85 Bears: Confrontation with Buddy lowlight of bad week

Last year, Rick Telander and Mike Ditka teamed up to write Ditka's chronicle of the 1985 Super Bowl season, In Life, First You Kick Ass: Reflections on the 1985 Bears and Wisdom from Da Coach. Each Sunday, the Sun-Times will feature an excerpt from the book.

The Bears were 12-0, having won their last three games by the combined score of 104-3. It was December, and winter beckoned in Chicago. But the Bears had to fly to warm Miami for a much-hyped ''Monday Night Football'' game against Dan Marino and the pass-happy Miami Dolphins. An undefeated season was Mike Ditka's goal. Against the Dolphins, he got disaster.

We get to the Orange Bowl, and the crowd is at a fever pitch. That's fine. Cops have German shepherds on leashes. We're used to noise and craziness by now. It was humid but not hot because this is already the beginning of December. Somebody has told me we've lost our last eight Monday night games when we're on the road. Yeah? Screw 'em. Screw those statistics, all of it. This isn't a pinball game. This is football.

But something is wrong with this night. The Dolphins are having Marino roll away from Dent, which is smart, but we can't get to him with the other guys. They're using little wide receiver Nat Moore like a tight end, putting him in the slot and putting him in motion. We've seen three-receiver sets, but this has three wideouts and no true tight end. So we have to cover Moore with a linebacker like Wilber Marshall or, after a while, we moved Fencik up in man-to-man. But he's more of a deep safety, and that's not a good matchup, either.

Now, Dent is an impact player. He should be in the Hall of Fame, no question about it. He was the 203rd player taken in the 1983 draft out of dinky Tennessee State, and he was skinny and raw and hadn't played against anybody. But he worked his ass off, bulked up, used his athleticism. I kidded him, calling him Robert, but that was just because he wanted more money, more publicity, and I was messing with him. But he was the real deal, a great pass-rushing defensive end.

Thing was, in this game Marino stayed away from him. Marino did his half-rollouts to stay away, and he had that quick release. A quick-draw gunslinger's gun. The problem is, Dent can't do anything because he's got to go 15 yards or more to get to Marino, and we're asking our linebackers, guys who are used to going straight ahead, to drop back in coverage. We should have gone to a nickel. Five defensive backs. They're running what is essentially a third down-and-long formation a whole lot of the time. They hadn't shown that before. Not throughout an entire game. And we didn't adjust. Sure, it was more complicated than that, but that was at the root of it.

Miami got lucky, too. They blocked a punt by Maury Buford and recovered it at our 6. They even had a horse[bleep] pass that Hampton deflected, and it should have been intercepted. But it went way up in the air, and damned if their toothpick wideout Mark Clayton didn't catch it for a long score. But that wasn't what [ticked] me off.

No, I was mad at Buddy. Look, what we're doing on defense isn't working. So let's adapt! Wilber Marshall is one of the best athletes I've seen, but don't ask him to cover wide receivers 30 yards downfield. We should have gone to a straight nickel. Rush four linemen, use two linebackers and have the five DBs cover. Maybe the problem was whom do you take out? It might have hurt somebody's ego. Maybe Buddy's. Otis Wilson is a good linebacker, but why didn't we put Reggie Phillips in there in the nickel? If you're not flexible to make adjustments, to change what's not working, you'll never win. The ''46'' had been ungodly up until this game. But we needed to fine-tune it. Right now! You have to give your players the best chance to win. You can't handicap them. If the tanks are getting blown up, come in with the Air Force. That's all I was saying.

So we come in at halftime, down 31-10. We've given up more points in two quarters than we had in the last six entire games! Damn, I was furious.

I go up to Buddy and I start screaming at him. ''What are you doing out there? We have to run the nickel! Let's blitz the [bleep] out of them!'' He yells back at me, and now we've got a [confrontation]. We're pushing and yelling, and the players are there, and it's not a good thing. It's pretty ugly. Players separate us, and we move apart. I try to calm down. Football is a tense game. I've seen two assistants go at it. But not a head coach and a coordinator. All I'm trying to get across is that you don't let your men get beat just because you won't combat what the other side is doing. I'll go to my grave believing that.

I think Buddy and I resolved the conflict before the half ended. And I think I apologized to him after the game. At any rate, Fuller got hurt in the fourth quarter, so I put McMahon in the game, hoping that maybe he could do stuff just like in that first Minnesota game. But it wasn't there. He had no magic under his hat. He got sacked a couple of times and threw an interception. We lost 38-24, and it stunk.

We had to regroup. Excerpted from In Life, First You Kick Ass: Reflections on the 1985 Bears and Wisdom from Da Coach (2005, Sports Publishing L.L.C.) by Mike Ditka with the Sun-Times' Rick Telander. It can be found in bookstores everywhere. The hardcover book also can be purchased directly from the publisher by calling (877) 424-BOOK (2665) in the continental United States or online at www.SportsPublishingLLC.com.