CORYELL HAD ROOTS IN RUN GAME
Don Coryell’s original plan was to spend his life walking through forests in the Pacific Northwest and enjoying the outdoors, not stalking football sidelines and innovating offenses.
“I started out as a forestry major,” Coryell told Sports Illustrated in a 2008 interview, two years before his death. “I wanted to be a forest ranger. But there was no way I could get through all the science.
“So I withdrew before I flunked out and switched to physical education.”
That was at the University of Washington, where Coryell played defensive back for the Huskies.
“I wasn’t good enough to play offense,” he said. “Even on defense, I think I started one game, and that was in my senior year.”
Coryell may not have been good enough to play offense. But when it came to conjuring up what could be done on offense and imagining possibilities no one had considered before, Coryell was a genius.
That brilliance — long, long overdue in the minds of Coryell’s many supporters — was recognized Thursday night when the NFL’s 2023 Hall of Fame class was announced. Coryell, a finalist six previous times, was elected to the Hall of Fame in the coach/contributor category.
Former Chargers quarterback Dan Fouts made the announcement during the “NFL Honors” show.
“I owe my career to this man,” Fouts said, “and we all owe our game to this man. The father of the modern passing attack. The late, great Coach Don Coryell.”
Fouts congratulated Mindy Lewis, Coryell’s daughter, who was welcomed
on stage to acknowledge the honor.
Lewis said afterwards that the election “just hasn’t really sunk in.”
“It’s just so thrilling to know that after all these years, he’s still relevant in football and that people still bring him (up),” she said.
Lewis said she had begun to lose hope that her father would ever be enshrined.
“I hate to admit that, but I always hoped and always felt that God would put him in,” she said.
She called Fouts’ introduction
“very sweet.”
Lewis, accompanied by her husband and daughter, is in Arizona for the Hall of Fame announcement as well as Sunday’s Super Bowl.
Said Coryell’s son, Mike: “I think my dad most of all would be grateful to everybody that helped him in every way to get to this place, all his players, all the coaches, everyone who supported him.
“It would have brought tears to his eyes to thank all those people. It’s really heartfelt.”
Waiting is nothing new. Coryell learned patience preparing himself for the profession. He was late to college, as many men were during the early-1940s.
After graduating from
Seattle’s Lincoln High School, where he played quarterback in a single-wing offense, Coryell’s college career was delayed by three years in the Army.
His military training, like his offensive philosophy, began on the ground, with a mountain infantry unit, and led to the air, where he trained as a paratrooper.
After earning a master’s in P.E. in 1950 at Washington, Coryell bounced around eight different coaching jobs in his first decade, from two high schools in Hawaii (assistant at Honolulu’s Punahou and Farrington highs) to a college in Canada (head coach at the University of British Columbia) to USC.
The longest he stayed put was during three years as head coach from 1957-59 at Whittier College, where Coryell replaced another man of some renown, George Allen.
A 1952 book by former TCU coach L.R. Dutch Meyer called “Spread Formation Football” was among the resources that may have sparked Coryell’s marvelous football mind.
A bedrock philosophy was established during his first decade in coaching — “You look at your players,” Coryell told SI, “and you figure out what the hell they can do.”
When his top fullback was injured in 1955 while coaching at Washington’s Wenatchee Valley College, Coryell borrowed from elements of the I Formation and T Formation — he called it the “IT” Formation — making him one of the pioneers of what became known as the Power I, an offense embraced by USC head coach John McKay in 1960 when Coryell was one of his assistant coaches.
Coryell was famous for his focus on football.
“Every year we would go up to Washington to visit his mom, and we would camp along the way,” Lewis said. “He was a lousy driver. He had a one track mind, and my mom would drive.
“He always had a yellow legal pad. He would be sitting in the front and doing Xs and Os the whole drive.”
There is the well-worn story of Coryell leaving the family’s La Mesa home one morning on trash day.
He put the trash cans in the car’s trunk, intending to drop them off at the bottom of the long driveway.
Before he was halfway down the drive, Coryell’s mind was elsewhere, and the trash cans were still in the car when he arrived at work.