Man With a Plan : Panther Coach Dom Capers Leaves Nothing to Chance on His Way to the Playoffs

CHARLOTTE, N.C. —  The man is obsessive, demanding and meticulous in his attention to detail. By his own journal’s account, he was home four daylight hours during the month of November. He sleeps in his office three nights a week, but dresses and combs his hair like a man aware his picture could be taken any minute.

He has a 44-inch chest and fingers so muscular looking that they portend a painful handshake. He recites statistics like some sort of hyperactive accountant, employs a disarming smile to avoid tough questions and has the ability to recall most every videotape he has ever seen.

He has written down everything he has done--everything--since 1982 and can tell you his pulse rate on the morning of July 5, 1983, and July 5, 1984, and July 5, 1985 . . .

In offering tributes to his success, his friends and former mentors describe a tunnel-vision, driven, boring student of the game.

In short, Carolina’s Dom Capers is the perfect football coach.

“I think he gets more like Paul Brown every day in everything he does,” said Mike McCormack, president of the Carolina Panthers, who played and coached for Brown. “The truest test is the test of time, but I think Dom is going to rank right up there with some of the greats of the coaching profession.”

The Panthers, looking so smart these days with a 12-4 record and a playoff game today against Dallas, made a run at Joe Gibbs before settling on two finalists to become their first coach: Capers and Rich Kotite. They debated--actually debated--but then became so smitten with Capers that they broke NFL rules prohibiting one team from tampering with another team’s personnel. The Pittsburgh Steelers complained, the Panthers paid a $150,000 fine, lost two draft picks and are in the playoffs.

After opening 0-5--the same thing that happened to Gibbs in his first year in the NFL as coach of the Washington Redskins--Capers’ team has gone 19-8.

Might history repeat? Gibbs took the Redskins to the Super Bowl in his second year.

“We knew he could be good, but what we are finding out now is, he’s almost too good to be true,” McCormack said. “This is a man who leaves nothing to chance, and if anybody has ever given him any advice in his life, I’ll guarantee you this, he’s written it down.

“He is so organized, so precise in what he wants, and that’s Paul Brown. You could visit a Paul Brown training camp on a Tuesday at 2:30 in the afternoon and come back a year later at the same time and he would be doing exactly the same thing. That’s Paul Brown, and that’s Dom Capers.”

Brown liked to be regarded as being “meticulous.” The Panthers now embody that concept. The do-it-the-same-way, do-it-by-the-book Panthers broke an NFL record that stood 51 years by having fewer penalty yards than their opponents in 20 consecutive games.

It’s the routine that counts with Capers. Each June he has already plotted every minute of the day for the following year for his football team. “I don’t like surprises,” Capers said.

“He’s not going to come to the meeting room and be Mr. Jocularity one day and then Satan’s twin the next,” Carolina center Mark Rodenhauser said.

This week defensive end Shawn King missed a weightlifting session after having been tardy for a few meetings. Capers suspended King for the remainder of the season.

“When I played for San Francisco, we held a plane one time for 40 minutes because Ricky Watters was late,” Carolina defensive back Toi Cook said. “When Kerry Collins was a few minutes late for the plane this year before one game, we just left him.”

Collins is the Panthers’ starting quarterback, and he had to purchase his own airline ticket to join the team. And then he was fined for being late.

“Everyone is treated the same way, and because of that kind of consistency there are no mood swings,” McCormack said. “That makes Dom’s team consistent. What you see is what you get. And with Paul, it was the same way. There were no surprises and you could count on that.”

No surprises? The Panthers are the surprise, the surprise of the year in the NFL in their ability to win the NFC West at the 49ers’ expense. Carolina has the home-field advantage today, and they were 8-0 in Ericsson Stadium.

The Panthers have won by design and by innovation, something Brown was most famous for during his revolutionary time as the father of play books, offensive play-calling from the sideline, intelligence tests, a year-round, full-time staff of assistants, comprehensive game plans and player grading system based on film clips.

Capers’ Panthers, who operate by an organizational manual so detailed that it describes every duty of every assistant coach, have won because of their leader’s tireless study of zone blitzes and his ability to assemble a veteran corps of defenders who can grasp his aggressive philosophy.

“They’ve got guys with a hundred years of experience out there,” San Francisco tackle Steve Wallace said. “You wonder how they do all the different [schemes] they do without messing up, but they’ve got guys that understand the game of football. You couldn’t have a bunch of second-year guys out there doing some of the schemes that they do.”

Buoyed by free agency, the expansion Panthers filled in the expansion draft gaps by spending the bonus money to get the players Capers required to rush the passer. And in his system, everyone rushes the passer.

“The whole philosophy of the defense is to create illusions and be aggressive and not let the quarterback sit under center and get a pre-snap read of the defense,” said safety Brett Maxie, who also played for Capers in New Orleans. “You want to make the offense think, make them think we’re blitzing more people than we are actually bringing.”

In Pittsburgh, while working as defensive coordinator for Coach Bill Cowher, Capers, 46, became known as the “Mayor of Blitzburgh.” His 3-4 defensive alignment, which maximized the skills of outside linebackers Greg Lloyd and Kevin Greene, led the NFL with 55 sacks in 1994. The Panthers led the NFL this season with 60 sacks.

“We want to be a physical football team,” Capers said. “Two things we can never sacrifice are toughness and effort.”

It was Capers’ idea to build an expansion franchise with veterans on defense to keep the game close, and develop youth on offense. General Manager Bill Polian, who assembled the Buffalo dynasty, provided the personnel expertise, and overnight the Panthers shocked the NFL.

They have won consistently already, and their offensive superstars have yet to mature. Collins has begun to blossom, but injuries took out rookie running back Tshimanga Biakabutuka and rookie wide receiver Muhsin Muhammad.

“I had been through all this before,” Capers said. “I had gone through two start-up situations. I was with Jim Mora when we implemented our program in the USFL and then in New Orleans. Then I went through a similar operation with Bill [Cowher] in Pittsburgh. The only difference [in Carolina] was we didn’t have any players.”

In his first training camp, Capers cut running back Barry Foster, the team’s only marquee player, because Foster would not practice up to Capers’ standards. In their first regular-season NFL game, the Panthers closed to within one point of Atlanta and Capers immediately opted to go for two points.

“In my mind, there was never any question,” Capers said. “To me, you’re aggressive right there.”

A false start penalty eventually forced Capers to settle for the tie, and although the team lost in overtime, his players had taken notice.

“He earned our undying respect right there,” wide receiver Willie Green said.

Apparently, he also has his players’ attention at halftime. In eight home games this season, the Panthers allowed the opponent to score 13 points in the second half. The 56 second-half points given up by Carolina during the regular season are the fewest since the NFL went to a 16-game schedule in 1978.

“Watch him on the sideline during the first half and he’s taking down notes,” said McCormack, who played a prominent role in making the expansion Seahawks successful. “There’s no panic; he makes changes based on his amazing recall of videotape he has seen of the opponent during the week.”

Capers’ note-taking, however, is something extraordinary. His father, Eugene, a carpenter from Buffalo, Ohio, gave him his first journal as a Christmas present in 1981. His father died a few months later, and in his memory, he has continued to fill the books ever since.

“My father was a man who believed you got back out of things what you put into them,” Capers said. “I was as close to him as anybody could be; I had a great desire to please him.”

In a very neat, finely printed manner, Capers documents most every thought, most every action of his life. He stores his old journals in his office, his new one in his briefcase.

“Three-and-a-half minutes for a shower, and he can tell you his pulse rate from last year’s morning jog,” said Ron Lynn, former Washington defensive coordinator who recruited Capers to play defensive back at Mount Union College. “I had him as a student in my class too, and I’m sure he took notes, but not like this. A lot of the things Dom does now come from his dad, who was really a good man.”

He runs his news conferences and his meetings with a sheet of paper in front of him filled with the points he will cover. Preparation is never left to last-second spontaneity.

“Some coaches have a couple of things they want to go over on Mondays after a game,” Carolina guard Matt Elliott said. “He’s got three pages of perfect handwritten notes. That’s one thing I find interesting. If you see his signature on footballs, it’s printed very carefully, very meticulous, as if to say, ‘This is who I am.’ ”

The note-taking, however, is an obsession. Despite getting little sleep, he will not end a day without filling his journal. He said it is all part of his preparation, which allows him to constantly reference experiences he has had in the past without leaving them to the chance of memory.

“There’s a fine line between winning and losing,” he said. “So many games come down to the last two or three minutes. I just believe there’s a direct correlation between how thorough you are and how you play on Sunday. You can do all the preparation in the classroom and then go out and practice it. But on Sunday when the bullets start to fly, there’s a lot of quick decisions that have to be made. Preparation gives you confidence. To me, this is a structured game. It’s hard to lack structure and win.”

Although he has found instant success, Capers toiled anonymously for years as an assistant at Kent State and the University of Washington with Don James and at Ohio State, Hawaii, San Jose State, California and Tennessee with Johnny Majors. Mora hired him to coach the Philadelphia Stars with him in the USFL, and then again in New Orleans before joining the Steelers with his first big break as defensive coordinator.

“He’s put in the hours,” Mora said. “He’s been in some great programs and has learned from them. This is a very disciplined coach; he would leave his office every night and there would be nothing on his desk.”

The only thing that’s changed now is that Capers doesn’t leave his office. He sleeps on a cot Tuesday and Wednesday, and sometimes he begins the week that way on Monday. He has a 5,000-square-foot house on a lake, and on occasion, he told the Charlotte Observer recently, he forgets what his home looks like in sunshine.

“I’ve got a radio down here, a shower, a john, a fold-out bed and a desk,” Capers said of his Ericsson Stadium office. “I’ve got everything I need. I could move right into a minimum-security prison and not miss a beat.”

Karen, his wife of 2 1/2 years, is a flight attendant and travels 10-12 days a month, which fits perfectly with the coaching lifestyle.

The man can be a bore, although very polite and gracious. His machine gun dissemination of statistics becomes tedious when repeated week after week. Ask him a question he doesn’t want to answer and he will reply in platitudes and continue talking with the hopes of eating up all the interview time. Ask him a really tough question, and he will smile, but not reply.

“I’m not going to be evaluated on being a stand-up comedian,” Capers said. “I’m going to be evaluated on how well we do.”

What he has already done is captured the fancy of a football team that really has no business winning so regularly at this point. It is a team with a roster still full of rejects, who will be gone in another year or two here. But because he’s so different in his delivery, so exacting in what he wants to accomplish, they have been inspired.

“Coach Capers is an artist at what he does, and most artists are a little different,” Maxie said. “People call Michael Jackson weird, and he’s the greatest pop artist in my lifetime.

“If you take a shotgun and fill it with buckshot, it’s going to scatter the whole place. With Dom, it’s like those laser guns with that little beam coming out. That’s how Dom lives his life; everything comes to a fine point. Maybe it’s tunnel vision, but he has this agenda, this goal in mind, and he’s going to get there and take you with him.”

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TODAY’S GAMES

AFC: Pittsburgh (11-6) at New England (11-5)

9:30 a.m., Channel 4

NFC: Dallas (11-6) at Carolina (12-4)

1 p.m., Channel 11