Ryan’s best play: Making Eagles fans feel like champions
The whole idea of coaching, the very concept of sports, is to design a plan for fulfillment. The geniuses, and there aren’t many, will figure it out. Buddy Ryan, who died Tuesday, was one of those geniuses.
He was a head coach in the NFL for seven seasons, five with the Eagles, and he never won a playoff game. For that, there would be no parades. But he would never need one. By then, he’d already figured out that the only difference between championship teams and teams that acted like championship teams was that one could sell the officially licensed souvenir swag.
The Eagles were more than a quarter-century removed from their last championship when Ryan became their coach in 1986. They still haven’t won another. But because of his people skills, his poker face, his guts, his snarl, his background as a sergeant in the Korean War, his disregard for authority, his risky defense, his colorful speech, his sly grin, the native of Oklahoma did the impossible. He gave Eagles fans the precise thrill of being champions without the inconvenience of finding shelf space for that clumsy Lombardi Trophy.
He told the players, he told their supporters, he told Philadelphia that they all were winners, that they were going to be winners and that would remain winners. And even with insufficient on-field accomplishment to support the claim, they all believed. For that, they would spend not only Ryan’s five seasons in the Vet but every season after thrusting out their chests and belting out song, brandishing the attitude that every other NFL team was playing for the silver medal. Buddy’s team was No. 1, no matter what those smeared printed standings were suggesting.
Ryan was 82 when he died, and he will be remembered nationally for coordinating the defense of the 1985 Chicago Bears and for his “46” defense, an attack approach with arrogant disregard for risk. But he ran his most innovative and most successful plays in Philadelphia. And he ran them right away. A horseman in the offseason, Ryan knew how to read everything from the past performances to the body language of the participants. So it was within hours after being likened by Norman Braman to Vince Lombardi that he would announce that they were about to win the NFC East. The Eagles could have offered free beer and their fans wouldn’t have soaked it up as quickly. Aware that he’d created a
spark, Ryan doubled-down and began to ridicule the Dallas Cowboys with every public opportunity. That made him to Eagles fans what the 1974-75 Flyers were to a Spectrum full of hockey faithful. Finally, they had a bully too.
At some point, Ryan would need to win some games. And by his third season, the Eagles would win 10, finish first in their division and, after a bye, roll into Chicago for a playoff game. As he had vowed during the week, Ryan would order the team bus to circle Soldier Field on the way from the airport to the hotel, blaring its air horn. “We don’t sneak into Chicago,” he would snarl. The Eagles would lose that game, in fog. The result would be so obscured, too, by history. What endured was that attitude, the one Eagles fans would come to embrace.
Aware that any good leader needed an assortment of enemies, Ryan produced plenty. Whenever a player was unsigned and skipping training camp, Ryan would growl that it could all be handled better if Braman wasn’t summering in France. When the Eagles finished 7-8 in 1987, largely because Ryan showed disrespect and disregard for a replacement teamthat went 0-3 in those games, he would use his seasonending press conference to distribute what he’d call “scab rings” to two startled team executives in the back of the room. He was good at picking enemies, in his organization, in his league. And with each fight, his fans felt like they delivering, not absorbing, the black eyes. For that, they never seemed to mind that Ryan never did end a season with his green baseball cap soaked in spent Gatorade.
Ryan pretended to de- spise the press, the fans enjoying it whenever he would, for example, tell a writer to “go inquire someplace else” on camera. But in more private settings, a softer personalitywould leak through, an indication that what he really was doing was what all coaches do. He was designing and running plays.
Ryan never minded being unpopular. Often, he would say, “If I win, the press can’t hurtme, and if I loss, it can’t help me.” His one miscalculation was that he could win and be fired anyway, not because of his hot-and-cold relationship with the media, but because he’d picked fights with the that man in France, the one autographing the paychecks. So Ryan was fired by Braman after a third consecutive playoff season. He would surface in Arizona, where he tried to run that familiar sweep, telling fans of a franchise that hadn’t won an NFL championship since 1947 that they had “a winner in town.” They didn’t. And two years later, Ryan was fired, never to coach again, retiring to a Kentucky horse farm. Among his thoroughbreds was one named “Fired for Winning.”
It’s been 26 years since Ryan coached the Eagles, who have fired four full-time coaches since, somewho won, some who didn’t, none who led a parade. From time to time, he would surface to remind the customers that had the Eagles just kept him around a little longer, they would have won a Super Bowl.
The fans, as they did all along, believed every Oklahoma-accented syllable. That was Buddy Ryan’s best play. That was the only one he ever needed. That was his genius.