NFL Open Thread: Let’s remember Air Coryell edition
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This is a fun story:
The Chargers gathered for a 9 a.m. meeting. Their coach, Tommy Prothro, had stayed at the stadium all night poring through film of a humiliating 26-3 loss to the Packers the day before. The Chargers had managed only a field goal. They’d turned it over 11 times. They were 1-3 on the season. Prothro had seen enough. He decided to quit.
He told the players. Then the new coach was introduced, and as Don Coryell made his way to the front of the room, Fouts muttered something under his breath.
Holy sh–, this is amazing.
To that point, Fouts had done nothing in the NFL. “A horrible career,” he calls it. He was a bust, and more than that, a headache. He spent his rookie season warring within, torn between the Chargers’ coaches and their aging, iconic starter.
Even at 40, Johnny Unitas never saw the third-round pick out of Oregon as any kind of threat — “He saw me as someone who’d go get him a beer,” Fouts says. The Chargers’ staff that year was primarily made up of old Giants and Packers, two teams that happened to be chief rivals of the Baltimore Colts, the franchise Unitas spent 17 seasons with before landing in San Diego in 1973. “The coaches wanted me to do what they were teaching, not the things Johnny was telling me off to the side,” Fouts says. “I didn’t always listen to the coaches.”
Unitas hurt his shoulder and lasted just four starts in San Diego, never to play again. Fouts took over and didn’t win a game all year. By 1978, he’d played under three head coaches and five offensive coordinators. He’d won 13 games in 47 starts. Fouts had demanded a trade, taken the team to arbitration, lost, then threatened to retire at 26. But Fouts knew Coryell was a disciple of Sid Gillman, father of the forward pass, and that Coryell’s San Diego State teams used to outdraw the Chargers in their own stadium.
Suddenly, there was hope.
Within days, the new coach added a play to the offense — 989 F-rub sneak — that featured two go-routes on the outside with rookie first-round wide receiver John Jefferson as the primary option. The Chargers hardly practiced it, the assistant coaches never thinking Coryell would dial it up in the game. Sure enough, that Sunday against the Patriots, Coryell called it in the first quarter.
His assistants figured the bravado would blow up in his face. An argument ensued.
“Dan, if we get this coverage, we’re gonna do this,” offensive coordinator Ray Perkins told Fouts.
“But if it’s this coverage,” another coach chimed in, “then go here …”
Coryell stood in silence for several seconds, letting his assistants bicker.
Finally, he spoke up.
“Ah, hell!” he shouted with a distinctive lisp that at least one former Cardinals player likened to Daffy Duck. “Just throw the son of a b—- to JJ!”
Fouts did. Jefferson caught it. The Air Coryell Chargers were born.
They never could win it all, but they won what might be the greatest game of football ever played, which is not nothing: