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RIP Chuck Noll

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Inky_Wretch, Jun 13, 2014.

  1. Smallpotatoes

    Smallpotatoes Well-Known Member

    Are you suggesting Tom Landry and Vince Lombardi are in the other place?
     
  2. Liut

    Liut Well-Known Member

    RIP.

    Didn't Madden offer him a coordinator's position the year before he went to Pittsburgh?
     
  3. jr/shotglass

    jr/shotglass Well-Known Member

    Exactly. And he didn't just roll out the footballs at camp, either.
     
  4. outofplace

    outofplace Well-Known Member

    True, though Art Rooney, Jr. and Bill Nunn deserve a good bit of credit for those draft picks, too. At least Noll was smart enough to back down when need be, as he did when the scouts insisted on Franco Harris even though Noll wanted Robert Newhouse.
     
  5. Mark2010

    Mark2010 Active Member

    Interesting how Noll, Tom Landry and Don Shula all coached their same teams for more than 20 years. No one comes close to that anymore. Now, it's win in three years or you're out. Kinda sad.
     
  6. Batman

    Batman Well-Known Member

    Don Shula wasn't exactly a schlub when he went to the Dolphins. He'd won an NFL championship already, and the late 1960s Colts are among the forgotten great teams. He also got the Dolphins to the Super Bowl in his second season with them, and won in the third and fourth.
    Noll inherited a mess, but had the Steelers in the playoffs by his fourth season.
    Of those three, only Landry (sub-.500 records each of his first five seasons, then .500 in Year 5 and back-to-back NFL championship game losses in 1965 and '66) seems like he needed a longer rope than usual. He started with an expansion team, though.
     
  7. Riptide

    Riptide Well-Known Member

    You get the point about the expansion team, right?
    I mean, you must. But you said he needed a longer rope than usual.

    Well, yeah ...
     
  8. Riptide

    Riptide Well-Known Member

    What was Noll like on the practice field?

    Never saw much about his coaching style. But he didn't strike me as a screamer.

    Or was he?
     
  9. Mark2010

    Mark2010 Active Member

    The longevity of all of those, as well as others of that era like Bud Grant, George Allen and Chuck Knox, is remarkable.
     
  10. 3_Octave_Fart

    3_Octave_Fart Well-Known Member

    When I think of Noll the first thing I think of is him jabbing a finger into Jerry Glanville's chest after a typically physical old AFC Central game at the Astrodome.
    He did not seem like a guy who suffered fools gladly.
     
  11. Baron Scicluna

    Baron Scicluna Well-Known Member

    The other amazing thing is that he went 1-13 in his first season. No matter how used to losing that ther Steelers were back then, the fact that he managed to survive that first season and go on Tao do what he did is even more remarkable. Winning one game in a season today would get almost everyone fired, even if they were a rookie coach. Everyone would be saying the coach didn't have a clue.
     
  12. Batman

    Batman Well-Known Member

    I meant his success came in year 6, where most franchises -- even expansion franchises -- would get antsy after four or five seasons like he had in the early 60s. The Cowboys made the turn just outside that "normal" window so, yeah, he needed a bit more leeway than most coaches get. They gave him a 10-year constract extension in 1964, though, so he obviously was never in any real danger of being fired.
     
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