Longtime Miami Dolphins coach Don Shula, who died in May, used to call the area between the 20-yard line and the goal line the “green zone” because that was where all the money was made in professional football.
Former BYU coach Bronco Mendenhall often referred to it as the “blue zone,” for reasons that were obvious to anyone familiar with the BYU-Utah rivalry.
Now the scoring territory is almost universally called the “red zone,” and former Washington coach Joe Gibbs gets most of the credit for introducing that term, a military phrase for decades, to the football lexicon in 1982.