Football codes & code-breaking.

Since I was a kid, I have had an extraordinary interest in codes and code-breaking. Years later, as a radio officer in the Army, I was trained in the state-of-the art cryptography. In Vietnam, I saw our soldiers using the do-it-yourself codes and heard from Intelligence about how easily the enemy broke them.

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Then I got involved with football coaching where much of what players and coaches say during games is encoded. I refer to audibles, defensive calls, conversations in the press box, and coach calls from the sideline to the captains on the field.

The codes used in football are appallingly bad. The only thing dumber than most football codes is the near total lack of effort by the opposing coaches and players to break them.

The typical football audible involves two or three plays stated more or less in the clear, but preceded by colors, one of which is "live." A quarterback might say "Green 24, blue 98, red 28," then run a sweep play around the right end.

What color do you think is the live one? Or, as I saw in one game, the head coach brought his hands together as if in prayer, then made a diving motion with them. It was third and one. What play do you suppose that was?

A 4-4 linebacker steps up and taps the right thigh of the defensive lineman in front of him. What gap do you think the linebacker has?

You gotta be kidding me! But whenever I complain about these "codes," I am invariably told that the user has been employing them for decades and never had a problem.

That is not comforting. The longer you use it, the easier it is to decode. I change mine annually. Trouble is, I think they really have been getting away with these ridiculous "codes" for years. Why? Because the lack of effort in designing "codes" is exceeded only by the even greater lack of effort to break them.

First, let's dispose of the notion that it is unethical to break the codes. There is no such ethical canon in the AFCA Code of Ethics. Lousy codes are nothing but a tip-off, and if you and your players are not looking for tip-offs you are not doing your job as a coach.

Your advance scout should point his camera at any signaling by coaches to players or by players to players. When I scouted teams that used coach hand signals to send in plays, I pointed the camera at the coach as soon as each play ended. If a QB or a LB was using hand signals to communicate, I videoed those signals.

If you play at a level where the opposing QB's use audibles, you should try to record them with your camera audio capability. You might want to get some sort of unobtrusive long-distance microphone. Merely putting the cardboard core of a roll of toilet paper over the camera microphone might do the trick.

A parabolic microphone like you see at NFL games would work, but your league would probably outlaw it as soon as you used it. You may, alternatively, take a partner with you and have him sit or stand near the field so that he can hear and write down each audible and the subsequent play.

Your scout team also needs to know the opponent's normal cadence so that your defense can get used to not encroaching in response to it. And you have to know whether the opponent uses first sound or touch so that your scout team can run it.

Coaches nowadays are justifiably proud of their high-tech video capabilities, but most coaches are still in the silent films era. It's time to enter the talkies era.

If you record the words being yelled out loud at the games by the opposing players and coaches, it should be quite simple to decode them and teach your players their code. It would be unethical to monitor private conversations of players and coaches on the sideline or in a huddle. They have an expectation of privacy in those cases, but not when they are yelling things that their opponents and fans can hear.

Here is one of the play codes I have used. We yelled out four numbers. Let's say 4785. The players were told to add two of them together. Let's say the last two: 8 + 5. That equals 13.

We told the players that the play being called was the last digit of the sum, or play 3 in this case. We had nine running plays and nine passing plays. The first digit signified whether it was a run or pass.

For example, we might say odd numbers are runs and even numbers are passes. Thus, we have called pass play (4 is an even number) number 3. What does the second number, 7, mean? Nothing. It's just there to make the code harder to break.

This probably sounds complicated. It's not. Almost all of your players will learn it in about four minutes. Try them next time you see them. I recommend that you avoid the number 0. For unknown reasons, it fries players' brains. That leaves 1 through 9.

Now let me tell you how hard it is to break. You have four even numbers to send in each pass play and five odd numbers to send in each run play. Since you have four digits and each digit can be from 1 to 9, you have 4 x 9 x 9 x 9 = 2,916 ways to send in each pass play and 5 x 9 x 9 x 9 = 3,645 ways to send in each running play.

For example, here are some of the other 2,915 combinations for sending in pass play #3: 2,785; 4,785; 6,785; 8,785; 2,776; 4,776; 6,776; 8,776; 2,176; 2276; 2,376; and so forth. There are literally 2,916 ways to send in pass play number 3 using this system.

Even if your opponent is aware that you use odd and even numbers and add a pair, how can they tell which is the odd-even indicator? How can they tell which pair you are adding?

There are four possible numbers to use as the odd-even indicator. And in an ABCD sequence, there are six different possible pairs to add together: AB, BC, CD, AC, BD, AD.

Furthermore, you can and should use a unique, underlying play-numbering system. Remember in my live color audible example, I had 28 mean a sweep play to the tailback around the right end? Calling the tailback 2 and the right D gap the 8 hole is standard. Go non-standard.

For example, number your holes from right to left so that the right D gap is 1, the right C gap is 2, and so forth. Then you have a double code, although if your players never learn any other numbering system, they will not recognize that your whole numbering is unusual.

Similarly, you could number pass plays in a non-traditional way, like making pass play 3 a deep corner route rather than the more typical slant or shallow out that is assigned that number.

By using a unique numbering system, you make it even harder to decode your plays.

For example, if they wonder if you are adding 8 +5 in the above example, seeing your team throw a pass to a corner route receiver would probably cause them to conclude, "That can't be it. A 3 route would probably be a slant or quick out."

There are all sorts of variations. You could use low (below 5) and high (above 4) rather than odd and even to indicate run and pass. You could add a fifth digit that meant nothing. That would be no sweat for your players, but it would dramatically complicate breaking your code.

The number of ways you could send in the same run play then would increase from 3,645 to 5 x 9 x 9 x 9 x 9 = 32,805.

One season, I used a letter and three numbers, e.g., D268. The letter indicated pass (A through M) or run (N through Z) and the first two numbers were added together. We used the phonetic alphabet to say the letter, that is, Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, and so forth.

Also, as in the military, we said "niner" for 9 to distinguish it from the number 5. When you use the letter and three digits, you can send in each play in 13 x 9 x 9 x 9 = 9,477 ways.

Our quarterbacks each had a wrist coach in which they would put a couple of pre-made sequences for each of our plays so they did not have to think about them when they wanted to call an audible.

Our eye in the sky in the press box wearing a head set would discuss plays in the same code that our field coach and quarterback would use. So the opponent eye in the sky might overhear our guy saying something like, "I think 5579 would work. Their guy is not where he should be. What're you running next? 2467? OK."

The same thing would happen at away games where the chain gang members were typically opposing parents. A fellow coach standing ten feet away from me would ask, "What'd you call?" "Foxtrot 728." And the chain gang member between us would have no clue what I just said.

On defense, we created a whole new language each season. Basically, we were extremely tip-off oriented, including such subtleties as offensive line hand pressure or running back eyes in the huddle, as well as formation tendencies and the like. We want to be able to yell to our players, "The opposing offense is about to run such-and-such play." But we want to do it in code.

It has always amazed me when opponents yelled stuff like, "Watch the screen" when they know from our tendencies that we are likely to run a screen. That happened to my son when he was sent into a game to run a screen play at tailback against Harvard.

Guess what play my son's team did not run and guess what the QB immediately told their head coach on the sideline so that no screens were thrown to my son that day. I thought Harvard guys were supposed to be smart.

Not only do we want you not to know that we know. We do not even want you to know that we are trying to know what you are about to do. So our defense language is deliberately designed to sound like innocuous defensive chatter.

For example, in 2005, we used the word "Wright" as in Wright brothers, the inventors of the first heavier-than-air flying machine, to indicate a pass was coming.

When our opponent lined up in a formation they only used for a pass play, our linebackers and coaches would start yelling, "Wright," which sounded like "right" to our opponent. They probably figured we were making a strength call or some such. We could tell each other who was going to carry the ball, what hole he was going through, whether there would be a trap block, and so forth, all in seemingly innocuous code.

For example, if we knew from the formation that the fullback was running a trap play through the 1 hole we would yell, "Hotel (H back) Rat (as in rat trap) North (our code for either A gap)."

Furthermore, our players were trained to wait one second and look away from the tip-off they were reporting before they said anything. That was to prevent the opponents from figuring out that we were commenting about something they did.

They would see, say, an opposing tailback shoot his eyes to the weak-side B gap when he heard the play in his huddle. Our guy who saw that would say silently to himself, "One one thousand," then look to one side and say out loud, as if appropos of nothing, "Tango (tailback) Quick (our weakside) Bravo (b gap)."

Football codes are a disgrace at all levels. Efforts to break opponents' codes are almost totally lacking. This is bad coaching. You can easily make codes that are both simple to use and virtually impossible to break. And you can relatively easily collect and decode your opponent's codes and hand signals. You should do both.

By John T. Reed, Former Coach, Alamo, CA