Retired Quarterback's Memoir Reveals He Never Understood What a 'Tampa 2' Was

Three-time Pro Bowl quarterback and two-time Super Bowl champion Rick Cannon has admitted in his forthcoming memoir, 'Under Center: Confessions of a Man Who Winged It,' that he never once in his 16-year NFL career understood what a Tampa 2 defense was. 'People would say Tampa 2 and I'd nod,' Cannon writes in Chapter 7, titled 'The Tampa Situation.' 'My offensive coordinator would point at the board and say this is how we attack Tampa 2. I'd nod again. Then I'd go out and throw it to whoever looked most open. It worked out fine.' Cannon, who retired in 2024 with 52,847 passing yards and 389 touchdowns, writes candidly that his pre-snap diagnostic process consisted entirely of 'checking if the safeties look relaxed or stressed' and 'making a gut call based on the vibe.' 'There are 247 defensive concepts in the modern NFL,' Cannon writes. 'I understood about four of them. Man coverage. Zone coverage. Blitz. Not blitz. Everything else was taxonomy for taxonomy's sake. The ball goes to the open guy.' The book has sent shockwaves through the football analytics community. 'We've spent decades building sophisticated models to predict quarterback decision-making,' said analytics pioneer Sarah Metrics. 'And it turns out one of the most successful quarterbacks in history was operating on pure instinct and what he calls vibes. Our models are wrong. Everything is wrong.' Cannon's former coaches have responded with varying degrees of shock. 'I spent 200 hours a year preparing Tampa 2 game plans for Rick,' said retired coordinator Phil Chalkboard. 'Two hundred hours. And he was reading vibes.' The memoir debuts at number one on Amazon's pre-order list.