Season Preview: Rams ’92 : Assistants Prove Their Loyalty to Knox
They didn’t have to go far to talk it over on the night Chuck Knox resigned. They didn’t even have to pick up the phone. They were together, as usual. Chuck’s guys, eating dinner together.
Joe Vitt, George Dyer, Rod Perry and Chick Harris had just shared dinner, and when their head coach quit the Seattle Seahawks, they shared the same response: Where he goes, they go.
“I can remember the night Chuck resigned in Seattle,” Vitt says. “Just by coincidence, Chick, George and Rod were all over at my house eating together. We always kind of hung around together.”
Then Knox got hired by the Rams, and he asked the four--plus Seattle offensive coordinator John Becker--to hang around together with him in Anaheim.
Though they all say they enjoyed living in Seattle and had the opportunity to stay under new Coach Tom Flores, it was not a difficult decision. He asked, they went.
“When we were asked to come down here with Chuck, there was a real concern that we would all want to stick together and come down together,” says Vitt, now the Rams’ assistant head coach/safeties. “We’ve all worked with each other for a long time, we know each other’s strengths, our weaknesses.
“I think the most important thing is when times are tough, we’ve all stuck together, and I think players notice that and it’s been good for us.”
The times were toughest in the days immediately before and after Knox’s resignation. His loyal lieutenants didn’t know where Knox would end up, didn’t know if they should commit to staying in Seattle, didn’t know if they could all stay together.
Flores wanted fast decisions.
“We were back and forth on the phones early in the morning, late at night, just trying to figure out when it was going to happen and when we had to make decisions on coming down,” says Harris, who also was Knox’s running backs coach in Buffalo and Seattle. “Oh, the decision was easy. The only decision I had was with my children. This was the first time I was going to be away from them.
“But they know how much I enjoy working with Chuck. It was no problem. My 11-year-old son said, ‘Go get it, Dad, you and Coach Knox can’t be apart from each other.’ ”
How fast did these guys make up their minds? All five former Seattle assistants were at Rams Park the day after Knox was announced as the Rams’ new coach. Knox’s first day was spent at a hotel in Beverly Hills, so, more than symbolically, Knox and his five Seattle men arrived at Rams Park together, Jan. 9, to start again.
By the time a week was over, Knox’s group had jumped right into their new jobs, assumed their offices, and gone to work wearing blue and gold.
Knox seemed to have the heart of his new staff in place with the snap of his fingers. Vitt, Dyer and Perry took over the defense, Harris moved into the offensive staff and Becker came over as the team’s college scouting czar.
For a man who treasures loyalty over almost anything else, Knox had the nucleus of his Rams staff transplanted immediately, and he knew without a doubt they were all loyal.
Where so many new staffs are patched-together quilts of coaches who take weeks and months and sometimes years to get used to each other, trust each other, Knox’s Ram staff had five Seattle coaches to make it happen now.
“I think the first thing you look at, you talk about Rod Perry, Joe Vitt, Chick Harris, John Becker, the guys who came down here, those four guys, first of all they’re great people,” says Dyer, the defensive line coach in Buffalo and Seattle, now the Rams’ defensive coordinator.
“They’re honest people, they’re tough people, they’re fair people. Then you add to it, they’re very talented coaches. Loyal. They’ve got all the qualities you’d like to have in anybody you knew.
“There’s a great, great amount of trust among us. You know somebody will always be at your back, and you will always be at somebody’s back. I think that in itself is the root of everything.
“You’ve got to have that bond. Got to have it.”
Knox spent a decade as an NFL assistant before getting his first shot with the Rams as head coach in 1973. And he takes tremendous pride in putting together assistants who do not quarrel with each other and blend into a seamless working unit.
One of the main reasons, team insiders acknowledge, that Knox, after a day to think it over, fired last year’s Ram defensive coordinator Jeff Fisher, was that he did not think the fiery, vocal Fisher fit in with his idea of a team player.
“I think it’s important for a coaching staff to be close,” Knox says. “Not that everybody has to think alike, because you want to get the best of the individual thinking that each particular coach has.”
And you have to understand that the idea of being a Knox assistant is that the team always comes first. Under Knox, there never seem to be the kind of battles that bloody other NFL staffs.
Knox does not appreciate coaches who, elbowing for the spotlight and thinking of a future as a head coach, try to hog the publicity that he believes should rightfully go to everyone on the staff.
“I think it’s the type of coach Chuck recruits to be on his staff,” Vitt says. “They can’t be ‘I’ guys, they can’t isolate themselves from the staff. They’ve got to be ready to give and share and be part of the whole picture.
“When you get guys like that, the players are the first to notice it and you develop a camaraderie among your players,” Vitt says. “The second thing that happens is that you get a real cohesiveness between the units, offense and defense.
“I think when the players see how close the coaches are on the staff, then the players become more cohesive and close and you get the job done.”
Says Becker: “With him (Knox), he doesn’t like disloyalty, he doesn’t like back-stabbing, bickering. . . . And, of course, who the heck does? But he won’t tolerate it.
“And as a consequence, I think one of the things he really looks for when he’s hiring somebody is somebody who doesn’t have a history of that kind of thing.
“When he hires somebody, he’s done a pretty thorough investigative background check on the guy. He doesn’t hire that kind of guy.”
Knox flares a bit when it is mentioned that he seems to prefer low-profile coaches who do not usually get noticed when head coaching jobs open up across the league.
The highest-profile coach he had in Seattle was special teams coach Rusty Tillman, who stayed in Seattle this year and was given a promotion.
“We’ve never had competing egos but we’d probably had about as many assistant coaches that have gone off our staff as anybody’s staff to become head coaches in the National Football League,” Knox says.
“We had two assistant coaches come off this Rams staff in 1977 to get head coaching jobs. One, Ken Meyer, went to San Francisco and two, Leeman Bennett, went to Atlanta.
“Then we had Ray Malavasi become head coach of the Rams. We had Kay Stephenson become head coach of the Buffalo Bills. We also had Dick Vermeil, who became head coach at UCLA, then went on to become head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles.
“We have had a number of coaches who have been with us that have gone on to get head jobs and rightfully so, without quote-unquote all this tremendous hype or PR that some people seem to generate.”
The main thing, his assistants say, is to blend a staff of equals, all of whom report to him and work for the common good.
“When he recruits coaches,” Vitt says, “he’s going to (ask himself), ‘Hey, how is this coach going to fit in with this coach on defense or these coaches on offense?’ He looks at, ‘Am I going to be able to work with this guy?’
“Every coach in this league is smart. I think it’s the little intangibles that Chuck looks at: Whether the guy’s going to fit on the staff or not, the kind of work habits he has, the kind of character he has, the ability to get along with players, his ability to teach.
“When you have a bunch of coaches on one staff like that, they tend to draw to each other and get along with each other.”
With those friendships and their devotion to Knox, the assistants say, they all naturally knew they would follow him from Seattle. More than anything, they feel they belong on Chuck Knox’s staff.
“He’s got a real charisma,” Becker says. “He has a real knack for knowing what it takes to get a job done. I really have a belief in him, and for me, the fun of football is winning.”
“Even though I’m not coaching, we win the other night, and I feel as good as when I was coaching. I’m interested in being around something successful.
“Plus, he’s very, very fair. And I don’t think anybody wants to work for somebody they don’t respect. I have, and I know the difference.
“He’s somebody you respect. It’s like kids in the house. They don’t want to just flat-out run free and go ape and do whatever they want. They want some discipline, they want some direction. Yet at the same time they want to be treated fairly. That’s what he provides.
“He creates an atmosphere where you can do your job and you can be happy doing it.”
For the five from Seattle, the getting-along part of it goes well beyond their time at the practice site. The dinner at Vitt’s house was nothing special, they say, for a group of men whose kids play together.
“We’ll have little picnics together and all that stuff and it has been pretty nice,” Harris says. “We’ve been doing it for a long time and that’s probably why it’s so good.
‘We’ve shared a lot of things together. It runs deep, it doesn’t stop on the football field.”
The Seattle Connection
JOHN BECKER, director of player personnel: Becker, 49, joined the Rams after spending the last three years as the offensive coordinator in Seattle. Before that, he was offensive coordinator at Indianapolis.
GEORGE DYER, defensive coordinator/defensive line coach: Dyer, 51, was defensive line coach in Seattle from 1983 to 1991. Previously, he was on Chuck Knox’s staff in Buffalo.
CHICK HARRIS, running backs coach: Harris, 46, originally joined Chuck Knox in Buffalo (1981-82) and has spent the past nine seasons as Seattle’s offensive backfield coach.
ROD PERRY, defensive backfield coach: Perry, 39, who played eight seasons (1975-82) with the Rams, was on Knox’s Seattle coaching staff from 1989 until last season after coaching four seasons in college.
JOE VITT, assistant head coach/safeties: Vitt, 37, joined the Seahawks in 1982, handling the team’s conditioning program, and was given defensive coaching responsibilities in 1983.