It was born in a USFL special teams meeting room in Philadelphia, or thereabouts, in 1984. Ish.
Even for Joe Marciano, the man credited with introducing ’s signature phrase, his mantra — “Death by Inches” — with the , the specifics get a little, well, hazy.
“Yeah, I can’t believe I heard it from anybody else,” the 65-year-old Marciano laughs. “I might’ve read it somewhere. I read a lot of coaching books and motivational books.”
The short version? The birth of the Death came at the end of one of Marciano’s special teams meetings with the old Philadephia Stars, because a few players in particular had cheesed Marciano the heck off.
Fangio, who was working with Marciano on the Stars staff, happened to be in the room at the time, taking careful mental notes.
At the end of the meeting, Marciano would say, “Ready,” and the players would respond by shouting, in unison, “Break!”
“And I said, ‘Letap have everybody do it and see how it sounds,’” recalls Marciano, a special teams coordinator for five NFL teams from 1986-2018, and one of the Broncos coach’s oldest pals.
“So everybody would in unison would clap their hands. And then I said, ‘OK, letap do it again and remember what it sounds like.’
“And I said, ‘OK, just the offensive guys do it.’
“And then I said, ‘Just the defensive guys,’ and then, ‘Just the defensive backs.’
“And the decibels were a lot lower. And when I said, ‘ready, break,’ the whole team sounds like half of the group’s not doing it. (I said), ‘If itap not important for you guys to say “break…”
“And thatap when we said, ‘death by inches’ — if itap not important for you guys to say ‘break’ and clap your hands, itap not important for you to use the right technique or be in the right stance. Itap not going to win us a ballgame, but itap going to tell me where our focus is. It was high school-ish, but I told a (player) once, ‘You let the decibels go down, we have an issue.’”
The message? The devil’s in the details.
Every detail, no matter how trivial. Add up enough paper cuts — being late for meetings, letting little things slip — and a flesh wound starts to form.
“It was a thing about discipline, you know what I mean?” chuckles Marciano, who grew up near Fangio in Dunmore, Pa., and was four-and-a-half years his senior. “Yeah, itap contagious. I’ve said it. Other coaches have said it.”
Most notably, Tony Dungy — who had Marciano on his staff in Tampa Bay from 1996-2001 — has dropped “death by inches” in a public setting, as has University of Arizona men’s basketball coach Sean Miller.
“And other players have said it,” Marciano says. “Tony Dungy has said itap true, itap so true, how it works.”
