Don Shula was Bill Belichick before Bill Belichick, the best of the best | Mike Sielski
Shula, who died Monday at age 90, could win with any team, any time, in any era of football.
Don Shula was 90 when he died Monday morning, and every obituary written about him will include one particular quote. Those obituaries will include that quote because it is the best quote about any coach in any sport. The quote is from Bum Phillips, the longtime, Texas-twanged coach of the Houston Oilers, and it paid Shula, who won an NFL-record 347 games for the Baltimore Colts and Miami Dolphins, the greatest compliment a coach can be paid:
“He can take his’n and beat your’n, and he can take your’n and beat his’n.”
These days, we tend to think of one football coach and only one football coach in those terms, with that ability to contour his strategy and approach to the strengths and weaknesses of any unique group of players: Bill Belichick. But as brilliant as Belichick is, Shula was his antecedent. He won that way first, and he won more often than anybody else.
In the early 1970s with the Dolphins, he won with a power running game – Larry Csonka, Jim Kiick, Mercury Morris – and a terrific defense. The Dolphins went unbeaten in 1972, 17-0, to this day the only NFL team to finish a full season without losing a game, then came back and won the Super Bowl again in 1973: a 32-2 record and two championships over two years. In 1982, Shula coached the Dolphins to the Super Bowl while rotating quarterbacks; his starter in the big game was David Woodley. Two years later, he again coached the Dolphins to the Super Bowl. This time, his starter was Dan Marino, who threw for 5,084 yards and 48 touchdowns and had a season under Shula that no quarterback in the league had ever had before.
“You could see how he understood the game,” said Ron Jaworski, who backed up Marino for two years in Miami, practically sitting in Shula’s hip pocket throughout the 1987 and ’88 seasons. “He understood the players he had: a Bob Griese, a Mercury Morris, a Larry Csonka, a Paul Warfield. He knew their skill sets. He tailored his offensive scheme to those players, just like when he got Marino. It was amazing how he tailored not only Danny’s skill set to the offense but to the players we had.
“As I see the game evolve to what it is today, we never had these exotic game plans that coaches have now, with 30 assistant coaches on their staffs. He put his players in position to be successful. It might be as simple as, ‘Hey, against the Buffalo Bills this week, we’re going to have Mark Duper in the slot, rather than out wide.’ Just a simple adjustment, not transforming the game plan to get the ‘perfect’ adjustment.”
In just two of Shula’s 33 seasons in the NFL did his team have a losing record, and it was hardly as if he rode Griese’s and Marino’s coattails.
“Once I got the call from him, I said, ‘I’ve got to see what makes this guy tick. Why is he so good?’” Jaworski said. “Being around him a couple of years, it was really fairly simple, his approach to the game. It was about teamwork. He was always selling the team concept.”
Once, Morris told NFL Films, a player, late to a training-camp practice, climbed a fence and ran onto the field. Shula cut him on the spot. “By the way,” he told the player, “go back the same way you came in.” He maintained a certain standard, and he expected it to be met, no questions asked or accepted, no matter a player’s role or relative importance.
Of those 17 wins during the ’72 Dolphins’ perfect season, 11 came with their backup quarterback, Earl Morrall, under center. When they beat the Eagles, 19-14, at Veterans Stadium on Nov. 14, 1993 – the 325th victory of Shula’s career, moving him past George Halas and atop the league’s all-time list – the Dolphins were down to their third-string quarterback, a fellow named Doug Pederson, who had never thrown a pass in the NFL. They won anyway. That was par for Shula’s course.
No one better represented Shula’s skill in recognizing what a player could do and maximizing it than Jim Jensen. After starring at Central Bucks West in Doylestown, Jensen was the starting quarterback as a junior and senior for Boston University. He completed barely 50% of his passes but wasn’t a typical drop-back QB. He led the team in total yardage, often carrying the ball himself or throwing the lead block on a sweep after pitching the ball to a running back. Shula selected him in the 11th round of the 1981 draft, back when the draft had 12 rounds.
“The big thing when we got Jim was we realized how football-intelligent he was,” Shula said in a 2012 phone interview. “Put him in the backfield, and against linebackers in coverage, he would just get open, give the quarterback somewhere to throw the ball, and make a big play. He did all these special-teams things. He ran down on kickoffs, was on kickoff returns, the punt-return team. You get a guy like that, he’s making it well worth your while to have him.”
You could hear Belichick saying the same thing about Kevin Faulk or Julian Edelman. Jensen played 12 years for the Dolphins. He caught 229 passes, had 26 rushing attempts, completed four passes – including two for touchdowns – covered kickoffs and punts, and was nicknamed “Crash” for his willingness to charge headfirst into the blocking wedge on the kickoff team.
“That was the great thing about Shula,” Jensen said. “When he gets a player, he finds out what his abilities are and utilizes them.”
Genius shows up in the little things, the tiny details. Don Shula, with his’n or your’n or any’n, had better eyes than anybody.