With resume enhanced by coaching Kansas City Chiefs, a case for Dick Vermeil in Canton
Editor’s note: Former Kansas City Chiefs general manager Carl Peterson asked KC Star sports columnist Vahe Gregorian to lend support to efforts to get former Chiefs coach Dick Vermeil inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Here’s what Gregorian wrote in making the case for Vermeil’s inclusion ...
Dear Pro Football Hall of Fame Senior Committee:
When Carl Peterson asked if I’d consider joining in the support of Dick Vermeil for the Pro Football Hall of Fame Class of 2022 as you prepare to meet in August, I told him it would be my honor and delight.
I’m writing this from Kansas City, where Vermeil further burnished a superb career by becoming one of only two NFL coaches (along with Hall of Famer Bill Parcells) to guide a third franchise to division titles having led two others to Super Bowls … and where his ongoing sphere of influence on the game includes a matchmaker role in Clark Hunt hiring Andy Reid in 2013.
As you know, Reid is among the NFL luminaries who enthusiastically advocated for Vermeil in a letter sent last summer that I believe will be submitted again.
But my admiration of Vermeil and appreciation of his rare and enduring impact on the NFL and everyone around him, including the will to transform cynical team cultures and win over skeptical fan bases, goes back nearly 50 years to his revival of the Philadelphia Eagles and subsequent rejuvenation of the St. Louis Rams when I lived in each area.
That’s not a quirky point of nostalgia but, I believe, a useful vantage point from which to consider the essence of Vermeil and what distinguishes him even among other terrific candidates.
Spanning two different eras in the game over the 19 years between the Vermeil-infused Super Bowls, each challenge was radically different in certain ways but had fundamental common denominators.
The Eagles had been stranded between awful and mediocre, lugging a 33-74-5 in the eight years before he took over after the 1975 season, lured from UCLA to rebuild a team that had traded at least its first two draft picks through 1978 long before true free agency was a remedy.
It was a recipe for failure, compounded by having to grind against the grain of an entire organization mired in a defeatist mindset … not to mention against the backdrop of an often ornery group of fans: “I saw more contact in the stands today than I did on the field,” Vermeil told Peterson as they walked off at Veterans Stadium early in his first season.
Because he inherited such a rotten hand, much as he did in St. Louis with a team that had the worst overall record in the NFL over the previous seven seasons before his arrival, it was going to take time if it was going to happen at all.
Which brings us to a crucial contextual point about his career record, epitomized in Philadelphia en route to the first Super Bowl in franchise history and virtually duplicated in St. Louis on the way to winning Super Bowl XXXIV.
And it was also true to some degree in Kansas City — where the Chiefs had failed to make the playoffs four of the previous five seasons before he took over 20 years ago.
Some note that Vermeil’s career regular-season record is a fine but not glowing 120-109. But it’s at the very core of the virtues of coaching that his work with each franchise was a reclamation project, albeit less dramatically so in Kansas City.
So consider how his record looked after going 32-60 in his first two seasons at each stop: 88-49.
And while we might suppose that he’d have won many more if he hadn’t left coaching for 14 years citing burnout in 1982, it seems a worthy exercise to instead ponder how remarkable it was to resume coaching in another time and place and become one of just seven men to guide two franchises to the Super Bowl (along with Reid).
More to the point, no one has navigated teams to Super Bowls with more time elapsed in between (the second-longest was Don Shula taking the Colts and Dolphins 16 years apart).
“I think it’s tougher to get there twice with two teams than it is even to win it once, because you have to reinvent yourself,” Vermeil told the late, great Don Banks of Sports Illustrated in 2016.
So he did reinvent himself in some ways, presiding over The Greatest Show on Turf with the Rams via a quarterback in Kurt Warner who’d never started an NFL game before that season.
But the original Vermeil, the heart and soul that anyone who knows him can feel, resonated all the way through. And what that stands for is something beyond what any numbers might reveal, something intangible and yet infinite and lasting about what he has contributed to the game.
It goes well beyond such points of interest as becoming the first full time special teams coach in NFL history in 1969 with the Rams (along with Marv Levy doing the same in Philadelphia) and developing the influential two-point conversion chart for Tommy Prothro at UCLA and, well, being the guy who made crying in football OK.
It’s in the everlasting impact he had on countless players, despite being so demanding as to be deemed a tyrant at times, and on other coaches both as a rival and colleague.
It’s in the way he illuminated so many in his broadcasting career and through his ambassadorship for the game in how he conducts himself and stays connected to former players and has dealt with the media — both as a conduit to fans and simply as a human being.
It’s the fusion of that along with his more measurable achievements that make him special to so many, as Reid, Levy, Peterson, Bill Cowher, Herm Edwards, Al Saunders, Trent Green, Warner and others have attested in letters to you.
“I hear many people say they judge a Hall of Famer according to the old adage, ‘Could we write the history of the game without them in it?’ ” Warner wrote. “I know for a fact the history of two storied franchises, the Eagles and the Rams, could not be written without him!”
(Alas, we perhaps can’t quite say the same about the Chiefs. “The only regret I have in my career,” he told me in 2018 “was I wasn’t able to hand the Lamar Hunt trophy to Lamar Hunt.”)
Nonetheless, Warner punctuated the broader point by saying the history of some of the greatest teams and players in the game also would not have been written without Vermeil and adding, “I think it’s pretty obvious that the history of pro football and the NFL would not be the same without the contributions of Mr. Dick Vermeil.”
While his candidacy seems strong and his ultimate selection perhaps even inevitable, I’d like to appeal to you with another reason I hope he might be at the forefront of your one coaching selection this year among a group likely to include the late Buddy Parker and another modern marvel in 73-year-old Mike Holmgren — who also took two franchises to Super Bowls, among other elements of his own Hall of Fame resume and contributions including the fact he gave Reid his first NFL job.
Perhaps others such as Don Coryell, Dan Reeves, Mike Shanahan and Tom Coughlin will be discussed, too.
We know your work will be painstaking as you break down what they achieved, what it took for each to get from where they started with their teams and to their legacies. And perhaps you will determine that Holmgren or someone else stands clearly above Vermeil.
But if it’s too close to call, we offer this:
Even at 84 years old, the ever-radiant Vermeil has a presence that makes you feel like he will always be with us. Unfortunately, though, he might not actually live forever.
Understanding that age and sentimentality aren’t part of your criteria and, naturally, that you absolutely must select the candidate you believe most qualified, we still hope that if you believe Vermeil has earned this, well, that it would be terrific if it could happen soon enough for him to enjoy it.
Thanks so much for your time and consideration.