Don Shula ‘retired’ too soon — Jimmy Johnson was not as good
Don Shula won a record 347 NFL games, but he should have won more. When he retired on his 66th birthday with a year remaining on his contract with the Miami Dolphins, he was still as fine a football coach as there was. He was 9-7 and made the playoffs in his final season, when Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga told him to make changes in his staff.
Shula was loyal to a fault. His staff could have used an infusion of young blood, but no one was going to force him to fire a friend. Huizenga was adamant because he thought the team could do better with Jimmy Johnson, who’d won two Super Bowls for Dallas before fleeing Jerry Jones.
Huizenga turned out to be wrong. Johnson followed Shula’s 9-7 with 8-8 and was never better than 10-6 in four years in Miami. Johnson later said he never should have tried to succeed Don Shula, who died this week at 90.
Some will argue that Vince Lombardi was a better coach, or Bill Walsh or Bill Belichick or Paul Brown. But none were more resourceful than Shula. He started a backup quarterback in 68 games and won 49. His “No-Name Defense” produced two Super Bowl champions and several All-Pros.
In the 1965 NFL Championship Game against Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers, Shula’s Baltimore Colts were without their Hall of Fame quarterback, John Unitas, and his esteemed backup, Earl Morrall. But the Colts took the game to overtime, led by a hastily-converted, none too fast running back, Tom Matte.
Shula, who became a head coach at 33, is best remembered for the only undefeated team in NFL history, the 1972 Dolphins. That was no fluke. His 1968 Colts would have been 14-0 had it not been for the injury-impaired Unitas throwing three interceptions and just one completion in a loss to Cleveland.
Those Colts lost to the New York Jets in Super Bowl III, which exposed one of Shula’s few weaknesses. His greatness was in thorough preparation, not in creatively scheming each opponent.
I once interviewed Joe Namath about his famous “guarantee” of victory over Baltimore. “The reason I was so sure we’d win,” he said, “is that from studying the film I knew what they were going to do on every play. They were so confident in their blitzes that they didn’t try to disguise them.”
Shula’s postseason record was a modest 19-17; he was 2-4 in Super Bowls. One of his quarterbacks, Don Strock, said, “As great as he was at preparing a team throughout the week, he was pretty average as a game-day coach.”
Players sometimes described Shula as “flustered” on the sidelines, when a deluge of information must be processed in a second or two. We see this dilemma with Bill O’Brien of the Houston Texans. It was a problem for Andy Reid until recent years when he learned to lean more on his coordinators for crunch-time decisions.
Shula was a tremendous motivator. He had command presence, due in part to a wide chin that jutted like the prow of a ship. He seemed taller than his listed height of 5-11.
Like Lombardi, he was very tough, quick to issue fines. Shula teams had few penalties or turnovers.
Precision resulted from grueling practices: 2½ hours in South Florida heat and humidity. He would pause the action if he saw a guard’s feet five inches farther apart than he wanted.
He summoned many players into his office for a tongue-lashing. But they knew he cared deeply about them and was fair with his criticisms. He maintained lifelong friendships with many, treating them to dinners at fine restaurants he owned and managed in his retirement years.
Shula was a devout Christian, attended Mass every morning. He was never accused of breaking rules – unlike Belichick, who he renamed “Belicheat,” perhaps with a trace of envy for the Super Bowl king.
Committed though he was to the rulebook, Shula would take advantage of a loophole. The day before the 1982 AFC Championship Game, a monsoon swept through Miami. Obviously the field should be covered, but the rulebook didn’t require it. So Shula kept the tarp rolled up. He wanted a mud pit to bog down the Jets’ passing game. With his receivers sliding and slipping, Richard Todd threw five interceptions.
I got to know Shula a little bit covering the Dolphins for the Orlando Sentinel. He was pleasant and responsive, generous with his time. Especially after games, when he’d invite the Florida reporters (but not the outsiders) into a large room and would answer questions for an hour and more. More than most of his contemporaries he understood the importance of media relations.
What impressed me most was his flexibility, his willingness to keep learning and changing. Late in his career, he told me: “I’ve always wanted to be on the cutting edge.”
It’s long been conventional wisdom that an NFL team cannot win with two quarterbacks splitting time. But Shula in the early ‘80s made the playoffs four consecutive years with Strock, a drop-back passer, in a timeshare with David Woodley, a running quarterback. The improbable hybrid was dubbed “WoodStrock.”
Most coaches would not want to merge two radically different offensive systems. They’d say it takes up too much time. But Shula was all about having time: Make the opponents work harder than they want.
“He went from the running game and play-action to Dan Marino,” Strock pointed out. “He wanted to run the football, but he knew what he had in Marino. We became a team that threw the football. He could change with the times.”
I watched a couple of other coaching legends, Tom Landry and Chuck Noll, who were unable to do that. They faded in their twilight years because they couldn’t pull away from what had worked in the past. Years after the NFL had caught up to Landry’s Flex Defense, he refused to abandon it, causing much frustration on the Dallas Cowboys’ defensive staff.
Even sadder was Noll, standing alone on the Pittsburgh Steelers’ sideline, no longer calling his 1970s plays for a passing game that had passed him by.
As it does to everyone, Time eventually conquered Don Shula, but he fought it off better than anyone else I’ve ever seen.
