Lip Reading

Anyone who watches sports has witnessed coaches and players, in every game, who are afraid of lip readers. They hold their hand, their glove, or their play card up to their mouth to hide what they are saying from opponents and prying eyes. I used to attribute it to paranoia until Ernie Accorsi, the former general manager of the Baltimore Colts, Cleveland Browns, and the New York Giants, set me straight.

“I’ll tell you an incident that actually won the divisional title for us in 1977,” Accorsi said. “We had an assistant coach named Bobby Colbert, who had been the head coach at Gallaudet School for the Deaf in Washington. He had been educated in lip reading. There’s a science to it. That was the only way he could communicate with his players.

“We were losing to the Patriots in the last game of the season in a game we needed to win to win the division. If we lost, we’d be out of the playoffs. We had third-and-18 at our own 12. Their defensive coordinator was yelling, ‘Double safety delayed blitz.’

“Colbert read his lips with binoculars, got the word to [Colts quarterback] Bert Jones, who checked off and threw a pass down the middle of the field to Ray Chester for an 88-yard touchdown. That basically broke the game open and won the championship for us.”

I questioned how many coaches knew that story.

“That is an extreme example from a person who had tremendous expertise in it,” Accorsi said. “But now, teams have so many coaches — some have 21 — that they have people assigned on binoculars to try to read lips. They do!

“You used to send the plays in with players. Now, the offensive coordinator or the head coach is calling the plays in his headset. The quarterback is listening to it in his headset and the coach has to mouth it [the play call]. That’s why he’s obscuring his face.”