DeFilippo: “Two things I’m going to give you. Number one, trust in his assistant coaches. He trusted [offensive coordinator] Frank Reich to pull the whole thing together. He and Frank both trusted all the offensive assistants to have our own areas and be the master of that area. So the trust on that coaching staff was earned—if Doug put you in charge of red-area plays, he trusted you to be the best in the league at knowing the best things to do in that area. Number two: Coach is gonna do it his way. His way is pedal to the medal. He wants to score on every play. He gets upset sometimes because we don’t score on every play, in a good way. He’s going to stay on the attack when there’s that point in the game where you can either try to put an opponent away or just kind of ride it out. He’ll always take the shot to put the opponent away. And the players followed. In all we did, we locked arm and arm, here we are, and prepared the same no matter who we played. Our term for that year was, ‘faceless opponent.’ And each week we treated our opponent like it was a faceless person.
