I am belatedly saying farewell to Don Coryell, who died earlier this month. I am too young to remember his days coaching San Diego State but old enough to remember clearly his NFL days with the Cardinals and Chargers. Coryell was an excellent offensive coach and is the only coach in history to win more than 100 games on the collegiate level and in the pros. While I cannot speak to his successful days with the Aztecs, I can acknowledge the great job he did converting a mediocre Cardinal squad into a power in the NFC, despite taking over while Eastern rivals Dallas and Washington were seemingly at their peak. But Coryell's passing offense exploited the aging defenses of his rivals and allowed his team to quickly improve from also-ran to contender. The Cardinals last went to the playoffs in 1948 prior to Coryell's arrival in 1973; by 1974 they won the division, a feat they repeated the following season. Players like Terry Metcalf, Jim Hart, Mel Gray, Dan Dierdorf and Conrad Dobler became stars and expectations increased so rapidly that Coryell was surprisingly fired in 1977 because he only managed a .500 record. St Louis's loss was San Diego's gain and "Air Coryell" made Hall of Famers out of players like quarterback Dan Fouts. The Chargers employed arguably the greatest collection of passing targets ever in wide receivers John Jefferson, then Wes Chandler, and Charlie Joiner, tight end Kellen Winslow, and backs James Brooks and Lionel James. Perhaps San Diego could have won a Super Bowl if they did not have to trade star defensive end Fred Dean in 1981 because of a contract dispute. Not winning a title is keeping Coryell out of the pro Hall of Fame (he is already in the college one), which is ridiculous as he changed the way the sport was played as much as any other individual since the merger with the AFL.
The recent piece on him in Sports Illustrated reminded me of one of my favorite diatribes against those who think that the NFL is much more creative and dynamic than the college game. Where do you think these ideas come from? As the recent use of the "Wildcat" by NFL teams, the professional game has been borrowing from the college one since the beginning of the sport. The article mentions that Coryell's offensive philosophy was basically lifted from a book written by former TCU coach Dutch Meyer, who won a national championship with the Horned Frogs in 1938. He also shared the national championship in 1935. Meyer's love of the short, quick striking pass game was the forerunner of what is now called "West Coast" offense and he was one of the first to spread ends out wide in search of mismatches.
The article, which is an excerpt from the book Blood, Sweat and Chalk by Tim Layden, also gives credit, once again, to Tom Osborne for the hugely successful variation off of Coryell's offense by Washington coach Joe Gibbs, who coached under Gibbs in college and in the pros, called the Counter Trey. A running play, the Counter Trey, featuring a big back following an even bigger tackle into a huge hole, was perhaps the preeminent play used by the great Redskins teams of the 1980s and was lifted from the Nebraska playbook by Gibbs and his staff.
There are plenty of other examples like these, in which a popular NFL play is nothing but a reworked college maneuver. The advantage for the pro team can be that you could keep someone like Peyton Manning for 15 years and develop your offense around him as he matures. But as Gibbs proved in Washington, you can save a lot of money by creating a system and then interchanging the parts when a player gets too old, injured or expensive. That is another concept lifted by men like Gibbs and Bill Walsh from the college game. The college game must replace starters every 1-4 years and so the system is king and a coaching staff must recruit players that fit that system. The smart NFL teams do the same thing.
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