Tag: Don Shula

Don Shula, who passed away peacefully at his home on Monday at the age of 90, was the winningest coach in NFL history. Over 33 seasons with the Baltimore Colts and Miami Dolphins, he amassed a 328-156-6 record, and his 19 postseason wins ranks third in NFL annals behind only Bill Belichick and Tom Landry.

​”Don Shula will always be remembered as one of the greatest coaches and contributors in the history of our game,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement. “He made an extraordinarily positive impact on so many lives. The winningest coach in NFL history and the only one to lead a team to a perfect season, Coach Shula lived an unparalleled football life. As a player, Hall of Fame coach, and long-time member and co-chair of the NFL Competition Committee, he was a remarkable teacher and mentor who for decades inspired excellence and exemplified integrity. His iconic legacy will endure through his family and continue to inspire generations to come. We extend our heartfelt sympathy to Don’s wife Mary Anne along to his children Dave, Donna, Sharon and Mike, the Shula family, and the Dolphins organization.”

But if you want to know how highly a coach is really regarded, you ask other great coaches about him. Safe to say, Shula led the pack in that regard.

“Coach Shula really set the standard for all of us.”

Bill Belichick remembers a fellow coaching legend. 🙏 pic.twitter.com/NRYwXpjW7U

— NFL (@NFL) May 4, 2020

To maintain a winning culture through multiple decades requires a great many things. You have to know how to inspire. You have to be a great teacher. You have to know when to turn over your rosters before your rosters do it to you. Shula was a master of all of these things, but perhaps the most undertold part of his story is his schematic flexibility through time. Shula started his coaching career as the ultimate distillation of the NFL’s old-school approach in the 1960s, and ended it as one of the ultimate distillations of the new-school, bombs-away approach to the multiple, explosive, and prolific passing games of the 1980s and 1990s.

On the occasion of Shula’s passing, here’s a look at how Shula built one kind of amazing team, and then went about building a very different version.

Perfection through fundamentals

“Spirit is built on reality.” — Larry Csonka

Shula was a winner for a long time before he was recognized as such. He was a defensive back for the Cleveland Browns, Baltimore Colts, and Washington Redskins from 1951 through 1957, racking up 21 interceptions in 73 games, before starting his coaching career at the Universities of Virginia and Kentucky in the late 1950s, and moving up to the NFL as the Detroit Lions’ defensive coordinator in 1962, The Colts hired him as their head man in 1963, and Shula built one of the best defenses of all time in Baltimore – the 1968 Colts defense was the lead dog on a team that went 13-1 in the regular season and destroyed the Browns, the only team to beat the Colts in the regular season, in the 1968 NFL championship game. Shula’s Colts were double-digit favorites to take apart the New York Jets in Super Bowl III, but everyone remotely familiar with NFL history knows how that turned out – the Jets carried the first win for the American Football League by a 16-7 margin, and the Colts were on the wrong side of what was then the biggest upset in sports history.

1969 showed the cracks that loss caused. Baltimore managed just eight wins and missed the playoffs; moreover, Shula found it tougher and tougher to get his message across. Before the 1970 season, Miami Dolphins owner Joe Robbie contacted the Colts about acquiring Shula, a process that ended with Shula moving to Miami, and the Dolphins penalized their 1970 first-round pick for violating the NFL’s tampering rules. The negotiations were conducted before and after the NFL/AFL merger, which is the only reason the NFL’s tampering rules applied; otherwise, the NFL would have had no say in the matter. The Colts took running back Don McCauley with that extra first-rounder in 1971; McCauley ran for 2,627 yards and scored 40 touchdowns during his 11-year career. Shula won 257 regular-season games and 17 postseason games for the Dolphins over 26 years. It’s safe to say the Dolphins got the better end of that deal.

Shula inherited a fine Miami team in many respects, especially for a young franchise that did not benefit from the league’s later adjustments to benefit expansion franchises – ask the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who lost their first 26 games in the 1976 and 1977 seasons. Shula, through the auspices of Joe Thomas, the general manager from 1965 through 1971, walked in the door for that 1970 season with quarterback Bob Griese, running backs Larry Csonka, Jim Kiick and Eugene “Mercury” Morris, offensive linemen Larry Little and Norm Evans, defensive tackle Manny Fernandez, linebacker Nick Buoniconti, and safety Dick Anderson as starters. The 1970 draft brought defensive backs Jake Scott, Curtis Johnson, and tight end Jim Mandich. Through management of the existing roster and a real knack for picking up otherwise jettisoned players from around the league (the 1970 trade with the Cleveland Browns for receiver Paul Warfield was particularly lopsided in Miami’s favor), Shula’s Dolphins went 10-4 and lost to the Oakland Raiders in the first AFC divisional playoffs, a huge improvement from 1969’s 3-10-1 mark. In 1971, Miami went 10-3-1, and lost Super Bowl VI to the Dallas Cowboys, 24-3. It was a second Super Bowl humiliation for Shula, who told his team after the game that they never wanted to feel like that again. He started the 1972 season, according to Csonka and several other players, by predicting a perfect 17-0 season – which, of course, actually happened.

Shula’s developmental teams, and the perfect team that followed, were typical of early 1970s teams in that Griese only threw a lot when he had to, the run game was the fulcrum of the offense, and the defense, run by Bill Arnsparger, was a combination of man and zone coverage that was more mistake-proof than flashy at any time. Shula was a football fundamentalist above all, and he drilled that into his new charges from Day One. Shula claimed to be about as subtle as a punch in the mouth, and that’s how he ran things. While former head coach George Wilson let things go easy, Shula had his guys practicing four times a day – a move that would probably cause open player revolt in the modern era. Shula created a culture of accountability and toughness the Dolphins hadn’t known before, and that combined with the talent on board to create the first great dynasty of the 1970s.

Arnsparger’s “No-Name Defense” was recognized as the key to Miami’s success, but the true base of the offenses in Shula’s early Miami years was an offensive line that ranked among the best in NFL history, and the influence blocking that set things up for Csonka, Kiick, and Morris. Perhaps the finest distillation of that strategy came in Miami’s 24-7 win over the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl VIII – Shula’s second straight Super Bowl win, following the 14-7 victory in Super Bowl VII over the Washington Redskins, and with a 1973 team that many believe was better than the ’72 version, despite the fact that they lost two games that year. The Vikings’ Purple People Eaters defense was historically great, especially along a defensive line that featured ends Jim Marshall and Carl Eller, and tackle Alan Page. It was a ruthlessly fast and powerful front that forced opposing lines into a seemingly unsolvable problem — how can you deal with demon speed and elite leverage at the same time?

Shula, armed with a terrifically schooled bunch of blockers, decided to use the Vikings’ aggressiveness against them—much like the Kansas City Chiefs had done in Super Bowl IV. Shula had faced more than enough of that idea in his last Super Bowl loss, when the Cowboys riddled a younger and less disciplined Dolphins defense for 252 yards on the ground using traps and counters and draws in Super Bowl VI. The next year, against the Redskins, Miami’s defense exhibited correct gap control and angular assignments to crush Washington’s cut-back run game, and Brown gained just 72 yards on 22 carries. Now, it was the offense’s turn to take a great defense to the woodshed with complex blocking concepts that represented a sea change forward from the old Packer Power Sweep.

Shula had implemented these run schemes before, but never to this level of effectiveness.

“Going into Super Bowl VIII against the Vikings, we felt that one of the critical areas of the ballgame would be the ability of our offensive line to handle Minnesota’s great defensive line,” Shula told NFL Films in the game’s highlight reel.

“They predicate everything on coming off the ball as fast as they possibly can,” he said. “We felt that we were going to be able to take advantage of this tremendous quickness by cross-blocking.”

“On our cross-block, our left tackle Wayne Moore, comes down hard on Alan Page.”

“If [Page] is sliding to the inside, he takes himself out of the play. If he’s sliding to the outside, he’s coming right into the area that [left tackle] Wayne Moore is blocking down, and this nullifies his outside slant. [Left guard Bob] Kuechenberg, on this play, lets Wayne Moore go first, and then he pulls outside and blocks out on their defensive end (Jim Marshall, #70). The play was very effective, and it’s only because the cross-block was the type of blocking that should be used against these hard-charging defensive linemen.”

Throughout all these plays, the theory was not only that Minnesota’s defensive line could be negated by using its speed against it, though – that was just one more common constraint. Shula and his staff also devised ways in which the veteran acumen of the Purple People Eaters could be used as a net disadvantage for the opponent.

“There were two plays we had in the game to take advantage of the experience Carl Eller and Jim Marshall. Eller (No. 81) and Marshall have been playing so long, every time they read the blocking pattern of the offensive line, they react instinctively to this blocking pattern. The play starts out as a trap on the defensive end (Eller), and when the defensive end reads and reacts tough to the inside, the ballcarrier, instead of cutting inside, continues to the outside. We made everything look like it was the inside trap play, and when Eller closed to the inside, we still were able to get the ball outside to Mercury Morris, and it was a very effective play.”

“Another way we were able to make the defensive line hesitate was misdirection. The offensive linemen would pull in one direction, and the backs start out like they’re going in that direction, and then, Larry Csonka comes back with the football against the flow.”

Misdirection was a more common thing – Csonka running against the tide of the line when holes opened up with the flow — but it worked just as well, as did most concepts with a Miami offensive line that should not have been as great as it was. Left tackle Wayne Moore was an undrafted player out of Furman. Left guard Bob Kuechenberg was a cast-off from the Eagles who had to find his way with the Chicago Owls of the Continental Football League before Shula came calling. Center Jim Langer was another undrafted player (from another smaller school, South Dakota State). Right guard Larry Little was a free agent who was signed by the Chargers and then traded to Miami. And right tackle Norm Evans was a fourteenth-round pick of the Houston Oilers in 1965, who was taken by Miami in the 1966 expansion draft. Little became a Hall-of-Famer, while Langer and Kuechenberg made six Pro Bowls. As Little said years later, it was about working together, about fundamentals, and about domination. Line coach Monte Clark was Shula’s voice among the front five.

“He was such a technician, a guy who was hung up on details,” Little said. “He stressed the importance of repetition. Shula and Clark were sticklers for details. We would be in practice working on drills, and Shula would be on the other side of the field. You didn’t think he was watching you, but he was. He would holler out your name from one end of the field to the other – ‘Hey, you’re not doing that right!’ The man was a perfectionist, and he embedded in our minds that we ought to strive for perfection.”

And in the second half of Super Bowl VIII, with the Vikings looking for all manner of misdirection, the Dolphins reverted to a brutal man-on-man blocking strategy. Minnesota never knew what hit it – figuratively or literally – and the Dolphins won, 24-7. It was as decisive a signature win as Dallas’ had been over the Dolphins two years before.

“I have never seen a more dominating team than the Miami Dolphins,” Eller said after the game. “All afternoon, I had the feeling that the outcome had already been decreed on high before we even took the field. It seemed I could hear Scottish bagpipes in the distance, keeping time as they came after us, wave after wave – gaining ground so easily, they seemed to be floating in suspended animation.”

Air Marino

Shula never won another Super Bowl after his team decimated the Vikings, though he did come close. The 1982 Dolphins lost Super Bowl XVII to the Redskins, 27-17, with David Woodley and Don Strock (the combination then known as “Woodstrock”) at quarterback. It wasn’t enough, and Shula knew it. So, with the 27th overall pick in the 1983 draft, the Dolphins managed to select Dan Marino out of Pitt. As legendary NFL Films voiceover man John Facenda often intoned in his work, “It was a wise decision.”

Marino gave Shula a flexibility in the passing game he’d never had before. Yes, Griese was talented, but Marino came into the NFL with a release quickness and easy arm strength that brought peak Joe Namath to mind. Marino threw 20 touchdowns to six interceptions in his rookie season, and then started to tear the league to bits in 1984. That’s when he threw for 5,084 yards, 48 touchdowns, and just 17 interceptions, and the dynamic receiver duo of Mark Clayton and Mark Duper each gained over 1,000 yards — an unusual statistical benchmark at the time.

Now, instead of punching his opponents in the mouth, Shula had the quarterback who could demolish them through the air. The Dolphins came at enemy defenses with a dizzying array of route combinations and option routes, basing a great deal of their passing game on the actions of the defense. For example, the “Curl Go” concept had the receiver releasing straight ahead off the snap, and breaking to the curl route after 12-13 yards. If the defensive back was looking to gain inside position, the receiver would run the go (vertical) route off the curl fake. If the defender was lined up to take outside position, the receiver would run the go route off a comeback move.

It was as advanced a passing attack as was in the NFL at the time, rivaling Bill Walsh’s West Coast offense and Don Coryell’s Air Coryell passing game. The same coach who had once directed Griese to throw just eight passes in Super Bowl VIII was now dazzling opponents with stuff like this “Z Smash” stuff:

It was a long way from the ground attacks of the past — rockets in the air on the page in a comparative sense — but that was the point. Shula had the staff and the personnel to build the most prolific passing game of his era, and he wasn’t going to let his previous schematic preferences get in the way of that.

Still, the 1984 Dolphins ran into the only superior force in the NFL that season — Walsh’s 49ers. Super Bowl XIX matched the teams with the most wins in a season (18 for San Francisco, 16 for Miami, including the playoffs leading up to the Super Bowl), and Walsh, though Joe Montana, was able to exploit Miami’s defensive issues that had been hidden by Marino’s brilliance.

Moreover, San Francisco’s defensive staff had a plan for Marino and his undersized receivers — beat them off the line of scrimmage with aggressive coverage, and make them earn every yard they made.

“I think the coverage of their receivers was closer, and tighter, and then there was the pass rush.” Walsh said the day after the win, via Jenny Kellner of the Miami News. “Even if we didn’t get to Marino, the pressure was there. It was a lot of hard, concentrated practice.”

Marino completed 29 of 50 passes for 318 yards, one touchdown, and two interceptions in the 38-16 loss. But he led the NFL in passing yards and passing touchdowns in each of the next two seasons as well, and eventually became the third quarterback Shula coached, along with Bob Griese and Johnny Unitas, to be enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Shula himself got his ticket to Canton in 1997, and it was obviously well-deserved. Not only was Don Shula one of the greatest coaches in NFL history; he was also one of the most schematically versatile and curious. And that, as much as anything, should be his legacy.

(This article contains excerpts from the book “The Genius of Desperation,” used by permission, courtesy of Triumph Books Diagrams bv Lindsey Schauer).