Vermeil walks a Hall that should have room for Coryell
Dick Vermeil (pictured) spent 24 minutes Saturday thanking everyone in Canton, Ohio except President William McKinley, who is buried there.
Any coach or player who had crossed his serpentine path to the Pro Football Hall of Fame got a mention. At the end, Vermeil finally turned to his family, explaining that he was afraid he would cement his reputation for disorderly sobbing if he had called them out first. He did crack briefly when he introduced Carol, his wife of 66 years.
What happened next was only perfect. All around the audience, Vermeil’s people rose to give Carol an ovation. All coaches’ wives deserve combat pay, but Carol might have deserved four stars on her sleeve, plus a statue. She leads the list of Vermeil’s loyalists, those who would follow him to Philadelphia, St. Louis, Kansas City and the River Styx just to protect him, and maybe protect those from him.
Carol took care of the house while Vermeil tried to break all coaching records for hours worked. With the Eagles he spent most nights at the office, looking at video for a false step, an involuntary twitch, a bad habit that might give them a better chance. Vermeil was oblivious to the outside world and anything else that might prevent a victory, and the 1980 Eagles, most of whom should have bought a ticket to get into a Super Bowl, beat Dallas in the NFC Championship Game. Then he coached the 1999 Rams, with Kurt Warner walking in from the Arena League, to a Super Bowl win over Tennessee.
It is true that a mischievous sportswriter asked Vermeil, in August of ‘81, what he thought about the Royal Wedding, Charles and Diana. You know, it had been in all the papers. Vermeil had no idea what the guy was talking about.
It is also true that a Rolling Stones concert chased the Eagles off their John F. Kennedy Stadium practice field. Vermeil said the Eagles would compensate somehow. Then he was asked if he knew who the Rolling Stones were.
“Sure,” he said. “I mean, I’ve never heard any of their music (!) but my son is a big fan. In fact, he subscribes to that magazine they put out, you know, that Rolling Stones magazine.”
In 1982 there was a players’ strike and Vermeil was pretty much around the bend. Remember, he’s from Northern California and he spent most daylight hours in Philly holed up in his office, so he wasn’t familiar with decidious trees. One day Carol persuaded Dick to take a Sunday drive down Lancaster Avenue, near the Main Line. Dick looked out the window and asked why the leaves on the trees were so yellow an red. Carol said, “Dick, they do that every year.” At the end of the season, Vermeil quit the Eagles, becoming one of the first and most famous victims of “burnout.”
That story has been repeated so often that I’m going to pretend it’s true even if it’s not. It certainly would not be out of character.
In a day when NFL players blanch over the suggestion that they should play preseason games (and they’re right to do so), Vermeil would not survive. Yet he did adjust, a bit, to the Rams and then later the Chiefs, after he’d spent 14 years as a TV analyst and, of course, pulled all-nighters to prepare.
At UCLA, John Sciarra and his teammates asked Vermeil to tone down the practices after the Bruins had beaten USC and were preparing to play Ohio State in the Rose Bowl. Vermeil’s response was that if the guys didn’t want to do what he asked, he’d just go out to Bruin Walk and find new players. UCLA did indeed beat Ohio State, in Vermeil’s second year, and Sciarra and Carl Peterson introduced Vermeil at Canton.
The early 80s in Philadephia were a golden age. The 76ers and Phillies won titles, the Eagles and Flyers got to Finals, and Villanova knocked off Georgetown in ‘85 for an NCAA title. More than that, it was a village of off-center personalities whose humanity was embraced by a fandom that loves the uninhibited. Vermeil was joined by Pete Rose, Julius Erving, Bobby Clarke, Tug McGraw, Rollie Massimino, Ken “The Rat” Linseman, and the late, great Darryl Dawkins, who used his guest column in the Philadelphia Journal to describe his adventures on the planet Lovetron with his girlfriend Juicy Lucy.
So what if Vermeil cried at the drop of a penalty flag and thought that a working-class hero was the only hero worth having? He was pure Philly, and he’s still a health insurance spokesman there. Later, Charles Barkley, Jerome Brown and John Kruk would understand the power of entertainment, of leading the daily sports parade.
Halls of Fame need to recognize that, too. Obviously no deserving player should be barred because he or she wasn’t flamboyant enough. But there has to be more to this than the compilation of numbers, commas and decimal points.
Fernando Valenzuela transformed baseball in Los Angeles but he doesn’t have the requisite numbers to get to Cooperstown. That won’t change. His impact takes a back seat to cold, unwritten standards.
Again, a weekend in Canton came and went without a posthumous yellow blazer for Don Coryell, who died in 2010. He did not get to a Super Bowl with the Cardinals or the Chargers.
That is increasingly annoying to people like Dan Fouts, Coryell’s quarterback in San Diego who says he sure as hell wouldn’t be in Canton if not for his coach. The wide-open, three-ring, four-wide pageant that you watch every Sunday, and that gets more popular each year because of its dynamism, is attributable to Coryell.
Travis Kelce owes a good part of his paycheck to Coryell, who made Kellen Winslow a matchup impossibility as a pass-snagging tight end. Marshall Faulk also owes Coryell, who dreamed up the one-back offense. In Coryell’s first Chargers season, Clarence Williams caught 51 passes out of the backfield. The previous year, he caught one.
The way routes are numbered and the way route combinations are organized were Coryell’s inventions, although he said he borrowed most of it from Sid Luckman who didn’t win a Super Bowl either, but wound up in Canton. In seven years, Coryell’s Chargers led the league in yards five times and points three times.
In 1980, Coryell’s second year, there were five NFL teams that threw for 30 or more touchdowns. In 2021 there were ten (in a 17-game schedule). In 1980 ten of 30 teams threw at least 494 passes. In 2021, 32 of 32 teams did.
Fouts said that Coryell’s marching orders were to look deep and then come back upfield in a passing progression, not the other way around. Incompletions? Don’t sweat them, Coryell said. Whatever you do, don’t quit throwing. Fouts said the offense would come out of the Wednesday game-plan meetings with chests puffed. He knew no one could stop them.
Well, there were playoff teams that did, including a Houston team that did so without Earl Campbell, Ken Burrough or Dan Pastorini. The Chargers won at Miami in a conference semifinal, with an exhausted Winslow being helped off the field between flights of fancy, but then were ambushed by a 40-below wind chill in Cincinnati the next week and lost the AFC title game.
Before that Coryell resurrected the Cardinals by giving the ball to Jim Hart and letting him throw to Mel Gray and Jackie Smith, with Terry Metcalf attacking out of the backfield.
And at San Diego State Coryell won 55 of 61 at one point and put four quarterbacks in the NFL. His winning percentage of .572 in the NFL is higher than those of Bill Parcells, Chuck Knox, Jimmy Johnson and Chuck Noll, and it’s not because he inherited world-beating rosters.
A character? Sure. Coryell gave his players freedom and was beloved for it, but his levels of preoccupation rivaled Vermeil’s (and that of Joe Gibbs, who was his offensive coordinator). More than once he took his daughter to the Chargers’ office instead of dropping her off at school, as he daydreamed about dig routes and sliding protections, and he was famous for loading garbage in the back seat and forgetting about that too.
On a trip to Green Bay, he asked, “Is there some kind of lake around here?”, without processing that the team hotel was right on Lake Winnebago, which measures 133,000 acres.
Maybe there’s a grim irony in Coryell’s missing the boat when he wasn’t even aware of the lake. Vermeil became eligible because the PFHOF created a special category for coaches that will last until 2024. Coryell was ignored, just as he was in 2021 when Tom Flores was picked.
No Halls are perfect, but there are ways to influence the game without winning the Lombardi Trophy. John Madden always said he thought the busts of the inductees spend the night talking to each other when the lights go out. If you ever could ask them for a voice vote, Coryell sails in.