Coach won 4 Super Bowls
PITTSBURGH — Chuck Noll, the Hall of Fame coach who won a record four Super Bowl titles with the Pittsburgh Steelers, died Friday night at his home. He was 82.
The Allegheny County Medical Examiner said Mr. Noll died of natural causes.
Mr. Noll transformed the Steelers from a long-standing joke into one of the NFL’s pre-eminent powers, becoming the only coach to win four Super Bowls. He was a demanding figure who did not make close friends with his players, yet was a successful and motivating leader.
The Steelers won the four Super Bowls over six seasons (1974, 1975, 1978 and 1979), an unprecedented run that made Pittsburgh one of the NFL’s marquee franchises, one that breathed life into a struggling, blue-collar city.
“He was one of the great coaches of the game,” Steelers owner Dan Rooney once said. “He ranks up there with [George] Halas, [Tom] Landry and [Curly] Lambeau.”
Mr. Noll’s 16-8 record in postseason play remains one of the best in league history. He retired in 1991 with a 209-156-1 record in 23 seasons, after inheriting a team that had never won a postseason game. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1993.
Mr. Noll worked so well with Steelers President Rooney that the team never felt the need to have a general manager. When he retired, and was replaced by Bill Cowher, only four other coaches or managers in modern U.S. pro sports history had run their teams longer than Mr. Noll had.
“Chuck Noll is the best thing that happened to the Rooneys since they got on the boat (to America) in Ireland,” Art Rooney II, the former Steelers personnel chief and the son of the team founder, once said.
A former messenger guard for his hometown Cleveland Browns who earned the nicknamed Knute Knowledge — as in Knute Rockne — Mr. Noll was an assistant with the San Diego Chargers and Baltimore Colts for nine seasons. Then he accepted what seemed a dead-end job in January 1969 as coach of the NFL’s least-successful organization.
Mr. Noll, hired only after Penn State’s Joe Paterno turned down a $350,000, fiveyear offer, was different from any Steelers coach before him. He immediately brought intelligence, toughness, stability, confidence, character and a can-do mindset to a franchise accustomed to constant upheaval and everchanging personnel.
Perhaps not the most colorful coach behind the microphone, Mr. Noll could often be counted on for memora- ble, motivational one-liners that became rallying cries. Phrases like “A life of frustration is inevitable for any coach whose main enjoyment is winning,” and “Before you can win a game, you have to not lose it,” and “The thrill isn’t in the winning, it’s in the doing,” spoke volumes about what Mr. Noll was trying to accomplish. They went over well in a football-crazed region of Pennsylvania.
The day after Mr. Noll was hired, the Steelers drafted defensive lineman Joe Greene. He was the first of the nine Hall of Famers selected during the Noll era. Four of the others were drafted within Mr. Noll’s first four seasons: Terry Bradshaw, Mel Blount, Jack Ham and Franco Harris.
Four more arrived in the first five rounds of the 1974 draft: Lynn Swann, Jack Lambert, John Stallworth and Mike Webster. And the 1971 draft, though it produced only one Hall of Fam- er [Ham], generated seven starters.
In 1977, Mr. Noll wound up in a federal court trial. He accused Raiders defensive back George Atkinson, who had leveled Swann with a brutal hit the season before, of being part of the NFL’s “criminal element.”
Mr. Noll prevailed, but there were hard feelings when, under oath, he included Blount as also being part of that criminal element. The Steelers went 9-5 that season, but rebounded to win the championship in the 1978 and 1979 seasons.
When all the talent began to retire, the championships ended. Great drafts gave way to poor ones. The Steelers won only two playoff games and no conference championships in Mr. Noll’s final 12 seasons, missing the postseason eight times.
When he retired, Mr. Noll always said he would never coach another team, and he didn’t.