Just One Coaching Change Could Hurt Big Staffs of NFL

The NFL’s best coaching staff of all time had just four assistants.

From that group came the league’s greatest head coach and the person who ranks somewhere around second.

Vince Lombardi ran the New York Giants’ offense from 1954-58 and Tom Landry served as the team’s defensive coach from 1955-59. Somehow, the Giants let both escape and soon thereafter began a 17-season playoff drought.

“Of course, when you have the best, you have to step down a little (when they leave),” said Jim Lee Howell, the Giants’ head coach during those years and now a special scout to the club living in Arkansas.

The exact correlation between the departure of Lombardi and Landry from New York and the departure of the Giants from the ranks of top teams is impossible to assess. However, knowing their records as head coaches, it is easy to see that the Giants would never have fallen as far as they did with Lombardi or Landry remaining in some capacity.

Which brings us to this year in the NFL. Or more succinctly to St. Louis, Miami, New York and Philadelphia. For in an era when teams carry more than 10 assistant coaches, these clubs have been hurt or helped significantly by one staff member’s coming or going.

The Dolphins and Cardinals have had strong assistant coaches leave, and the Jets and Eagles have had them arrive. Or, in the case of the Eagles, re-arrive.

Sid Gillman, a 74-year-old who never seems to get enough of football, “unretired” for the umpteenth time Oct. 7 to work with the Eagles’ quarterbacks. On that date, Philadelphia had a 1-4 record and an offense generating 11 points a game. Since the return of Gillman, considered one of the fathers of the modern passing game, the Eagles are 3-1 and averaging 17.5 points per game.

“He’s added some real stability and new ideas to the offense,” tight end John Spagnola said. “Sometimes you get into tendencies and you don’t realize them. A play that’s been working suddenly doesn’t work and you don’t know why. He’s good at finding offensive tendencies you don’t want to repeat.”

Repeating offensive success has not materialized for the Cardinals. Last year, St. Louis scored the most points in its history (426) and was the third-ranked offense in the NFL. With Neil Lomax, Ottis Anderson and Roy Green heading a strong cast the Cardinals appeared to be moving toward offensive pyrotechnics.

However, one man did not return, offensive coordinator Rod Dowhower, who became the Indianapolis Colts’ head coach.

Before scoring 21 points in the second half against Dallas on Monday night, the Cardinals had gone scoreless for 80 minutes and 7 seconds. In each of their previous four games, they did not score more than 10 points, a streak they had not duplicated since 1943. St. Louis failed to total more than 10 points only once last season.

Still, neither Dowhower, nor any Cardinal would admit the loss of Dowhower had anything to do with a 4-5 record in a season when St. Louis was expected to be a playoff team.

“Obviously, Rod is an excellent coach, but the people we have here now are too,” Cardinals coach Jim Hanifan said. “I don’t think that has anything to do with it at all.”

In Miami, Coach Don Shula and his players take the same adamant stance that defensive coordinator Bill Arnsparger’s departure two seasons ago for the head coaching job at Louisiana State has had nothing to do with their problems. Last year, that might have been believable when the Dolphins’ offense covered any blemishes by scoring the second-most points ever in NFL history while setting a slew of records.

But, starting with San Francisco’s Super Bowl XIX exposure of Miami’s weak defense, the Dolphins have had trouble stopping opponents.

Their defense is ranked 24th and has yielded 77.8% of their points in the second and fourth quarters.

“Those aren’t the Dolphins I remember,” said Detroit’s Leonard Thompson after the Lions, 27th in offense entering the game, racked up 355 yards in a 31-21 victory two weeks ago over Miami.

These are definitely not the Jets anyone remembers either. They are the No. 1 defensive team in the AFC after finishing 21st in the NFL last year. They have as many victories after nine weeks as they did all of last season. And the members of the defense have piled credit in one place.

“Bud Carson,” nose tackle Joe Klecko said. “He always has us ready. There are no compromises and that’s good.”

Mel Blount, a star cornerback on the Steel Curtain that Carson molded in the mid-70s at Pittsburgh, called Carson “a defensive genius.”

Fans of the Jets can only hope their favorite team’s management avoids the mistake the other New York team made more than 25 years ago when it let its geniuses slip away.