For those of us who have been around a while, it’s tempting to wonder after just a couple of days of the circus that is Super Bowl Week: How would George Allen have handled all of this?
The growth of the NFL’s championship game and the spectacle surrounding it, and not incidentally the more than 6,000 credentialed media members in Las Vegas this week, probably would have driven the Hall of Fame coach crazy. Allen served 11 sometimes turbulent but always successful NFL seasons with the Rams and Washington and reached the title game in Super Bowl VII.
And as author Mike Richman noted in his recently released book, “George Allen: A Football Life,” he railed at what he termed distractions in any case, and did not handle the media and promotional demands of what was a more modest a Super Bowl well at all.
Allen’s team finished the 1972 regular season 11-3 and beat the Packers and rival Cowboys to reach the Super Bowl at the Coliseum against Miami, which was attempting to and ultimately did complete the NFL’s first perfect season with a 14-7 victory.
“He was so annoyed with the media coverage at Super Bowl VII,” Richman said in a telephone conversation this week. “Today it would be even so much more overwhelming. If this (week) were his Super Bowl, who knows how he would handle it. … He was so uptight because of the media coverage there and that they were taking up his time.”
But while Allen reached the Super Bowl only once in his 11 full NFL seasons, 1966 through 1977, his winning percentage (116-47-5) is the fourth best in NFL history, behind Guy Chamberlain (who coached in the 1920s and won 78.4% of his games) and a couple of coaches you might recognize: John Madden (.759 in 10 seasons with the Raiders) and Vince Lombardi (.738 in 10 seasons with the Packers and Washington).
More than that, Allen was an innovator. He was the first to consider special teams aptitude in roster decisions; the first to stress offseason work (upon taking the…
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