Trojans Wire staff writer Andy Patton brought you the news over the weekend that Dick Coury, John McKay’s defensive coordinator on the 1967 USC football national championship team, died at age 90.
Andy’s news report chronicles the many stops Coury made in his coaching career, so we’re not going to rehash the many coaching stops he made. The focus of this particular piece is on the moment of his career when he was introduced to a larger national audience.
Ask a football fan over 50 years old who Dick Coury is. Try this with your dad or grandfather if he is an ardent football watcher, pro and college.
If your dad or grandpa is a USC fan, okay, they’ll remember him for what he did on the 1967 national championship team, and also for his tenure as Mater Dei’s head coach before moving to USC. If your dad or grandfather isn’t from Los Angeles, the majority answer is almost certainly going to be that Coury was an assistant to Dick Vermeil on the 1980 NFC champion Philadelphia Eagles, who made the franchise’s first Super Bowl appearance in SB XV against the Oakland Raiders.
If you don’t remember Coury through his Mater Dei or USC identities, chances are you and the older men in your family remember Coury through one moment: Super Bowl XV, and more precisely, the NFL Films half-hour documentary on the game, which it produces after every Super Bowl.
If you are a younger football fan (let’s say under 30 years old), you need to realize that in January of 1981, ESPN was juuuuuuuust starting out as a sports cable network. It had not begun to gain critical mass in the American sports fan’s consciousness. This was still a time when American sports fans listened to baseball on the radio at night and read the newspaper for box scores in the morning or early-afternoon editions of the paper. WFAN in New York — the first all-sports radio station in the United States — was still six years away from coming into existence. Cable television was just getting off the ground. American television news was still the three major networks and little else, with CNN — like ESPN — being in its infancy.
At this time, NFL Films was still riding high as the juggernaut publicity and promotional wing of the NFL. NFL Films was an essential ingredient in the growth of professional football as a commercial and cultural force in America. The work of the Sabols — father Ed and son Steve — created remarkable football cinematography. Sam Spence provided the iconic musical scores. John Facenda — “The Voice of God” — delivered his signature goosebump-producing narration. If you were on NFL Films, you achieved a certain degree of national recognition. People noticed.
If you received the NFL Films treatment at the Super Bowl, that recognition became exponentially larger.
So it was for Dick Coury at Super Bowl XV in 1981.
Even though Coury was just a wide receiver coach for Dick Vermeil on the 1980 Eagles, he figured prominently in the SB XV documentary produced by NFL Films. He appears at several points in this film, and he is even given the honor of a caption, which NFL Films did not regularly do for its Super Bowl films. He appears at 3:50, 6:10, and 19:40 in the video below, with the caption occurring at 3:50:
Within Los Angeles, Dick Coury is known as a Mater Dei legend who then helped USC win a national title.
Everywhere else in the United States — certainly outside the state of California — Dick Coury is known by your father or grandfather as “the Eagles assistant coach NFL Films showed in Super Bowl XV.”
Rest in peace, Dick Coury. Your place in the NFL Films documentary on Super Bowl XV will give you an eternal place in football history and the sports culture of the United States.