-5 cover eligible receivers) from a dog (5 rush-6 cover) – there are also pseudo blitz & dog schemes.” You’re killing us, Wade!
Funny how 'experts' don't know a blitz(6rush-5cover eligible receivers)from a dog(5rush-6cover)--there are also pseudo blitz & dog schemes
— Wade Phillips (@sonofbum) January 26, 2016
In 1976, a year after Bum Phillips became the head coach of the Houston Oilers, he named his son as the team’s linebackers coach. Wade coached under his father during the good times in Houston (with four playoff victories) and mostly bad in New Orleans. When the Saints fired Bum with four games left in the 1985 season, Wade became interim coach.
Wade Phillips was a head coach in Denver for two years, in Buffalo for three years and Dallas for three and a half years. (He also was an interim coach in Atlanta in 2003.) His career record is 82-64, but only the Cowboys in 2009 won a playoff game. He is one of those coaches, like Bud Carson or Dick LeBeau, who is a better mastermind than an overseer.
After Bill O’Brien got the job in Houston, it appeared Wade Phillips was done coaching. He was 66, four years older than Bum was when his career ended, and portly coaches with white hair don’t get hired as quickly. But Kubiak hired Phillips again 10 days after the Broncos hired Kubiak. Kubiak said last week that Phillips can “lead new groups real fast.”
Kubiak also said: “I’ve known Wade for a long time, known his family, knew his dad, grew up under his dad as a kid. For me to share this opportunity with him is really special. I’m very proud of him, the job he’s done, the career he’s had.”
After the Broncos beat the Patriots, Phillips tweeted: “Good year for me from unemployed to the Super Bowl!” It was retweeted more than 6,500 times. Twitter may be a newfangled way for a football coach to communicate, but Son of Bum can keep up, and he still has another chance to lift the Vince Lombardi Trophy towards his daddy in the heavens.
