N.F.L. PLAYOFFS: CONFERENCE CHAMPIONSHIPS; Headset-to-Helmet System Isn't
Perfect

   By RICHARD SANDOMIR
   Published: January 8, 1998

   At key points during this Sunday's National Football League conference
   championship games, will quarterbacks Steve Young, John Elway, Kordell
   Stewart  and  Brett  Favre  hear  every  play  that  coaches send them
   electronically through their helmets?

   Or  will  coaches  (or  backup  quarterbacks)  call  plays  using hand
   signals?  And  will  those  signals  be interpreted correctly, or will
   opponents steal them?

   The  questions arise because Kansas City quarterback Elvis Grbac could
   not  hear a coach's instructions last Sunday for the Chiefs' final two
   plays  of the American Football Conference playoff game won by Denver,
   14-10.  When  the  voice of Mike McCarthy, the quarterbacks coach, did
   not  come through his helmet's tiny speakers, Grbac called an end zone
   fling  on fourth-and-1; it fell incomplete with time nearly elapsed in
   the game.

   A  technician  from  Control  Dynamics,  which makes the communication
   system,  was on the Kansas City sideline, said Harvey Shuhart Jr., the
   company's  president.  ''He  told  me  that  he heard all the plays go
   through,  and  Grbac had a way of acknowledging that he got the plays,
   except the last one,'' Shuhart said.

   On the last play, he said, the technician heard McCarthy call the play
   in  --  ''it  was  being yelled over and over'' -- but Grbac could not
   hear it.

   Although initial reports indicated that Grbac's problem stemmed from a
   mechanical  failure,  the  quarterback ''had difficulty hearing'' over
   the   roar   of  the  Arrowhead  Stadium  crowd,  Chiefs  Coach  Marty
   Schottenheimer said Tuesday.

   If crowd noise can render the system moot, is the league worried about
   Sunday,  when  Pittsburgh will play host to Denver in notoriously loud
   Three Rivers Stadium?

   ''It's  a concern,'' said Peter Hadhazy, the N.F.L.'s director of game
   operations,  ''but  we have what we think is a state-of-the-art system
   that has worked in Pittsburgh before.''

   Shuhart  insisted that in many instances, it is less noisy when a play
   is  being  radioed to the quarterback than when he gets to the line of
   scrimmage and has his oral signals drowned out by opposing fans.

   Once  upon  a time, quarterbacks called their own plays. Subsequently,
   coaches  would occasionally send in plays from the sideline. Later, as
   offenses  and  defenses  grew  more  complex, coaches and quarterbacks
   relayed plays with hand signals.

   Shuhart's  system  is the latest tier in coaching control. After first
   being used in the World League, the N.F.L. put it into effect in 1994.
   Ideally,  it is a most efficient system: from the coach's mouth to the
   quarterback's ear. It scrambles the calls and other instructions about
   defensive  coverage,  making  them  incomprehensible to anyone but the
   quarterback.

   The  chat goes one way: from the sideline to the quarterback. A button
   on  the  coach's headset activates it; he has until 15 seconds left on
   the  play  clock  to  speak, and is then cut off automatically. Volume
   control  is  inside  the  helmet,  but  it can be adjusted only on the
   bench.

   Although  its  quality  has  improved  since  1994  -- and Hadhazy and
   Shuhart  said  there  have  been  relatively few team complaints about
   malfunctions  -- the system has suffered through a variety of glitches
   like  failed  communications,  weakened  batteries,  interference from
   other  frequencies,  static  and  crowd noise coming through a coach's
   headset that garbles the play call.

   ''It  almost  always  failed  to  work at some time,'' said Sam Wyche,
   whose  tenure  as  the  Tampa Bay coach spanned the system's first two
   years,  1994  and  1995.  ''I'd  never  go  into  a  game without hand
   signals.''

   Human  error occurs: two people in the league said that Dick Jamieson,
   the  former  Arizona  offensive  coordinator, would forget to turn his
   switch  on, leaving his quarterbacks to look at a coach mouthing plays
   they could not hear.

   This   season,   Shuhart   investigated   a   problem  with  frequency
   interruption  in the St. Louis Rams' system for two games. ''We had to
   take  timeouts  because  Tony  Banks  couldn't  hear the plays,'' Rick
   Smith,  a  Rams  spokesman,  said.  ''It  would  shut  off.'' The team
   hurriedly improvised a series of hand signals.

   Last season, Giants quarterback Dave Brown occasionally had music from
   a  Spanish  language radio station invade his helmet. Coach Jim Fassel
   was concerned enough with the efficacy of the system that he tested it
   during preseason practices.

   Jim  Mora,  who  coached  New  Orleans during the system's first three
   years,  said: ''It would break down. It would quit. You can't rely 100
   percent on it.''

   Kent  Graham,  an  Arizona quarterback, said that in 1994, when he was
   still  with  the  Giants,  the  team occasionally ran the battery down
   during  practice,  weakening  it  for  use during the subsequent game.
   ''When  the  battery  is weak, you don't get a play, you just get some
   noise,'' he said.

   Phil Simms, the former Giants quarterback and now an NBC analyst, said
   that  for  the  most  experienced quarterback, a system failure can be
   welcome.  ''They  say, 'Man, I can call the plays,' '' he said. ''Troy
   Aikman  wouldn't  even use the new system in the first year. He didn't
   want them in his ears.''