3. Don Coryell
Regular-season record: 111-83-1
Postseason record: 3-6
St. Louis Cardinals, 1973-1977
San Diego Chargers, 1978-1986
Before his NFL career got started, Coryell spent 12 years at San Diego State, perfecting his passing concepts and coaching everyone from Brian Sipe to Haven Moses to Issac Curtis to Fred Dryer to Carl Weathers — who you know as the guy who played Apollo Creed. The St. Louis Cardinals, who had not made a postseason since the 1948 NFL Championship game, hired Coryell in 1973 to turn things around. By his second season, Coryell had turned the Cardinals into a force, with a 10-4 record, an NFC East title, and a balanced offense that relied on the run more than people may have thought. St. Louis upped the ante in 1975 with an 11-5 record, but the Cards couldn’t advance past the divisional round in either season. Cost-cutting by owner Bill Bidwill left Coryell in an untenable situation, which he resolved by moving back to San Diego and coaching the Chargers five games into the 1978 season.
1-4 when he took the job, the ’78 Chargers rolled off eight straight wins and finished 9-7, the franchise’s first winning season since 1969. And from 1980 through 1983, the Chargers led the NFL in points scored — a four-straight feat that has never been equaled in NFL history. But again, Coryell was dealing with a mercurial owner in Gene Klein, and it was Klein’s decision to start offloading players he couldn’t re-sign that stopped Coryell short. Losing pass-rusher Fred Dean, now in the Hall of Fame, might have kept the Chargers out of the Super Bowl in multiple seasons, and Dean was a force multiplier for the 1981 49ers, who beat the Bengals in Super Bowl XVI after the Bengals beat the Chargers in an AFC Championship game in Cincinnati that featured arctic wind chills and negated Coryell’s offense. Coryell died in 2010 at age 85, and his omission from the Pro Football Hall of Fame remains the institution’s most glaring embarrassment.