Allen Says Bad Rap Kept Him Out of NFL After ’78

A lingering mystery to those studying professional football is why George Herbert Allen never was hired as a head coach in the NFL after his accident with the Rams in 1978.

George, you’ll recall, left the Washington Redskins for Los Angeles, only to be scuttled after the second exhibition game by Carroll Rosenbloom, late owner of that troupe.

Allen had served 12 years in the league as a head coach, never experiencing a losing season. He was an innovator; his teams filled stadiums.

“Why were you shut out?” we ask George, recently enlisted for the prestigious job as head coach of the Cal State Long Beach 49ers. At 71, he is in the enviable position of drawing pay while continuing to collect Social Security.

“I suspected a word-of-mouth blackball,” he says. “I had only one offer. It came from Bill Bidwill of the Cardinals. But I couldn’t accept because he wanted to retain the old staff.”

“But why would the others pass, hiring all the clowns and tumblers they did?”

“Rosenbloom hurt me by telling people I was working too hard and needed a vacation. He hinted I was a stress case. That never helps a guy trying to land a job. It also wasn’t true, because I would later coach successfully in the USFL.”

Nor did George feel Edward Bennett Williams, one of the Redskin owners, helped.

“He wisecracked about my spending habits and my coaching habits,” Allen says. “He wrecked me. As a famous criminal attorney, he was very persuasive, and people felt that when he said something, it had to have substance.

“It was laughable. I made the Redskins a fortune. I built that team, and we not only sold out every week, but had a ticket waiting list of 10,000. I also arranged to buy the land near Dulles Airport and create our practice field, Redskin Park. We paid $700,000 for the property. It would grow in value to $12 million. But Williams’ jokes poisoned me with other owners.”

The chain of events that followed Allen’s departure from the Redskins is a mountain of intrigue. He was fired in the summer of ’78 by Rosenbloom, who drowned in the spring of ’79.

Later that year, his widow, inheriting control of the team, went to the Super Bowl, and the guy she then lived with (and later married) went to jail several years later for failure to report profits on Super Bowl tickets he scalped. Supplying the tickets, the widow was investigated, but not charged, and she eventually divorced the husband, her seventh.

With the Rams, life never was placid for George Allen. Working three years for the late Dan Reeves, George was fired the morning after Christmas.

Rehired, he was fired again two years later, moving on to Washington. According to Allen, part of the problem was Reeves’ drinking.

“Reeves bounced jokes off me like Ed Williams,” recalls George. “But he never bothered to explain the problems he caused with his drinking. After a loss one day at the Coliseum, he came into the dressing room, loaded, and berated me in front of everyone for not playing at fullback a guy named Vilnis Ezerins of Whitewater State, instead of my all-pro, Dick Bass. I told him that when he was drinking, I never wanted him to come into the dressing room again.”

Detached from the NFL, Allen tried CBS before taking coaching posts in the USFL with Chicago and Arizona.

And now, in his dotage, the trail leads to Cal State Long Beach, doing business in the Big West Conference, but not as successfully as it would like. It finished 4-8 this year, coming off a 3-9 the year before.

It is Allen’s first venture in college since he coached the feared Whittier Poets. For the $4,800 a year he was paid there, he also had to coach baseball and teach classes in badminton, tennis and golf.

One of his two football assistants was a used-car dealer, working as a volunteer. The other was Jerry Burns, whom George paid $700 out of his own pocket. He also promoted Jerry a free lunch each day in the cafeteria.

Burns is now coach of the Minnesota Vikings.

Can those comprising the Cal State Long Beach varsity please their new field leader?

They can if they don’t sit on their helmets, or litter. George has a revulsion to both, especially to players tossing drinking cups on the grass.

Cal State Long Beach also can please him if, at training table, it doesn’t separate the crackers from the soup. It always has been, and remains, George’s theory that a team failing to place the crackers next to the soup is just as apt to line up the guards away from the center.

If Cal State Long Beach wants to stay on George’s good side, it won’t decorate the walls of the athletic office with pictures of desert sunsets, cactus and flowers. The Rams made that mistake. George ordered them replaced by photos of guys crunching quarterbacks and blocking kicks.

And Cal State Long Beach can prepare for a sign in the locker room that reads, “100% Isn’t Enough.”

Hints of stress already, you ask? George walks around normally that way.

A telephone call arrives here from Sid Gillman, who is trying to reach Allen.

“I’m calling in a marker,” says Sid. “I hired George as my assistant in 1957. I think he should repay the favor.”

Sid is 78.

“That Long Beach team,” he says, “can use a quarterback coach with a cane.”