Hub Arkush: Remembering the great Don Shula

The entire National Football League community and millions of fans across America were deeply saddened and somewhat shocked by the news that Don Shula, the winningest coach in NFL history passed away Monday morning four months past his 90th birthday.

In a statement from the Miami Dolphins the team said Shula’s cause of death has not yet been determined, but it was not related to coronavirus and he died “peacefully.”

The NFL legend was not reported or rumored to be ill and remained mostly robust in occasional interviews over the past year or two.

Shula’s 328 regular-season victories were 10 more than Chicago Bears legend and NFL founder George “Papa Bear” Halas, and 55 more than current New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, who of course is still active and third on the list.

Including postseason play, Shula ranks first in wins with a 347-173- 6, .667 record, Halas stands at 324-151-31, .682 and Belichick is 304-139, .686.

When the conversation turns to the greatest NFL coach of all time, it almost always starts with these three and then many will add Paul Brown, Chuck Noll, Tom Landry and Bill Walsh to the conversation.

While all were/are obviously brilliant coaches, the debate over which is the G.O.A.T. often turns to categories with Halas and Shula recognized for their longevity – Halas coached the Bears over 40 seasons and Shula coached Baltimore and Miami over 33 – and total wins. Brown, Noll and Landry, in addition to Shula and Halas, are well regarded for their toughness and character, Halas, Brown, Walsh and Belichick as innovators, and Walsh and Belichick as strategic geniuses.

All but Belichick, who will be a slam-dunk first-ballot choice, are Hall of Famers.

In the end, what separates Belichick and Halas perhaps slightly are their respective 31-12 and 6-3 playoff records compared to Shula’s 19-17 mark. Halas and Belichick also hold the NFL record for championships with six each while Shula notched two, and they have slightly stronger winning percentages.

Of course, one of Shula’s titles was with his 17-0 1972 Dolphins club, the only undefeated champions in NFL history.

Another interesting Chicago Bears connection is the 1985 Bears – considered by many to be the greatest team in NFL history over a single season and coached by another Hall of Famer, Da’ Coach, Mike Ditka – suffered its only defeat in an 18-1 season at the hands of Shula’s 13-5 Dolphins, 38-24, in a historic Monday night affair at which Ditka and defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan are reported to have almost come to blows in the lockerroom at halftime.

NFL fans everywhere longed for a Super Bowl rematch that season, but the second-seeded Dolphins dropped the AFC title game to the fifth-seeded Patriots in Miami, 31-14.

Shula was drafted as a defensive back out of John Carroll University in the ninth round of the 1951 draft by Brown’s Cleveland Browns team and played seven seasons for the Browns, Colts and Washington. He then coached the next two seasons at Virginia and Kentucky. He then spent a season as the defensive backs coach for the Detroit Lions, and the next two years as the Lions defensive coordinator,

But what is often lost in the re-telling of Shula’s career is that the then-Baltimore Colts made Shula, at 33, the youngest head coach in NFL history in 1963.

That, of course, was the year Halas won his last championship in Chicago.

In Baltimore, his quarterback was the great Johnny Unitas and six seasons later, with Earl Morral playing most of the season for an injured Johnny U., Shula’s Colts won the NFL title and a berth in Super Bowl III.

In spite of being a 17-point underdog, Joe Namath guaranteed a win for the fledgling AFL’s Jets, and the rest as they say is history.

A year later following the ’69 season, with the Colts preparing to switch to the AFC as part of the merger, Shula stunned the league by agreeing to leave Baltimore and join the Miami Dolphins as their new head coach, a move that cost Miami owner Joe Robbie a first-round draft choice for tampering.

Just two seasons later, Shula guided Miami to its first of three consecutive Super Bowls: a loss to Landry’s Cowboys before winning the next two over Washington and the Vikings.

He would go on to lead the Dolphins to the playoffs in 16 of his 26 seasons, seven AFC title games and five Super Bowls, and over 26 seasons he had just two losing records in 1976 and 1988.

Another oft forgotten story is how Shula’s Dolphins career was almost cut in half when in the middle of the 1983 season the owner of the upstart USFL’s New Jersey Generals, Donald Trump, offered him a $5 million contract to leave his $400,000 deal with the Dolphins.

Shula was allegedly ready to join Trump until Trump announced to the media the deal was done except for Shula’s demand of a rent free apartment at Trump Tower, a move that caused Shula to break off the talks.

Years later one of Shula’s greatest stars, Larry Czonka claimed that Shula would have taken the job but was angered at being “thrown out to the press” by Trump.

Shula had two sons, David and Michael, and two daughters, Donna and Sharon.

His oldest, David, is a former head coach of the Cincinnati Bengals, and his youngest, Mike, was the Bears tight end coach from 1993-1995, the Dolphins quarterbacks coach for Dave Wannstedt from 2000-2002, the head coach at Alabama from 2003-2006 preceding Nick Saban, and the offensive coordinator at Carolina under Ron Rivera from 2013-2017.

In recent seasons, Shula had been most visible at whatever point in the year the league’s last remaining unbeaten team would lose for the first time, ending the threat of a second club matching the ’72 Dolphins undefeated campaign.

But he will be most remembered not only as one of the game’s greatest coaches of all time, but as a man of outstanding character and dignity, deeply beloved by almost every man that ever played for him, and greatly respected by fans and media for whom he always had time and almost never disappointed.