For Stephen Weatherly, football is a game of chess
The Vikings' defensive end has spent a lifetime playing chess. He applies it to his life and NFL career
By Matthew Coller, 2003 Perry High School chess champion
EAGAN — During the NFL season, nearly every press conference around the league features somebody making reference to the upcoming chess match between the two teams.
Football to chess is an easy metaphor. Coaches make moves and players have individual battles within the game. The winner either defeats the opponent schematically by forming a better game plan or an individual matchup is so one sided that it leads to victory. And the chess matches between coaches and players happening simultaneously are what makes the game so darn compelling, even if there’s only 11 minutes of actual action over three hours.
For Minnesota Vikings defensive end Stephen Weatherly, comparisons between football and chess take on a deeper meaning. Chess has been a part of his life since he was young. It’s helped shape the way he plays, the way he thinks and the way he connects with other people.
Growing up, Weatherly’s elementary school happened to be across the street from Georgia Tech, so his humble after-school chess club was mentored by a GT student and chess tournaments were often held on campus. The group started out simply learning how to set up the board and grew to the point where they could compete. Just like in the Netflix show “Queen’s Gambit,” they would set up a bunch of games around the outside of the room and one person would go around and play everyone at once. He even got an opportunity to sit in on a few practices at Vanderbilt. He calls that the “pinnacle” of his chess playing.
In high school and college, it was tough to continue competing in the world’s most popular board game.
“Student athlete, so there was no free time and there wasn’t time to find your de-stressors either,” Weatherly said. “It was very tough to do it….In college you charter planes so I would hop on there and play chess with anyone else who was on the plane or against the computer.”
Weatherly was drafted by the Vikings in 2016 and worked his way from the practice squad into a situational pass rushing role by his third season. The following year, the Vikings drafted another defensive lineman, Ifeadi Odenigbo, who Weatherly calls a “chess head.” When Weatherly signed in Carolina in 2020, he found teammates there who enjoyed the game as well. Sometimes he’ll play people who aren’t very familiar with chess as a way of making a connection and getting to know them better.
“I think you learn a lot about someone,” Weatherly said. “If someone’s more passive or aggressive, how many steps ahead do they think. There’s a lot about how someone plays the game that you can kind of infer how they’ll handle situations. When they get caught off guard and adversity strikes, are they going to back away, regain their bearings and then launch or will they jump into a counter attack immediately even if they’re out-leveraged? You can pick up from something like that with chess.”
The road to making it as a seventh-round pick isn’t all that easy. Of the 20 players the Vikings have drafted in the seventh round since 2014, only Weatherly and Kris Boyd are currently on the team’s active roster. There’s a couple of different ways in which the game of chess has influenced that journey. Weatherly’s mind was shaped from his childhood hobby to see what’s coming next and being able to adjust when things didn’t go his way.
“It helped me plan steps ahead,” the sixth-year defensive end said. “The importance of planning a move and more importantly dealing with adversity. The ability to adapt and respond. You have this amazing plan for a four-move checkmate but then they move their pawn up one spot and it blocks that or they move their knight, what are you going to do now? You’ve already committed to it, do you try to spin something off of that or bring it back and go to your second favorite move or third favorite move? If anything, that’s what that taught me. The importance of having a plan, executing it and when to abandon it and go to something else or when to stick with it.”
His adaptability landed him back with the Vikings. In 2018, Weatherly got his first opportunity to step into a starting role when the team was without starter Everson Griffen for a stint. He produced 14 QB pressures and two sacks in that time, opening the door for a bigger role in certain situations when Griffen returned. In 2019, head coach Mike Zimmer used Weatherly like a chess piece, sliding him inside on pass rushing downs. He switched that role to outside rushing during the Vikings’ playoff victory over the New Orleans Saints. It turned out to be a pivotal move in pressuring Saints QB Drew Brees.
Weatherly looks at his own weekly battle against the opponent’s offensive linemen as his personal chess match. He uses the example of preparing certain moves against an offensive tackle and then figuring out whether that plan will work or if he needs to quickly make changes on the fly.
“ Sometimes you get there and your move kills them so you stick with it, you don’t change….Most times they have a counter to your favorite move because they watch film too. From there it’s about adjusting right?” Weatherly said. “Do you continue with the same gameplan that you had and try to work into it or do you go to something else? Do you try to go to something you’ve seen someone else do and you don’t have enough reps at? There’s a bunch of things that you have to choose from in that best time. It’s also contingent upon what he does. Did he change his set to stop your move? And if he changed it, how did he change it and how can you exploit that?”
“That’s real-time thinking and you only have seconds to take in that information and minutes on the sideline to process it with still photos. That’s the correlation to chess.”
In order to fully explain the correlation between football and chess plans and adjustments, I talked with chess International Master Levy Rozman, whose GothamChess YouTube channel has more than 1 million subscribers.
“There’s two strategies,” Rozman explained over Zoom from his New York City apartment. “Number one is you know what they’re going to play so you try to take them out of it. The problem in doing that is you might take yourself out of it. Then nobody knows what’s going on and it’s basically let the best player win. The problem is sometimes in trying to take people out of their preparation you get into a really hot position and you might drop the plate.”
“That’s, unfortunately, my style,” he continued. “I rely too much on, ‘Oh I can’t go too much into this person’s comfort zone,’ but the truth is, if you go into someone’s comfort zone, you also will be well prepared. If you go into the main lines, what’s played more than anything else, the cutting-edge stuff, you’re both going to be prepared but if you break off into the third most popular move and then again something really unorthodox and again something really unorthodox, at some point it becomes something that you haven’t practiced, that you haven’t drilled, that you might have forgotten.”
Rozman’s channel chronicles his own journey, much like an NFL player, as he plays in tournaments and tries to reach Grandmaster status. He’s been playing the game for around 20 years and was a chess teacher before deciding to stream games online during the pandemic. His page drew wide interest because of his entertaining style and he’s quickly developed into one of the most popular voices teaching the game on YouTube.
While Rozman isn’t a football expert — he’s more of a basketball fan — he’s intrigued by the comparisons on the individual and broad levels.
In the micro battle of a defensive end versus an offensive tackle is that both players are the best in the world at their craft, so they each deeply understand the other player’s possible techniques. There’s only so many ways to move chess pieces and there’s only so many pass rush moves that someone can have. If a D-end beats a tackle seven times in a game, he’s done very well, meaning the margin for each player to create advantages is thin. Same goes for chess.
“At the highest level, you both see the same exact things,” Rozman said. “I see A, B, C and then I go a few moves deep and you see A, B, C and you go a few moves deep. The real fundamental difference is who sees and evaluates the position better throughout the game. I might see five moves and say that looks fine and you see a sixth move and suddenly we’re on that path and I’m like, ‘Ohhhh no, oh man this is not going to be good, I have to buckle down.’ You have this silent conversation among the two of you, which is not the same in football because you’re beating the crap out of each other and yelling at each other.”
“You can’t trash talk, you can’t kick them under the table [in chess], you can’t check them to the floor, as much as I have wanted to slug my opponent, unfortunately it’s impossible.”
While getting an edge in the DE vs. OT chess match is what matters most for Weatherly, he thinks that seeing the bigger picture of football has kept him in the league. Understanding the full view of football strategy helps him anticipate how he’s going to be played.
“I think one of the reasons I stick around so long is because I know where I need to be and I’ve taken the extra step to know where everyone else has to be,” Weatherly said. “That helps you make more plays.”
He uses the example of reading a formation and understanding whether he’s going to get double teamed or not.
“That helps you be a better athlete, a better football player,” Weatherly said. “That aspect I really enjoy. There’s a lot of stuff that helps a lot in regards to coverages and pass rush that we don’t examine too deep because it can be a lot [to handle]…too much information slows people down but if you could grasp and understand it, it would help a lot.”
Along the wholistic lines of football and chess, there’s a lot of other connections. Rozman seemed to enjoy finding out that NFL coaches script their first 15 plays in the same way that chess masters use designed openings. And just like in NFL games, your designed opening can be thrown off by the second play, depending on how things go.
The comparison to halftime adjustments would be what chess players call the “middlegame.” That’s when the openings are all set up and it’s time to go off script, to use football speak.
There’s game planning and analytics, too. But it’s a little harder to grind the chess tape.
“If you’re playing a tournament they might broadcast it but if you play a tournament that doesn’t broadcast the games, that’s nine rounds of your actual opening preparation that you use that no one gets to see except the people at that tournament so chess has a lot of secretive stuff,” Rozman said. “Probably the best way to describe it is more like fighting. In fighting, you fight once every six months so you might really train certain techniques. [In football] every week you’re on TV and the stuff you’ve been working on is put to the test against somebody else.”
On the analytics side, chess engines have entirely changed the way the game is taught, similarly to how football teams go for it on fourth down more often and no longer draft running backs first overall. Rozman is able to analyze his decisions in a match the same way a coach could study if his punt was the right move or how his offense performed against a certain type of coverage.
“I had a game like that my first round of my last tournament where the first move out of my preparation my opponent made, I couldn’t remember that move in the notes,” Rozman said. “I’m sitting here going, ‘OK I know there’s two different plans based on other things that could have happened…I have to look three, four moves down the line and I’m like, I don’t know, it looks a little risky and then I go back to my hotel room and the computer is like, ‘Yeah, of course, why didn’t you do that?’ And I’m like, well it’s easier when I’m here.”
A lot of football coaches who punt on fourth-and-3 can probably relate.
What the two games have most in common is bigger than theory and schematics. It’s the drive to win that reaches obsessive levels. Top chess players start at age five or six and eat, sleep and breathe chess. They watch every tournament and study every new move the same way NFL players go home from the team facility and watch more film or coaches work eight days a week during football season.
If you have never sacked a quarterback and you have never checkmated an opponent, it’s hard to fully understand why anyone would want so badly to do these things. The satisfaction of both compels the people who chase them.
I asked Weatherly if the feeling is the same. I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t provide his entire answer:
“It’s the same feeling. It’s just a lot quicker… when you hit the move and you feel that he’s uneven and off balance, you just lean on it because it’s your go-to move, that feeling right before you contact [the offensive lineman] with your move is the same as you’re three moves away from checkmate.
They move a piece that doesn’t help them and it’s like, ‘Oh they don’t see this,’ and then you make your second move and they still don’t see it and it’s like, ‘It’s about to go down,’ and then they need to move this piece or it’s over and they move a third piece that doesn’t help their cause.
You finally pick up the piece and as it’s in mid-air, I feel like that moment is the same as sinking a long arm into that tackle and he’s on his heels waving his arms and I just came off the block and the quarterback is standing right there and he has no idea. You had a chance, nothing helps you, you made all the wrong decisions and now boom, checkmate slash sack.”
Yes, chess can be that intense.
Though it doesn’t have to be. It can also be a way to relax on the plane back from a football game or a way for a young person to train their mind to plan ahead and handle adversity or a way to connect with teammates.
“Highly recommend it,” Weatherly said. “It’s done a lot for me. Definitely pick it up.”
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Good read. Weatherly is interesting and I liked learning about the connections and lessons applied from his chess play…
If I remember correctly, doesn`t Weatherly also play something like 7 different musical instruments? Seems like a cool dude.