Noll and Bill Cowher and Mike Tomlin, who followed Cowher, all fit the profile of young, thirty-something assistant coaches on the rise. Each had his own approach but all proved they were capable of leading a team—and commanding respect even from players not much younger than they were.
If the hiring of Noll established a template for an organization that had cycled through head coaches for too long, Noll himself established a standard that remains unmatched.
He and Bill Belichick are the only coaches to win four Super Bowls; Noll is the only coach in NFL history to win all four Super Bowls in which his teams played.
He harnessed the talent that the Steelers stockpiled with a direct, no-frills style and a demeanor that could come across as detached if not aloof. His real genius, however, was his eye for detail and his meticulous approach to the game.
Noll, above all, was a teacher and he enjoyed the process as much as the wins that came in his 23-year coaching career.
“Let’s say you blocked the wrong man. When you’re coming off the field you can see that stern look that coach Noll used to have. Instead of him telling you, ‘You screwed up!’ His first question to you was ‘What were you thinking?’” former Steelers running back Frenchy Fuqua said. “When I did make a mistake and was corrected in that manner it made me think, Frenchy, were you thinking when you walked up to the line? I think it made us a better team mentally and he would even do that in the meetings while we were watching film. And I never wanted to be put in that situation, what were you thinking? I always called him a student-of-the-game coach.”
Noll, in truth, was a student of life.
He got his pilot’s license and became a wine connoisseur and his desire to be well-rounded hardly stopped there. Noll could talk about almost any subject, something that made him an excellent party host, and the only reason the public didn’t see more of his personality is Noll never wanted it to be about him.
He turned down all kinds of endorsement opportunities, preferring they go to his players. After he stunned Dan Rooney on December 26, 1991, by telling the Steelers president he was retiring Noll quickly receded into the background.
He held a position with the team after that but it was largely ceremonial until Noll’s death at the age of 82 on June 13, 2014.
No one in the Steelers organization knew Noll better than Joe Gordon.
The two joined the Steelers in 1969 and Gordon served as the team’s communications director during Noll’s tenure. What is revealing about Noll—and a trait he never lost even when his health started to fail him—is a story Gordon often tells when asked about his enduring memories of the man.
Prior to a Steelers AFC Championship Game against the Oilers, Noll stopped in Gordon’s office and saw a broken shelf on top of a cabinet. Noll proceeded to fix it, totally immersed in the task despite the magnitude of the game that started in just a couple of hours.
“This was typical of him,” Gordon said.
That love of fixing things and tinkering with gadgets made Noll the repair man of choice for Steelers broadcaster Myron Cope.
The colorful Cope had dubbed Noll “The Emperor” because he reigned supreme as a coach and the two lived one near one another in the Sewickley section of Pittsburgh. They taped a regular show in Cope’s basement and Noll often gladly put in a little overtime after the two had finished.
“Any time there was any little problem in the house, if a screen door was unhinged or some other minor problem in the household, Myron’s wife, Mildred, would say ‘You’ve got to get that fixed,’” Gordon recalled. “He’d say, ‘No, Chuck’s coming over on Sunday morning. He’ll fix it.’”
One of Noll’s best repair jobs came near the end of his career.
The team started 0–2 in 1989, losing by the combined score of 92–10 to the Browns and Bengals. That followed a 5–11 season in 1988 and the national media descended on Pittsburgh, including NBC’s O.J. Simpson.
The inevitable stories about whether the game had finally passed Noll by did not rattle the Steelers. Noll simply called the team together and told his players to stay the course because what they were doing worked.
The Steelers beat the favored Vikings 27–14 that Sunday at Three Rivers Stadium and went 8–5 the rest of the season. They returned to the playoffs for the first time since 1974 and upset the Oilers 26–23 in the wild-card round.
Only a dropped pass the following week in Denver prevented the Steelers from advancing to the AFC Championship Game. That season ranked up there with any as far as Noll’s coaching jobs and the genius of the man always went back to one thing: Noll’s ability to teach.
“I don’t believe that I would have learned the game, learned about being an offensive lineman, learned about being a professional any other place like I learned here,” said Tunch Ilkin, who played for Noll from 1980 to 1992. “One of the things he’d always say is “Understand what’s going on here, understand what we’re trying to do, understand what the people you’re playing against are trying to do.’ Playing for him, it wasn’t enough just to know your position but to know what everybody understood on the offensive line and to understand conceptually what you were trying to accomplish offensively and to understand conceptually what the defense was trying to do that you were playing against. He would stop practice and say this all of the time, ‘Understand what we’re trying to do here,’ and everybody would take notice.”
Fuqua paid his former coach the ultimate compliment when he said the older he got the smarter Noll became.
“A lot of the things he told us back then wound up being a whole lot more true as we matured and you realize what he was telling you,” Fuqua said. “I love Chuck Noll. I would run through a damn brickhouse for him.”
Success Outside Pittsburgh
Here are three Steelers draft choices who never played for the team but found success away from the NFL:
Ara Parseghian, 13th round in 1947: The Miami (Ohio) product played two seasons for the Browns, who also drafted him in 1947, before a hip injury cut short his career and put him on a path to Notre Dame lore. Parseghian became head coach of the Irish in 1974 and led the team to a pair of national championships in 11 seasons. Parseghian was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1990.
Gene Keady, 19th round in 1958: A three-sport star at Kansas State, Keady went into coaching instead of pursuing a playing career and is one of the most successful coaches in Big Ten men’s basketball history. Keady won conference coach of the year honors seven times from 1980 to 2005 at Purdue. He retired with a career record of 493–270.
Tom Jurich, 10th round in 1978: The longtime athletics director at Louisville kicked at Northern Arizona—and for one game for the New Orleans Saints—before embarking on a career in sports administration.
EXTRA POINTS
Knowing His Audience
Chuck Noll could go deep when trying to motivate his team. Take the time he referenced the Spartans and Corinthians and how the former burned their own ships after sailing to Corinth so they had no option but to win and return in captured ships. “He said, ‘That’s how committed we have to be,’” former Steelers offensive lineman Tunch Ilkin said.
Noll also knew how to read his audience.
One time, Ilkin said, Noll started talking about the ingredients in a swimming pool and how they all came together to work. “So he’s going into this dissertation about pool water and he could see that he’s losing us,” Ilkin said. “And then he kind of gets that bulldog look on his face and he goes, ‘In other words, don’t let anyone piss in your pool.’”
EXTRA POINTS
Size Never an Issue with Jack Ham
Jack Ham’s size had been enough of a concern coming out of high school that he received Penn State’s last scholarship after another player turned it down. Art Rooney Jr., who headed the Steelers’ player personnel department when the team drafted Ham in the second round in 1971, saw why questions about Ham’s size lingered even after he became a two-time All-American at Penn State. The Steelers were hosting players they had drafted at a Pittsburgh hotel and when Ham knocked on the door to Rooney’s room, Rooney asked Ham if he was delivering a letter. The reason: he mistook Ham for a bellhop because of his size. Ham added 15 pounds of muscle once he got to the NFL and proved to be plenty big enough during a 12-year career with the Steelers. He made eight consecutive Pro Bowls and his interception in the 1974 AFC Championship Game proved to be a turning point in the Steelers’ 24–13 win at Oakland. Ham made the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1988, his first year of eligibility for it.
EXTRA POINTS
Mining the Mid-American Conference for Greatness
The Steelers made 584 draft choices from 1970—the year of the AFL-NFL merger—through 2016 and only 14—or roughly two percent—have come from Mid-American Conference schools. But to say the Steelers have done well when drafting from the MAC might be an understatement.
Quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, wide receiver Antonio Brown, and linebacker Jack Lambert all played in the conference that operates in the shadow of the Big Ten. Cornerback Ron Johnson, the Steelers’ first-round pick in 1978, also hailed from a MAC school, and the Eastern Michigan product started 62 games and intercepted 13 passes in seven seasons with the Steelers.
The Steelers’ history of drafting players from off-the-radar schools is well-documented. The organization has, however, stuck mostly to schools from the college football establishment since coach Mike Tomlin and general manager Kevin Colbert joined forces in 2007. The Steelers made 83 picks from 2007 to 2016 and 68 of those came from the five power conference schools or Notre Dame. Six hailed from Big Ten powerhouse Ohio State, including first-round selections Cameron Heyward (2011) and Ryan Shazier (2014).