Seems Like Old Times : Faulkner, Who Was With Knox in Coach’s First Term With Rams, Is Glad to Be Back to a System He’s Most Comfortable With

Jack Faulkner, along with just about everybody else, heard all the names and guessed along with all the guessers a few months ago as the Rams wound down their search to replace John Robinson.

Faulkner, along with just about everybody else, had his own private thoughts about the people mentioned, had his own idea of the right man to steady the Rams’ shaky situation.

The Rams’ administrator of football operations heard the name Chuck Knox, and 20 years of memories rushed into his mind.

“Sometimes,” Faulkner says now, “you have a chance to cheer for your own.”

And sometimes, you have a chance to celebrate the arrival of your own.

When the Rams hired Knox as head coach in January, the one man in the organization with the closest ties to him was Faulkner, reunited with an old friend.

From the beginning of their professional relationship, Faulkner and Knox recognized that they were cut from the same cloth. Faulkner was part of Knox’s 1973 holdover staff the first time he coached the Rams.

Here they are again, old-line football men thrown together to rebuild the Rams.

“It’s unreal,” says Faulkner’s assistant, Charlie Cowan, about the Knox-Faulkner friendship. “They have a good relationship, and I think Chuck depends on that to assist him.”

Faulkner, whose football career has spanned from the 1940s to the crazy AFL days with Sid Gillman and who has been with the Rams in various roles since 1971, was subtly shuffled out of the coaching and draft hierarchy into a limited role as an advance scout during Robinson’s nine-year tenure.

Though Faulkner won’t talk about it much, and though he did coordinate the team’s Plan B scouting with Robinson, his voice was not influential in personnel matters. He was mostly a gatherer of information, the man who put together all the data about every player from every other team.

With Knox, Faulkner is a familiar face with almost 40 years of NFL experience. This time around, he most certainly has the ear of the master.

“Knox will use him properly, no question about it,” says Sid Gillman, Faulkner’s longtime mentor. “Jack knows talent. He’s a super talent scout.

Faulkner was on the coaching staff through Knox’s first Ram stint, and while Knox wandered from Buffalo to Seattle and finally, 14 years later, back to the Rams, Faulkner stayed in touch. They were too similar not to.

“He’s from Youngstown (Ohio), and I coached high school football right across the border,” Knox says. “And I’m from Sewickley (Pa.), which I’d say is about 35, 40 miles from Youngstown.

“The backgrounds are similar. There’s a lot of common threads over the years.”

Faulkner turned 66 years old Saturday, which is impressive in a league that seems to prize youth over just about everything. He laughs when he thinks that he is more than twice the age of David Shula, the Cincinnati Bengals’ new head coach.

But he does not laugh when he talks about those who say the game passes older men by, who suggest this is a young man’s profession.

“Just like Knox (who turns 60 this month), I have more desire to do things,” Faulkner says. “I think I’m more equipped to see things more clearly in the game, and maybe some guys disagree. All the young coaches are going to say, ‘Bull.’

“But I’ll tell you one thing, when they say the game has passed you by, they are completely full of it. The game will pass me by the first time they line 12 men over there (on the field.)

“They still have 11 on that side and 11 on this side . . . The problem is all these guys want to make it complicated.”

Ask him about the idea of football burnout, and Faulkner is more direct. Some people feel burned out after 10 years, but Faulkner has been in professional football a bit longer than that.

“That’s all bull, burnout,” Faulkner says. “I don’t believe you burn out. What do you burn out of? I don’t know what you get burnt out of. I don’t know what that means.

“You come up with a guy like Sid Gillman, we would work . You’d start to work at seven in the morning and you’d work until midnight or something and he’d have you back there at six in the morning to go again.

“But it’s the thrill of the game, being able to see guys you coached and see them do well. I coached the defensive backs in San Diego (under Gillman with the Chargers), and those defensive backs, it was a thrill to see them. We were averaging five interceptions a game (and set a record with 42 on the season), those kinds of things are thrilling.”

Faulkner’s football career began when he came back from serving in the Marines during World War II and asked Gillman to play for his Miami of Ohio team. Gillman knew Faulkner from his high school days, and liked him, but there was one problem.

“I had a rule then,” Gillman says, “I would never permit any married guys to play on our football team. I don’t know why, but we had nothing but single guys, OK?

“One day I was sitting outside of my house and Jack Faulkner comes to the door, just got out of the service. He said, ‘Coach, I want you to meet my wife.’ She was sitting in the car, he didn’t dare bring her up. (But) he brought Betty up to the porch and it’s a crazy thing, she was so nice, that we changed the rule.”

From there, Faulkner and Gillman have been a team, off and on, through the years.

Eventually, he joined Gillman with the Chargers, first in Los Angeles, then in San Diego. Faulkner, joined by Chuck Noll and Al Davis, was part of what might have been the best coaching staff ever assembled. Even now, Gillman and Faulkner can remember the arguments that famous foursome used to have.

“That was a great staff,” Faulkner says. “A lot of arguments. But you could have a heated argument and you could go in there and cuss like a son of a gun and scream at each other and all that and go have lunch and start again.

“But there were a lot of good points made. If you had a point you were trying to make, you had better know what you were doing, because Al would shoot you down and Chuck would, too. And of course Sid, he loved that, everybody fighting each other. And when he had enough, he’d say, ‘All right, that’s it.’ ”

Faulkner left that staff in 1962 to take over the Denver Broncos as head coach/general manager, was coach of the year in the AFL that season, but the team’s lack of resources doomed him to the talent scrapheap, and he lasted only through the 1964 season.

However, he will forever be remembered--and thanked, presumably--for junking the team’s infamous vertical stockings and changing the colors to the now-famous orange, blue and white from brown and yellow.

“Burned ‘em,” Faulkner says of the socks. “Couldn’t do it fast enough.”

Gillman: “I thought he’d get it done there, he’s a good coach. But that’s football, that’s the way it works sometimes.”

That would be Faulkner’s first and last chance at a head coaching opportunity, but he never stopped working. In 1966, he came to the Rams as a scout, was with the New Orleans Saints from 1967-70, then rejoined the Rams in 1971 as a scout, staying from Tommy Prothro to Knox to George Allen’s stormy second term to Ray Malavasi and the Super Bowl trip, when Faulkner was defensive backfield coach, to Robinson.

Now to Knox again.

“Jack’s a survivor,” Gillman says, “that’s for sure.”

Obviously, things are different now in the trailer behind the coaching offices that houses Faulkner’s office. His title hasn’t changed, but his range of influence clearly has.

And he knows why.

Faulkner says the Rams, as they are currently composed, could use the same shock therapy Knox used in his earlier Rams’ incarnation.

“Of course when he was first hired he was a young guy coming in here, you had to wait to see,” Faulkner says. “And the more you’re around him, the more attracted you become to him because of the things that he says and the things that he does.

“He does things for a purpose, he doesn’t just talk about it. Behind everything he’s saying, there’s some motivation. He’s doing something for you or the benefit of the team or whatever. Always in the back of his mind, he’s got something that’s going to improve his football team.

“Obviously I feel more comfortable having Chuck. I know the system he works, I know how he works and the type of person he is. You feel more comfortable.

“He is the master. He is the organizer. He is the guy who rules. You have a question, take it to him, and that’s good.”

And isn’t Knox more comfortable having Faulkner around at Rams Park?

“Yeah, it’s nice for him because I know which streets to go down,” Faulkner says, laughing. “(I) remind him we don’t work at Long Beach anymore (as the Rams did during Knox I). I know where the hotels are, where the restaurants are . . . “