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Our topic today for the NFL 100 post is a look at highly successful defensive coaches, or coordinators as they’ve come to be known today, who never quite succeeded when given their opportunity to become head coaches. Some of the greatest defensive minds went on to make it big as head men, including Tom Landry, Don Shula, Chuck Noll, George Allen and arguably the greatest of all time, Bill Belichick. “The Hoodie” almost made the list of failures after his brief tenure in Cleveland ended disastrously, but he was put in a bad situation there with owner Art Modell announcing he was moving the team to Baltimore. Belichick landed on his feet in New England and to this day is a highly successful head coach. So what coaches who had Hall of Fame worthy careers as defensive assistants never quite made the leap to success as top men? The list is long. We’ll start with Joel Collier. He was a bespectacled, mild mannered assistant under Lou Saban with the AFL’s Buffalo Bills in the 1960s and later guided the Denver Broncos “Orange Crush” defense to a Super Bowl. The Bills won back-to-back AFL titles in 1964 and ’65, mostly on the strength of their defense, the best in the AFL’s 10 year existence. He got a shot at the top job in Buffalo after Saban abruptly quit but failed miserably. When Don Shula’s Miami Dolphins were dominating the NFL in the early 1970s, one of the main components of their success was the play of their “No Name” defense, which suffocated opponents and got its’ nickname due to the fact that there were no star players on the unit. The man who coached that stifling defense was Bill Arnsparger. His success earned him the opportunity to be the head coach of the New York Giants, but in three years at the helm there, his teams posted a dismal 7-28 record and after being fired he returned to the Dolphins to work under Shula. He spent the next eight years there overseeing a defense that acquired another nickname, the “Killer B’s” due to many members of that unit having names that began with the letter B.

Bill Arnsparger and The Killer B’s

When the Pittsburgh Steelers were dominating the NFL in the 1970s, winning 4 Super Bowls, the one constant that drove that team was it’s defense, aptly known as “The Steel Curtain”. Even though their head coach, Noll, came from a defensive background, it was widely accepted that the man who orchestrated that unit was defensive coordinator Bud Carson. He was the coordinator for the team’s defense for the first 2 of the championships, then moved on to become D-coordinator for the Rams, Colts, Chiefs and Jets, all while waiting patiently for a shot at a top job. His chance finally came when Modell hired him to coach the Browns in 1989. He did well his first year as the Browns advanced to the AFC Championship game, only to lose to the John Elway-led Denver Broncos. Modell didn’t show him any patience, however. Carson was fired midway through the next season after the Browns started out 2-7. Although his overall coaching mark for the year and a half he got was slightly under .500, it’s tough to say that Carson was a failure. Unlike Belichick in the 1990s, he never got the chance to prove himself in another job. We’ll treat our next subject on this topic as a tandem. It’s the father/son duo of Buddy and Rex Ryan. Buddy was the coordinator of one of the most prolific defenses in NFL history, the 1985 Chicago Bears. The success of his “46 defense” got him a job as head man in Philadelphia, where he lasted five seasons. Rex Ryan was coordinator of the Baltimore Ravens defense that was dominant for years and helped win the Super Bowl following the 2000 season. Rex eventually parlayed his performance into head coaching jobs with the Jets and Bills. Unfortunately, neither of the Ryans was ever able to raise his teams above the level of mediocrity when given the chance to run the whole show.

Buddy Ryan was well loved by his Bears’ defensive unit

There is one coach who was recently elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame mainly for his work as a long-time defensive coordinator – Dick LeBeau. Actually, he deserved Hall consideration for his playing career alone, as he played 14 seasons and was a top cornerback. His story is a little different than the men we previously featured. He was defensive coordinator for the Cincinnati Bengals in 2000 but was thrust into the job of interim head coach when Bruce Coslet resigned. He held the job until 2002 but a paltry 12-33 record got him axed. He returned to being a D-coordinator, for the Steelers, and went on to have tremendous success. He never got another shot at being a head coach, but he may have been content to “stay in his lane” as a successful assistant. One name that shouldn’t really be mentioned here is Wade Phillips. He has followed the same path as the others on the list, having “failed” as a head coach but having great success as a defensive coordinator, to this day in fact, as he is currently guiding the Los Angeles Rams’ defense. He has been the head man for 5 different teams in interim and permanent status, but in my mind never really was shown much patience by any of the owners he worked for. His overall record as a head coach is 83-69, a pretty healthy winning percentage. Dom Capers has been a highly successful defensive coach over the years, but hasn’t had success when given a chance to be the head coach. Part of the reason for that is that his only two opportunities came with expansion franchises. Others who have not taken advantage of head coaching opportunities but who excelled as defensive assistants are Romeo Crennel, a Belichick disciple, Rod Marinelli, Jim Schwartz and Gregg Williams. The art of hiring a top head coach is something NFL owners over the years have failed at many times, and in some ways the NFL over 100 years was bound to have more failure than success among its’ teams. The men mentioned in this article, for certain, should be remembered more for the innovation and success they have brought to the game rather than their failure, which is really more of a failure on their owners’ part than theirs.

In celebrating the first 100 years of the National Football League, there are men and women who stand above the rest for their contributions to making the game great. There are none who stand any taller than Vince Lombardi, who was overlooked for coaching opportunities in the NFL despite a successful run as the top offensive coach for the New York Giants in the 1950s. He worked as a high school coach and as a college assistant at Fordham and West Point before getting his NFL opportunity with the Giants, whose top defensive assistant at the time was Tom Landry. Those 2 legends, along with head coach Jim Lee Howell, turned the Giant franchise into winners as they reached a pair of title games and won the title in 1956. Howell readily acknowledged the talents of his two top assistants, jokingly saying that his main job was “to make sure the footballs had air in them.” Despite the success, Lombardi was passed over for head coaching jobs, both in college and the pros, and he feared that his Italian-American heritage was being used against him in his failure to land a head coaching position. Finally, in 1959, the Green Bay Packers hired him as their new head man. The team was coming off of a one-win season and was a laughingstock in the league. Lombardi immediately turned around the team’s fortunes. They finished 7-5 and Lombardi was named Coach of The Year. His success was only beginning, however. The Packers won the Western Division title in 1960 and lost a heartbreaker to the Philadelphia Eagles in the championship game. The Packers were stopped just short of the goal line on the game’s final play, costing them the win. In the locker room afterwards, the coach told his team “This will never happen again. You will never lose another championship game.” He was true to his word, as that loss was the only postseason defeat his Packer teams would suffer. They went on to win 5 titles in the next 7 years, including wins in the first 2 Super Bowls.

Lombardi and his Packers celebrate NFL title

Lombardi stepped down as Packers’ head coach after the second Super Bowl win and stayed on as the team’s general manager for a year, but still had a yearning to coach, so he left the organization to become head coach of the Washington Redskins in 1969. He turned the Washington franchise around in his only season coaching there as they finished 7-5-2 for their first winning season in 14 years. Lombardi’s final numbers as a head coach were astonishing – no losing seasons, the 5 championships and an overall 105-35-6 record, including a 9-1 mark in postseason games. Unfortunately Lombardi’s tenure in Washington would only last that single season. After falling ill, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and passed away shortly after at the age of 57. On his deathbed, he told a visiting priest that he did not fear dying but regretted that he had not accomplished more in his life. The football world couldn’t have disagreed more with that sentiment. He was enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame a year after his sudden death and the trophy awarded to the winner of the Super Bowl each year was named in his honor.

Vince Lombardi Trophy

Lombardi is a giant of the game for more reasons than just winning. He was a pioneer in improving race relations and treating black players as equals, and even embraced gay players. He always said he didn’t see his players as black or white, but only “Packer green”. One former black player, noting Lombardi’s disciplinary style, once jokingly said that the coach “treated us all equally….like dogs.” His reputation as a taskmaster wasn’t entirely true. He was a master at teaching the game, having been a teacher before getting into coaching. He instituted policies in Green Bay that insisted that the team only stay at hotels that treated his players equally, would make any establishment that was prejudiced against any of his players off-limits to his entire team and made crystal clear to his players that any of them who exhibited prejudice of any kind against another player would be thrown off the team. Some of Lombardi’s critics, as few as they are, have said that his accomplishments are tainted because his teams were loaded with future Hall of Famers. That argument doesn’t hold water when you consider that most of those players were already on the Packer roster before Lombardi arrived, and were underachieving on a losing team. Lombardi molded them into Hall of Famers. One other factor that made the coach an all-time great was his integrity. He was so admired for his upstanding character that in the 1960s Richard Nixon tried to recruit him to be his vice presidential running mate. Lombardi, being a staunch Kennedy Democrat, politely declined. His commitment to integrity is a lesson some modern day coaches could learn from.

Vince Lombardi’s quote about integrity

On this week’s NFL schedule of games, there is a contest to be played between the Los Angeles Chargers and Tennessee Titans. For our weekly Throwback Thursday feature, we settled on a game played between these two franchises when the Chargers were still in San Diego and the Titans were located in Houston as the Oilers. It was September 15, the opening day of the 1974 season and coach Tommy Prothro’s Chargers were visiting Houston’s Astrodome for a game against the Oilers, who were coached at the time by Sid Gillman. Gillman, of course, led the San Diego franchise to huge success in their American Football League years in the 1960s, and this was his first chance to take on the team that had let him go after the 1970 season. Gillman would hardly recognize the Charger team that came into the Astrodome to play that day. His star players from the AFL days like John Hadl, Paul Lowe, Keith Lincoln, Lance Alworth, Dave Kocourek, Ernie Ladd and Ron Mix were all either retired or dispersed across the league finishing out their careers with other teams.

Whether there was any sense of revenge or not, Gillman’s Oilers would take care of their coach on this day, as they ground out a 21-14 win over San Diego. The Oilers featured a balanced attack instead of Gillman’s usual vertical passing game. Their young quarterback, Lynn Dickey, was efficient, spreading the ball around among 6 different receivers. Ronnie Coleman was the bulwark of the running game, gaining 123 yards on 21 carries, although George Amundson stole his thunder by scoring 2 short rushing touchdowns and catching an 8 yard throw from Dickey to account for all of Houston’s scoring. Cid Edwards had 100 yards rushing for San Diego and Glen Bonner scored on a short TD run, while the other Charger touchdown came on a pass from the team’s young signal caller, Dan Fouts, to one of the few Charger players Gillman might recognize from his days as the team’s coach, receiver Gary Garrison. The Oilers, who had finished 1-13 the previous year, improved to 7-7 on the season under Gillman, but the future Hall of Famer stepped down to give his hand-picked choice as his replacement, Bum Phillips, a chance to take over in 1975. Prothro’s Chargers staggered to a 5-9 record and the franchise never worked their way out of mediocrity under his leadership. They finally fired him in 1978 and brought on Don Coryell, who would bring the team back to a level of respectability.

Oilers’ 1974 media guide prominently featured the bow-tie wearing Gillman