COMMENTARY : Allen Should Be Hall of Famer

George Allen, the football coach who died Monday at 72, was the late George Halas’ favorite assistant coach when Halas owned the Chicago Bears in the 1960s.

Allen was, that is, right up to the day that he suddenly left for Los Angeles to take over the Rams.

Thenceforth, Halas was a sworn enemy, fighting Allen bitterly in courtrooms and on football fields and even at NFL meetings.

At one such meeting during the new coach’s first winter in Los Angeles, Halas, addressing the NFL’s club owners, stood and berated Allen at length, describing him as, among other things, a schemer and a cheater.

That amused Vince Lombardi, the coach of Green Bay’s five-time champions, who at the time was seated next to Dan Reeves of Los Angeles. As the owner of the Rams, Reeves had hired Allen.

Turning in Reeves’ direction, Lombardi whispered loudly: “Sounds as if you’ve got yourself a hell of a coach.”

They’re all gone now--Halas, Lombardi, Reeves and most of the owners who laughed along with Lombardi that day. And now Allen.

Lombardi was right about Allen. He was a great coach, right to the end. One of the few 72-year-old coaches in football history, Allen realized another goal this season when he made a winner of Cal State Long Beach.

“I’ve never had a losing season,” he often said of his 12 years with the Rams and Washington Redskins. “And I never will.”

He wouldn’t allow it.

The Rams hired him because he wouldn’t.

Their interest in him was first stirred when they heard that the Bears had awarded Allen, instead of Halas, the game ball after winning the 1963 NFL championship.

Allen was then Halas’ defensive coach, and in the locker room afterward, when the Chicago captains handed him the ball, the Bears, singing wildly off key, honored him with a tuneless jingle.

As the television cameras looked in and as several Midwest radio stations tuned in, the Bears shouted:

“Three cheers for Allen,

“Three cheers for George,

“Hooray for George,

“He’s a horse’s ass.”

The football team’s idea of humor pleased Allen, who was not a profane man, who indeed seldom raised his voice, but who, like any coach, appreciated praise. The word for him was intense. There could never have been a football coach more dedicated to winning.

He was too dedicated for Reeves, who hired him after the Rams had experienced several losing seasons under Harland Svare, its personable coach from 1962-65. Despite one winning season after another, Reeves fired Allen twice in five years.

The first time, after a fan uprising in Los Angeles, Reeves relented and brought him back.

The second time, in late December 1970, he telephoned Allen and said: “Merry Christmas, you’re fired.”

After disappearing for several days, Reeves was asked to explain himself.

“I had more fun losing with Harland Svare than winning with George Allen,” he said.

All told, Allen was fired four times by the Rams, once as an assistant and the last time in 1978 after he had coached the team through only two exhibition games.

Allen in 1978 was undercut, he always said, by veteran Ram employees who made up strange things about him to tell the new club owner, Carroll Rosenbloom.

“He’s crazy,” they complained to Rosenbloom, soberly testifying that Allen, instead of coaching the Rams, had walked around training camp picking up scraps of waste paper that his players had discarded.

What the employees never understood--what Rosenbloom never realized--was that Allen was a perfectionist.

“Neatness is essential,” he said. “It’s essential to winning.”

And nothing was more important to Allen than winning.

He was intolerant of coaches and owners who subscribed to five-year plans.

“Any coach who’s worth his salt should be able to win (in) his first year,” he said, coming up with a phrase that outlined his philosophy in four words: “The future is now.”

He wouldn’t wait on the draft. He wouldn’t collect draft choices. He wouldn’t assemble a crowd of talented rookies who might win two or three years down the road.

He would win instantly.

Thus, in the same decade he improbably turned around two losing NFL teams, one after the other.

Taking charge of a Ram team that had been finishing 4-10 and 1-12-1 under former coaches, he finished 8-6 in his first season in Los Angeles, 1966, and then 11-1-2 in 1967.

In 1971, taking charge of a Redskin team that had had one winning season since 1955, he finished 9-4-1 in his first year, then wound up in Super Bowl VII in his second year.

Trading was his recipe for “future-is-now” success. In an era when trades were frowned on by other coaches, Allen was a dedicated dealer, once exchanging seven draft choices to Los Angeles for six Ram players--most of them old Ram players.

When Washington reporters criticized this deal, calling the new Redskins broken-down, over-the-hill players, Allen immediately borrowed the name.

“Watch out for the over-the-hill gang,” he warned other NFL teams. Privately, he said: “I really don’t want anyone but players over 30. Experience is more important than talent.”

He’s the only NFL coach who ever tried to win--and won--quite that way. In his approach to football, he sought to make whatever player deals were necessary to win immediately and always, with older players, year after year.

Thus he will be best remembered, perhaps, as the coach who paid big salaries to over-the-hill players, encouraging a former Redskin owner, Edward Bennett Williams, to quip: “I gave George an unlimited budget, and he’s exceeded it already.”

But Allen wasn’t a big spender.

“George wasn’t in the NFL’s top 10 (at Washington) in money spent on his team,” Rosenbloom said when he hired him.

In Allen’s final years, his one ambition was to make the Pro Football Hall of Fame, which, today, is home to many less worthy.

He obviously belongs.

His innovations have left a lasting imprint on the game.

He was the first to hire a special-teams coach. He was the first to use, as a regular alignment, five defensive backs instead of four--and he gave the alignment the name it bears to this day, the nickel defense.

When he used a sixth defensive back, he called it the dime defense--another name that has stuck.

He was the first to install a football team in its own home, which he named Redskin Park. Today, most pro clubs have such headquarters.

And, most significantly, he was the first to set out deliberately to win every year.

He won all five years with the Rams and all seven with the Redskins.

It was an achievement that denied him a Super Bowl title. Mostly, Super Bowl champions are created in the draft, which Allen scorned.

“Your job as a football coach is to win games for your fans,” he said. “And to a fan, winning (an exhibition) game is as important as winning any other game. Talk to them someday after you’ve lost (an exhibition) game.

“Football fans want to win the Super Bowl, of course, when it’s Super Bowl time. When it’s October, they want to win in October.”

That’s what made Allen unique.

He was a unique achiever.

And isn’t that what the Hall of Fame is about?