Don Shula passed away Monday morning at the age of 90. He leaves as accomplished of football coach as the NFL has ever seen with a record 328 career regular season wins and a two Super Bowl titles to his name.
Shula attended John Carroll University where he played football before getting drafted in 1951 and playing seven seasons in the NFL. From there he went to the college ranks to get a start in coaching.
Shula headed the defensive backs at the University of Virginia in 1958 before doing the same at Kentucky in 1959. From there he leaped to the NFL where he coached the Lions defensive backs for a year before running their defense in 1961 and ’62.
He would then become the youngest coach in the history of the NFL at the time when he got the head coach job of the Baltimore Colts in 1963 at 33 years old.
All Shula would do was lead the Colts to a 71-23-4 record in seven seasons, winning the NFL Championship in 1968 before suffering a stunning upset to Joe Namath and the New York Jets in Super Bowl III.
Shula was out of a job after the Colts went 8-5-1 but he quickly landed in Miami in 1970 where he’d stay until his retirement in 1995. His 328 career wins are the most all-time and he led the Dolphins to a pair of Super Bowl championships while getting there and falling three other times.
In reading about Don Shula today though I was left wondering an all-time sports “what if?”
This from a lengthy Gene Wojciehowski piece in 2007 on ESPN.com:
A Notre Dame alumnus, presumably speaking on behalf of the university, once approached Shula in the late ’60s, early ’70s about coaching the Fighting Irish. It had always been Shula’s life ambition to play and someday coach at Notre Dame.
“But after I got into the NFL, I didn’t want to go back into college coaching,” he says.
I had no idea about this ever being a thing before reading and researching about Shula a bit today. The timing is certainly interesting if you know anything about Notre Dame or Don Shula.
It wouldn’t have made sense for it to be late sixties considering Ara Parseghian nearly took Notre Dame to a title in 1964 before ultimately winning one in ’66 which put Ara on anything but a hot seat. After Parseghian left in 1974 then was Shula the first choice to replace Ara instead of Dan Devine?
It would be next to impossible to ever bring a more hyped up coach than Shula would have been in 1974. All he’d done in the three years previous was win the last two Super Bowls and appear in another. I also get why Shula couldn’t go to the college ranks after the start he’d had in his NFL run – it’d have been like if Bill Belichick left the New England Patriots for Notre Dame in 2005.
Yeah, not happening.
I think it’s safe to say things worked out more than alright for Shula afterwards, even if he never did win another Super Bowl. He’d appear in two more while heading the Dolphins and ultimately retire with more wins than anyone that ever coached the game.
And I know some people look back at the Dan Devine era as a disappointment but replacing a legend like Parseghian is a nearly impossible task. Devine only lasted six seasons at Notre Dame but went 53-16-1 in that time, winning a national championship in 1977.
RIP to a football legend.