In our Hall of Fame prediction post a few months back, Tony picked Tony Dungy as one of his five enshrinees for the class of 2016, citing the momentum the former Bucs and Colts coach has garnered in recent years.
He’s not wrong. Dungy has momentum in recent years and he was, last night, named a finalist in the quest to become a part of this year’s class.
But that doesn’t mean Dungy SHOULD be the next coach to make the Hall.
I like Dungy “the man” more than I like Jimmy Johnson “the man.” Johnson’s got a huge ego, which ultimately was part of the reason his tenure in Dallas was so short – it couldn’t co-exist with the equally massive ego of owner Jerry Jones. And those Cowboys teams he coached were a smug, arrogant bunch in a lot of ways – not that they didn’t deserve to be proud of their accomplishments. That was a seriously great team.
And Johnson was clearly their leader.
Dungy, on the other hand, is by and large a humble, easily likeable guy. He was easily the type of guy I wanted to pull for – whether things were going well for his team or not – or even as he was enduring great personal tragedy – Dungy oozed class.
And Dungy coached longer, won more games, turned around a woeful situation in Tampa Bay and did win a Super Bowl in Indianapolis. So a case for his deserving enshrinement can and should be made. But with respect to the Hall of Fame – where the greatness of the very best is acknowledged and celebrated forever – what I can’t get past with Dungy are the results his teams produced in the postseason.
His overall postseason record was 9-10, which might not be embarrassing on its face. But dig a little deeper. He took four Tampa teams to the postseason, getting as high as the second seed in 1999 and giving the Greatest Show on Turf a run for the money in the NFC Championship game.
But while he made the Bucs good and formidable, particularly on defense, he just couldn’t get the team over the hump. He was fired, largely for that reason, after the 2001 season and, lo and behold, Tampa won the Super Bowl in 2002, with Jon Gruden as coach.
I can live with his not getting the Bucs to the promised land. The turnaround work he did on the long-moribund franchise alone gives Dungy a level of credibility. Look no further than the results posted year in and year out by Cleveland or Detroit over the last four or five decades and you’ll see just how hard it can be for a down-on-its luck franchise to pull out of a tailspin. So if it were those years alone where his teams struggled in the playoffs, I could see looking past it.
But that’s not the case. It was during his tenure in Indianapolis where his reputation as a great regular season coach who couldn’t take it home in the postseason grew.
It started in 2002. Peyton Manning was in his fifth season, Dungy’s first with Indianapolis. The team finished second in the AFC South at 10-6, traveling in the wild card round to New York to face the 9-7 Jets. Certainly this was not a dominant Colts team. Yet the level to which the Jets dominated in a 41-0 win set a disturbing precedent. And it’s not like this was Manning’s first postseason rodeo – this game dropped his own postseason record to 0-3.
From 2003 through 2008, Indianapolis never won fewer than 12 games in the regular season, going 75-21 during that six-year stretch.
Yet during that time, the team made just one Super Bowl, beating Chicago in 2006. In several other seasons, the team underachieved relatively dramatically. The 2005 team, which earned the number one seed and was arguably Dungy’s best with the Colts, lost 21-18 to the sixth-seeded Steelers. The second-seeded Colts in 2007 lost to San Diego. And the Patriots twice knocked Dungy’s Colts from the postseason.
There’s no shame in losing to those New England teams, but the game against Pittsburgh was among the bigger upsets of the 2000s. And back-to-back postseason defeats to San Diego in 2007 and in 2008, the game that ultimately ended Dungy’s coaching career, wrote the final chapter in Dungy’s postseason failings (and have created a monkey on the back of Manning, in many eyes, too).
Johnson, on the other hand, did not win as many postseason games as Dungy did, but in fewer opportunities, he took home the prize twice – and put together the bulk of a roster that went to a conference title game and then won a third Super Bowl under Barry Switzer the first two years after Johnson and Jones parted ways.
So, yes, Dungy’s regular season winning percentage of .668 and total win count of 208 surpasses that of the Cowboys’ skipper. But if the name of the game is claiming the Lombardi Trophy at the end of the season – if the ultimate sign of greatness for a coach is to build great, dominant teams that win championships, Johnson’s two in nine years trumps Dungy’s one in 13.
Yet Johnson has fallen from the ranks of the finalists. He lost out last night not just to Dungy, but to Don Coryell, who masterminded the San Diego Chargers’ amazing aerial attack of the late 1970s and early 80s, but who also couldn’t quite get the job done in the postseason.
And I don’t understand it. The masterful way in which Johnson put those Cowboys’ teams together – not just the Herschel Walker trade, but the way he moved up and down the draft and got some tricky personalities to work together – was impressive. Whether you liked them or not those teams of the early 1990s put together one of the three or four most dominant five-year stretches for any periods in the NFL’s last half-century.
So this is not to say that Dungy does not deserve to be in the Hall. He’s a great regular season coach, he did win a Super Bowl and he has contributed to the game in many ways. But as much as I like and respect Dungy as a man, Johnson should be in Canton first.
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Seems you have a obsession with jj perhaps jj will get his turn after dingy an Coryell let it go
I’m not sure I’d classify it as an obsession. It’s just my opinion. And I think I backed up my case fairly well. If you disagree, feel free to make the case. But no, I’m not going to just let it go.
Thinking about it you have great logic if your just considering jj for Dallas but then you have to look at what he did with the dolphins
Jimmy Johnson was a finalist last year but dropped off the ballot this time around. And all of Jacoby, James, and Atwater were semifinalists last year but pushed past Johnson this time around. I don’t think that there have been too many one-and-done finalists except for candidates in their final eligible year (such as Cliff Harris and Jim Marshall) — I can only think of a few examples offhand: Jim Tyrer, Blanton Collier, Lee Roy Jordan, and Roger Craig.
My concern about Johnson’s candidacy is his short career and so-so won-lost percentage. Two Super Bowl wins while serving as Coach and GM is his primary argument in favor.
Yes, there was the stint in Miami that was less successful. And his coaching career in the NFL was short. But man, that stint made an impact on the league. In an incredibly short period of time he built up one of the strongest 4-5 year stretches any team has ever had.
I get the case against him – it’s just far outweighed, in my opinion, by the case for him. I’m not against either of the other two – just like Johnson’s case better.
this is jmo but jimmy johnson’s case reminds me of george seifert and tom flores’s case great with one team bad with another
Johnson has a much stronger case than Seifert and Flores, He built a dynasty in Dallas and called the shots, despite what Jerry Jones says. Seifert was handed the keys to a Ferrari in 1989 and told not to crash it.
ok thanks for the clarification bo knows
I don’t think Jimmy Johnson should be compared to Seifert and Flores, Seifert and Flores never went to the playoffs with the 2nd they coached unlike Jimmy Johnson.
Jimmy Johnson won 2 playoff games with the Dolphins and coached in a total of 5 playoff games with the Dolphins also.
Jimmy Johnson’s regular winner percentage with Dolphins was 563. That is not terrible and that actually doesn’t hurt Jimmy’s Hall of Fame case unlike Seifert and Flores. The problem with Jimmy Johnson with the Dolphins was in the playoffs with him losing 3 out of 5 games.
What Jimmy Johnson did with the Dolphins was improve the Defense. The defensive parts the dolphins drafted when Jimmy was a coach was a reason the Dolphins had 4 straight seasons in the playoffs with Dave Wannstedt.
The reason Jimmy had 3 playoff loses as a Dolphin was partly caused by how the offense was handled in terms of drafting and the 2nd part was the Dolphins gotten beaten by better teams. The 1998 Broncos was a great and the 1999 Jaguars actually were a 14 win team that year
The 3 first Round picks that were offensive players ended up being draft busts. The reason Dolphins were blown out in 1999 by the Jaguars was a couple facts including having a washed up Dan Marino. as a Quarterback.
Dan was washed up in 1999. I saw his arm strength a couple games that years and the arm didn’t the strength as it once did.
ok lets just say dungy gets in either this year or next who would be the next coach
If you simply go by the HOF voters then Coryell is next in line. HOF voters have also been concerned about using an election slot on a coach over a player. Parcells was the last coach elected via modern candidate pool (in 2013), before that Levy in 2001, if Dungy gets in this year or soon, I am not so sure it won’t take several years before the next coach. At some point, perhaps after the current 5 year cycle for contributors is complete, coaches should be removed from the modern and seniors pools and added to the contributors pool for consideration.
agreed with what you said all together paul
I totally agree, Andy. Jimmy Johnson’s winning percentage is skewed down by virtue of him taking over the worst team in the NFL as his first NFL coaching stint and not hanging around too long to milk his own achievement in turning it around or pad his stats. But what a turnaround that was, from 1-15 in 1989 to Super Bowl champion just three years later.
In fact I’d argue that the team he built had the most dominant stretch for four years in NFL history, or at least during the Super Bowl era. They were the first team to win 3 Super Bowls in 4 years, and every playoff game they won during that dynastic stretch was by double digits. No other team has accomplished that before.
That greatness was due to both Johnson’s eye for talent and the edge he brought with his psychology education. The 1994 conference championship game run and the third Super Bowl win in 1995 were from inertia and the player talent mostly accumulated by him. It’s been said that they became champions in 1995 despite their new coaching. How much more would that team have accomplished if Johnson had remained?
As others have said, there’s no comparison between Johnson’s second stint and guys like Seifert or many others who went to losing tenures in a second city. No coach has won Super Bowls with multiple teams, but Johnson came closer than most. He made the playoffs 3 out of 4 years at Miami and never had a losing season there, despite being stuck with a QB he felt was past his prime and would have preferred to replace.
I can get some people wanting to induct Dungy first but favoring Coryell is just disrespectful. There’s no valid argument for Coryell to trump Johnson. Coryell only won 3 playoff games his entire career and never even made it to a Super Bowl. Jimmy Johnson turned the worst team in the NFL in the late 1980s into the team of the 1990s, was good enough at another team a few years later to show his coaching success was no fluke, and deserves to be in the HoF.
second what Rasputin said and then some