Bay Area Coaching Bonanza:
It's time for me to toss my two cents into the buckets of money being spent and saved in this soap opera of two young Bay Area coaches.
Jon Gruden and Steve Mariucci are two of the best young minds in professional football today. That being said, they both have taken a lot of heat from the media and the fans right here at home for their lack of success.
Mariucci is 46 and Gruden is 38. They both were given head coaching jobs very early in their careers and took over teams with great history and tradition.
One raider fan wrote to the San Jose Mercury News saying Gruden is expendable because "he is no Lombardi or Walsh" Who is? in the 82 years of the NFL, only 12 coaches have shrines in Canton, Ohio. And none of them had the scrutiny of today's NFL head coaches.
These head coaches are in the Hall of Fame with one common characteristic often overlooked: They all turned nobodies into dynasties. The nobodies is what people forget. There isn't a whole lot of pressure to take over a team that has won nothing.
Mariucci was following the best winning percentage in NFL history. Gruden was following a "Commitment to Excellence" and the mind piercing phrase "Just Win, Baby!"
Of the dozen NFL head coaches who have busts in Canton, eight were only with one team in their entire pro career. George Halas coached Chicago for 40 years and Chuck Noll spent 37 with Pittsburgh.
Tom Landry and Don Shula both started franchises (Dallas and Miami) and each coached for over 25 years there.
Lombardi and Walsh were both very successful very early and did in 10 years what most of these coaches spent decades achieving. Joe Gibbs and George Allen, both spent their Hall of Fame years in Washington. Gibbs won three Super Bowls in 12 years. Allen went 116-47-5 but never won a Super Bowl.
Same with Bud Grant and Marv Levy, who each fell short 4 times. Both coached for 17 years in the NFL (Grant spent all 17 in Minnesota, while Levy coached for 5 years in Kansas City before heading to Buffalo) but never held the Vince Lombardi Trophy.
Paul Brown not only won seven titles in 12 years, but literally created the Browns.
And finally, Weeb Ewbank, the only coach to win Super Bowls with two different teams, round out the only coaches considered worthy enough to be remembered.
In the wake of Dennis Green's firing, whose 10 years was the longest NFL tenure along with Bill Cowher of the Steelers, reminds us that never again will a coach be given the freedom of these great minds of yesterday.
Noll, Shula, Gibbs, Levy and Walsh all retired. The weren't forced to resign. They were not pushed out like so many coaches today. The pressure to win now is so great in today's game that many coaches get burned out or decide to change jobs before things get rough.
We may never again see a coach with 20 or more years of service to one team at the professional level. We may never see Don Shula's record for wins be broken. And we may never see some of the great minds of today, like Gruden and Mariucci, blossom into the great runs of Lombardi and Walsh or the great careers like Shula and Noll.