Won Rose Bowl as coach of Michigan State, helped build the Steel Curtain
George Perles, who coached Michigan State to a Rose Bowl victory in 1988 and was a key defensive assistant for the dominant Pittsburgh Steelers teams of the 1970s, died Tuesday. He was 85.
Mr. Perles played football at Michigan State and later was an assistant coach, head coach, athletic director and member of the school’s governing body. Michigan State announced Mr. Perles’ death Wednesday.
“George touched so many lives. He helped so many people. He was fiercely loyal and never forgot where he came from,” said Brian Mosallam, a former Michigan State football player now on the Board of Trustees. “We lost a giant.”
Michigan State hired Mr. Perles in 1983 to revive its beleaguered football program. He did just that, winning Big Ten titles in 1987 and 1990 and coaching the school in seven bowl games. He helped the Spartans beat Southern California, 20-17, on Jan. 1, 1988, for their first Rose Bowl win in three-plus decades.
Mr. Perles was an assistant coach for the Spartans before he was hired away in 1972 to coach the Steelers’ defensive line. He later was defensive coordinator and assistant head coach for a team that won four NFL championships in six years. The Philadelphia Stars of the United States Football League signed him in 1982, but he got out of his contract to return to the campus in East Lansing, Michigan.
The Green Bay Packers tried to lure Mr. Perles to the NFL shortly after his Rose Bowl victory and the New York Jets tried two years later. Both times, Mr. Perles leveraged the opportunities to get what he wanted at Michigan State.
He signed a 10-year contract after passing on the chance to lead the Packers. Just before he was going to be introduced as the Jets’ coach in 1990, he was given the title of athletic director despite objections from John DiBiaggio, the university president.
Mr. Perles was forced to give up the AD job in 1992 and was fired as coach late in the 1994 season with the team on the way to a 5-6 finish. After an outside investigation, Peter McPherson, then the school president, said the Spartans would forfeit their games because of an academic scandal. The NCAA cleared Mr. Perles.
“I would never have stayed at Michigan State if I knew there could be so much conflict about it, or that my staying could somehow hurt the school,” he said in his book, “George Perles: The Ride of a Lifetime,” published in 1995. “I would have taken the job with Green Bay (in 1988) or with the Jets (in 1990) if I had known what was coming.”
Nick Saban, a former assistant, took over as Michigan State coach after Mr. Perles.
“He was one of my mentors in this profession, and he gave me my first opportunity to be in a position of leadership as the defensive coordinator at Michigan State,” said Saban, now Alabama’s head coach.
Steelers coach Chuck Noll hired Mr. Perles to coach defensive linemen in 1972. Hall of Fame defensive tackle Joe Greene recalled how Mr. Perles asked players for their ideas.
Greene remembered suggesting to Mr. Perles during the 1974 season that he line up in an inside gap instead of slanting into it. That led to the Stunt 4-3, a staple of one of the NFL’s great defenses known as the Steel Curtain.
“We worked on it during practice that season when we went on to win our first of four Super Bowls, but it wasn’t a big part of the game plan until we played Oakland in the playoffs,” Greene said in a 2019 interview with The Associated Press. “Oakland didn’t know what to do with it. For about 2 ½ seasons, no one could run inside us because we had everything locked down. If George said my idea was bad, we may not have ever seen the Stunt 4-3.”