Quote of the Day (Don Shula, on Luck and Quarterbacks)

“Sure, luck means a lot in football. Not having a good quarterback is bad luck.”—Former Miami Dolphins coach and Football Hall of Famer Don Shula quoted in Norman R. Augustine, Augustine's Laws (1997)

At first, I read the above quote as a quip from Don Shula. But, given certain events in his career—not to mention this past weekend in the NFL playoffs—I think he might have simply been speaking the brutal truth.

After all, Shula—from all accounts, a religious man—must have been thanking the Almighty for much of his career. I’m not talking about the coach having a young Dan Marino or even two other Hall of Fame quarterbacks in their prime, Johnny Unitas and Bob Griese, but also possessing a journeyman QB who, when called on in an emergency to replace the latter two when they were badly injured, performed superbly: Earl Morrall.

When Johnny U. went down with an injury early in the ’68 season, Morrall guided Shula's Baltimore Colts to a 13-1 record, deservedly taking MVP honors. In Super Bowl V, when Unitas was hurt in the big game itself, Morrall stepped in again, this time becoming the first substitute quarterback to rally his team from a deficit to claim victory in the championship contest.

Finally, in the Dolphins’ 1972 season, Morrall—rejoining his former coach, Shula—stepped in yet again when Griese got hurt, keeping the team on track for an undefeated season, before gracefully stepping aside when Griese was ready to take the reins again. 

If Shula was watching TV on Sunday, he must have groaned over what the Pittsburgh Steelers did to the Dolphins in their playoff matchup. More particularly, he must have winced as his old team’s backup QB, Matt Moore, was pressed into making his first playoff start when regular QB Ryan Tannehill was injured a few games before. Moore gave it his best shot, but was a sitting duck for much of the day in the face of the Steeler defense (including one brutal hit that left many observers fearing he had a concussion). 

The only solace Shula might have taken over the weekend was that, compared with the Dolphins, the luck of the Oakland Raiders was downright catastrophic. Once Derek Carr was felled for the duration with an injury, the Raiders blew their last two regular-season games. The team’s fans, who had not experienced a wild ride to the Super Bowl since 2002, sensed that, unlike Jeff Hostetler with the New York Giants a quarter-century ago or Tom Brady with the New England Patriots a decade later, a backup would not leap off the bench and convey them to the Promised Land.

It was bad enough that Matt McGloin joined Carr among the injured before this weekend’s playoff game against the Houston Texans. Left to pick up the fallen standard was rookie Connor Cook (pictured), third on the depth chart, in his first start. Ever. Let’s just say he looked like a deer caught in the headlights.

By the end of the 27-14 loss, Oakland Raiders head coach Jack Del Rio must have felt afflicted not just with bad luck, but with very bad luck.

This Day in Sports History (Colts Beat Giants in “Greatest Game”)

December 28, 1958—With the former head football coach of my high school, Vince Lombardi, serving as offensive coordinator, the New York Giants lost the first “sudden-death” overtime game in the history of the National Football League to the Baltimore Costs, 23-17.

A number of people have called this “the greatest game ever played.” Giants running back Frank Gifford, who fumbled twice in the game, remembers it as sloppily played, pointing to seven turnovers altogether on that blustery winter day. Philadelphia Eagles coach Andy Reid, who broke down a “coaches’ film” of the game this past spring for Atlantic Monthly writer Mark Bowden, would probably agree. So, I bet, would the notoriously perfectionist Lombardi.

Nevertheless, there’s no doubting the attention given this NFL championship game, especially when you consider the following:

* Approximately 45 million people watched the broadcast of the game, ratifying the NFL as a major TV draw 19 years after NBC became the first network to televise a contest.
* Among the people in attendance was Vice-President Richard Nixon.
* The Giants may have had the most talented assistant coaching staff in the history of the game—Lombardi as offensive coordinator and Tom Landry directing the defense.
* Besides Lombardi and Landry, 14 other people associated with the game would enter the Pro Football Hall of Fame, including Colts coach Week Ewbank and Giants owner Wellington Mara.

I am a longtime Giants fan and, as a graduate of St. Cecilia, a Lombardi aficionado. But I have to admit that one of the most inspiring stories of this game was the crucial partnership of Johnny Unitas and Raymond Berry. The pair—nothing at all like the mastodons that now roam the gridiron—would never have even stepped foot on a football field if their naysayers could have helped it.

That they could have succeeded at all was due to a blue-collar work ethic, tireless craft and undaunted grit. Two years before “the greatest game,” Unitas had been picked up off the slag heap, so to speak, by the Colts, who had found him playing in a semipro sandlot league after he’d been cut by the Steelers.

Even before that, when he was a college hopeful, Notre Dame had ignored him, never believing he could bulk up. In a way, they were right—Unitas finished up his NFL career with the San Diego Chargers, a team that, exactly a decade before, had introduced steroids into the game, and the proud old quarterback was distinctly out of place in that overgrown lockerroom. In his prime, it didn’t matter—no field general could move his forces at will and attack the enemy at the exact point where it hurt when everything depended on it like Unitas.

Likewise, those paid to know about those things discounted Berry as lacking speed. They overlooked his big hands and an obsession with detail that made the wide receiver what writer Mark Bowden, in an excerpt from his book The Best Game Ever in Sports Illustrated, called “the prototype of the modern football player.” Not only did he study 25 pages of game notes in preparation for the confrontation with the Giants, but before the fans trooped into the stadium that day he minutely inspected the turf, examining which spots he could exploit—preparation that aided him in his playoff-record 12 catches that afternoon.

Two last points and I’m out of here:

* Lombardi was halfway through his post-St. Cecilia High School life—and at a career crossroads—during the game. He badly wanted the head coaching job of the Giants, but the Mara family made too much of a fetish out of personal loyalty. They didn’t want to push out the door current head coach Jim Lee Howell, even though he cheerfully admitted his penchant for delegating to Lombardi and Landry with the one-liner, “I just blow up the footballs and keep order." In short order, Lombardi and Landry left for head coaching posts with the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys, where they forged the records that put them in the Football Hall of Fame—and even Howell had decided to hang it up after the 1960 season.

* Colts running back Alan “The Horse” Ameche, whose one-yard plunge into the endzone decided the contest, was the subject of one of the funniest scenes in the great 1982 Barry Levinson comedy Diner. You might remember the scene when a sports-fanatic groom decides that his prospective bride needs to pass a trivia test before the ceremony. “Alan Ameche” was the answer she had on the tip of her tongue when her fiance’s friend blurted it out. The capper of the scene: The groom emerging to tell his buddies that the wedding was off! As Paul Reiser’s character Modell sums it up: “We all know most marriages depend on a firm grasp of football trivia.”