nine

“KNUTE KNOWLEDGE”

The parallels in the careers of Chuck Noll and Don Shula were likely apparent to both men. Shula was two years older, born January 4 rather than Chuck’s January 5. Both began the first grade as precocious, headstrong five-year-olds, both were the children of working-class parents, both attended Catholic grammar schools in northeastern Ohio. Both had successful football careers in high school, then went to a private Catholic college in Ohio (in Shula’s case, it was John Carroll University in suburban Cleveland). Both were drafted by the Browns and inculcated in Paul Brown’s philosophy of football. (Shula was traded by the Browns the same off-season that Chuck was drafted by Cleveland, so the two were never teammates.) Both built seven-year pro careers by being smart and consistently intense about football as a vocation rather than being more physically talented than other players. Both went directly from their playing career into coaching and soon revealed themselves to be among the brightest and most respected minds in the game.

So it was not a surprise that they hit it off immediately.

“I knew the minute I sat down with him that I wanted to hire him,” said Shula. “Chuck was that impressive. He was the complete package, total—exactly what you would want in an assistant coach.”

Where they differed was in demeanor. Shula was an intense extrovert, headstrong and combustible; Chuck remained cooler, calmer, and more cerebral. Their mutual respect and complementary styles would define their time together in Baltimore.

It is hard to overstate how separate the two leagues were in the first half of the 1960s. While Chuck had remained in pro football, he was returning from six seasons in an entirely different world. Not only were the players different and the philosophies different, the rules were different as well. In a sense, he was returning to the more traditional approach to football. “Don was so much like Paul Brown, which I was used to,” said Chuck. “And Sid was not, so it was like coming home in a sense.”

“I hired him from Sid Gillman, and that was a completely different style of football, philosophy, everything,” said Shula. “It was completely different from what Paul Brown or what I was doing, so Chuck had to just come back and get back into the Paul Brown style of football. Get that Al Davis out of his mind.” Of course, Davis had been gone from the Chargers for three seasons by the time Chuck left San Diego, but Shula’s point still stood. The slashing, open-ended passing offenses of the AFL, and the innovative zone defenses of the younger league had not filtered into the National Football League yet.

In 1966, the NFL was a league thoroughly dominated, both on the field and in the collective mind-set, by Vince Lombardi. His Packers (who’d been to the title game in 1960, and won the NFL title in 1961, 1962, and 1965) were the standard against which the rest of the league judged its progress. Baltimore was perhaps the most recognized perennial rival, led by the redoubtable presence of quarterback Johnny Unitas, already a legend in the game after a decade in the pros. So the mission was clear: Chuck was hired to help the Colts get past Green Bay. He knew that if he succeeded in doing so, a head-coaching job offer was likely to follow.

Chuck and Marianne packed up the house in San Diego, put it up for sale, and then Chuck drove the car across the country while Marianne and Chris flew to Baltimore to look for housing. They found a tidy home in suburban Towson, on a street dotted with pine trees, across from a creek, and just down the street from Riderwood Elementary School.

But even before Chuck’s first training camp with the Colts, the world of pro football changed again. On June 8, 1966, the war between the leagues ended, Tex Schramm and Pete Rozelle having brokered a truce with AFL founder Lamar Hunt. The most immediate impact was that the era of recruiting college players ceased—the two leagues agreed to a common draft beginning in 1967, and a championship game between the winners of each league (Hunt dubbed it the Super Bowl; though the league wouldn’t officially adopt the term for another two years) that would be played following the 1966 season. The merger would become complete in 1970.

Earlier that spring, Chuck had stopped into Cleveland. While William Noll’s physical health was deteriorating—the tremors remained and dementia began to set in—Kate took extra work when she could but usually stayed home, so she could feed the grandchildren lunch and watch over them after school. For William Noll, the world constricted. He sat in a rocking chair and watched television much of the day, waiting for the children to come home from school.

When Chuck appeared, he felt compelled to rally his parents from their malaise. He would get out the ukulele or the guitar and lead his nieces and nephews in a sing-along. There were magic tricks—pulling a quarter out of a nephew’s ear, then making it disappear—and jokes and pointed questions about how their school was going.

On the same trip in the spring of ’66, Chuck spent time with Rita’s oldest son, Rick, who was thirteen years old and had entered a car in the Pinewood Derby of his local Boy Scout troop. The local scout leader asked Rick if his uncle would come to speak to the boys, and Chuck agreed to do so. He was still not comfortable with public speaking, and he didn’t give a formal talk. Afterward, a Boy Scout raised his hand and asked, “What do you have to do to be a pro football player?”

“Go to school, do your homework, get good grades,” said Chuck. “And study, because we don’t want any dumb kids. We want smart kids.”

“The kid’s face just fell,” said Rita. “That wasn’t the answer he was looking for.”

On one of Chuck’s visits to Cleveland, Margie was upstairs at her grandparents.

“How’s school?,” he asked.

“Um, okay,” she said, unconvincingly.

“What do you mean ‘okay’? You should be doing real well.”

“I don’t get algebra.”

“What do you mean you don’t get algebra? Go get your book.”

What transpired was an intense session, in which Chuck conveyed the concepts in a way his niece understood.

“He went over every problem with me,” said Margie. “I don’t know what it was, if it was the attention, or that he explained it right, but it clicked. From that day on, math was my best subject.”

The Nolls’ move to Baltimore precipitated the Deininger family’s first vacation out of state. In late June of that summer, Rita had put her children in the station wagon, with her billy club under the front seat, and drove them to Baltimore. Chuck had come back to help ferry supplies to Baltimore. The seven Deiningers could all fit in the station wagon but not their luggage. So Rita had five, and two more were in Chuck’s car with all the bags. That first night in Towson, Margie, Joanne, and Marilyn were assigned the fold-out sofa in the living room.

“I remember we were just all excited being there on our first vacation, and we couldn’t go to sleep,” said Margie. “I remember he came down to the room. The three of us were on the sofa couch, and he’s like, ‘Pretend you’re floating on clouds.’ He literally calmed us to sleep.”

Befitting Chuck’s nature, the itinerary of the visit was crammed with activities and culture. They went to a frontier town in Virginia. They went to the Capital Mall. They stopped in Gettysburg on the way home, and Chuck spoke to his nieces and nephews about the history of the place.

Early in their visit, he came back from the Colts’ offices one day to find Rita’s entire family still indoors.

“What’s everybody doing in the house?,” Chuck asked. “Why aren’t they out playing?”

“Because of the air conditioning,” explained Rita. Her children had never spent time in an air-conditioned home before.

The Colts began 1966 still stinging from their 1965 playoff loss to Green Bay, when they were convinced (and game films seemed to confirm) that the Packers’ tying field goal at the end of regulation had actually sailed wide.

On defense, Chuck sat down at a desk next to Bill Arnsparger, who’d coached with Shula under Brown protégé Blanton Collier’s staff at the University of Kentucky. Avuncular and unassuming, Arnsparger was in many ways a perfect match for Chuck.

At the Colts’ training camp in Westminster, Maryland, Chuck began inculcating the linebackers and secondary in his coverage principles (Arnsparger was in charge of the defensive linemen). “Chuck made sure that everything was outlined step by step,” said Shula. “You learned by listening, writing, seeing, and practice on the field—four steps of the learning process.”

It was the Browns’ method, modernized. “When I first went into coaching,” Chuck once said, “I heard it one time and I knew it, and I thought everybody functioned that way. It didn’t work, until I learned you had to go over it and over it and over it and over it and over it, and when you think you’ve gone over it enough, you go over it some more, and then finally, in another year, somebody is going to learn it.”

And that change was soon instilled. While Arnsparger varied the fronts to employ the Colts’ superior defensive line, Chuck began to emphasize a cohesive structure for his linebackers and defensive backs.

“When I first joined the Colts, I knew my assignments and I didn’t really understand where all the linebackers were and where the other defensive backs were,” said Jerry Logan, the crafty fourth-year safety from West Texas A&M. “I understood after a little while with Chuck Noll that defense was a team game. Everybody has to know what everybody else is doing. And that makes you a better player.”

Arnsparger and Chuck’s collaboration on the defensive game plan was seamless. Chuck had absorbed Gillman’s fanatical devotion to film study, and Arnsparger had earned the nickname “One More Reel” for his indefatigable devotion to inquiry through game film.

During games, Chuck, often wearing a pin-collar shirt, a narrow black tie, and the Colts’ blue satin warm-up jacket, prowled the sidelines with a headset, communicating with Arnsparger up in the booth. The Colts players noticed Chuck’s composed demeanor. He in turn understood, from his career as a pro, that there were times almost any player was going to be physically manhandled.

“If you got beat physically, that wasn’t a problem,” said Dennis Gaubatz, the middle linebacker in 1966. “But you better not get beat mentally—wrong coverage, pick up the wrong man, that was a no-no with him.”

In 1966, the Colts’ defense showed marked improvement over the course of the year, giving up more than 20 points only once in the last ten weeks of the season. The season came down to a showdown with the Packers, who’d routed them in the season opener in Green Bay. Back at Baltimore in December, the defensive game plan devised by Arnsparger and Chuck neutralized the Packers’ offensive thrusts, though they ultimately fell, 14–10, and were eliminated from playoff contention.

The Colts finished in second place in the Western Conference, qualifying for the dreaded end-of-the-season contest called the Playoff Bowl, which was really neither. The game was a matchup between the two runners-up in each conference, played on a neutral field in Miami, with the ticket proceeds going to benefit the players’ pension fund. Lombardi called it “the Shit Bowl,” according to Bob Skorinski (“He said it was a losers’ bowl for losers”), and Shula’s opinion of the game wasn’t much different. Still, it was a game, and they all wanted to win it—and they did, as the Colts edged the Eagles, 20–14, to end the season on a winning note, however extraneous it may have seemed at the time.

Chuck’s two biggest fans remained his parents. William Noll watched the games in hopes of seeing a glimpse of Chuck on the sidelines. Kate Noll, still temperamental, still steadfast in her devotion to her family, kept her daily routine. The focus on frugality never left. Kate still saved her dimes to take weekly bus trips downtown to the Cleveland Trust. Helping his grandmother up the stairs with groceries one time, Ken dropped a bag and crushed some of the eggs. “Looks like we’re having scrambled eggs today,” she said.

But mostly William and Kate were marooned upstairs. He wasn’t healthy enough to get around much, though he’d unsteadily make his way downstairs on occasion. Kate’s sister, Toot, would come over with her husband Stewart, and the two couples would play gin or cribbage.

“My grandmother was so severe,” said Rick Deininger. “She was the sort of typical German, you know: ‘Do it this way.’ You did not cross grandma. She was a tough woman, but I think a lot of that was a result of things not working out. Chuck had loads of that, too: Suck it up, deal with it, and get on with life.”

It was difficult for Chuck to see his father. The frozen rictus of a smile on his face was there, but there was also a hint of a haunted countenance. The pack-a-day habit of unfiltered cigarettes didn’t help either. By the ’60s, with the Parkinson’s tremors, emphysema, and the beginnings of dementia, William Noll was a wreck. At the Noll family reunions, the emphysema prevented him from singing along with his siblings.

By 1967, he was finally on disability, and the extra $40 a month helped Rita make ends meet. The grandchildren would come upstairs to keep him company. He played gin rummy with them, and the kids would cheat, slipping the cards to each other under the table. “I thought I was the best card player ever,” said Joanne. “I always beat my grandfather.”

Rita had gone back to work around the time Marilyn started elementary school, working part time for Adams Spices in Cleveland. Beyond that, Chuck helped out whenever possible, paying the school tuition for some of the children, helping out with the house note, covering any extraordinary expenses.

Rita, hewing to family practices, refused self-pity or second thoughts or any conjecture about her life had Clare lived. “It’s over with,” she’d say. “It’s done with. I’ve gotta get on with my life. Let’s go on.”

But she remained true to Clare for the rest of her days. Still attractive and fun-loving, she nonetheless rejected her children’s suggestions to start dating again. “What man,” she’d ask, “is gonna want a woman with seven kids?”

From Baltimore, it was easy for Chuck and Marianne and Chris to visit each summer. “It was such a different world for me when we went to visit,” Chris said. “It was an old house, the doilies on the back of the furniture, and the food was different. [My grandma] was big at making the different nut rolls and German stuff. So I loved going for the food. I was an only child and those were my cousins, and my closest relatives, so for me it was time to go play with people my age.”

The visit in 1967 had an added significance. Chuck and Marianne and Chris drove back to Cleveland for his parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, and they arrived to a family quarrel.

The strained relationship between Bob’s wife, Stella, and the Noll family became a breach that summer. William and Kate didn’t want to make a fuss but agreed to a large sit-down dinner at the church. Stella had wanted a smaller, fancier affair.

“His wife wanted a sit-down dinner for adults,” remembered Margie. “And my mom wanted all the kids to be there. All I know is Aunt Stella walked out mad and, from that point on, that was it.”

“It was very tense,” said Marilyn, “and then we just never saw them again.” With Bob almost completely out of the picture, and Rita already working a full-time job, the responsibility continued to fall on Chuck. “Stella kept him in his place,” Rick said. “Bob was never around to help.”

The fiftieth wedding anniversary went as planned. Chuck and Marianne and Chris were there, as were all seven of his cousins. Bob showed up, somewhat sheepishly, and Stella did not.

“We didn’t talk about it,” said Joanne. “We really didn’t. I just knew they stopped coming around, and my mom and my grandparents didn’t talk about it. That is what a lot of the family does—we didn’t talk about a lot of things.”

The Deininger family visit to Baltimore in ’66 launched a tradition that would affect all of Rita Deininger’s children. For each of the next fifteen years, at least one Deininger niece or nephew would spend some or all of the summer with the Nolls. In the summer of ’67, Ken came to Baltimore to spend a few weeks. He was about the same age as Chris, the closest thing to a brother, and eager for time with his uncle.

“I absolutely loved it,” said Ken. “When I got there in June, Uncle Chuck was there, and they took a vacation, and I would be with them. I remember them saying, ‘What do you guys want to do for vacation?’ Well, I wanted to go to amusement parks. Uncle Chuck is like, ‘No, no, we are going to go someplace good. We are going to go to Gettysburg and Williamsburg,’ all the historical stuff that he loved. It was absolutely cool. Everything was an adventure. Even eating—when they would cook, they just wouldn’t cook. He would have the grill, and it had to be charcoal or mesquite. Everything was a lesson or an adventure, and I loved that. We decided to get into badminton one day. So, do you get the store badminton with the dinky nets? Uncle Chuck had nothing to do with that. He went out and bought a full-sized net and lined the backyard for the court. The whole neighborhood was over. It was the coolest thing.”

With the 1967 season, the NFL added a sixteenth franchise, New Orleans, and realigned to four four-team divisions, adding an extra tier of playoffs. The Colts, oddly, were placed in the Coastal Division of the Western Conference, with the Rams, 49ers, and expansion Atlanta Falcons. The defense was even better, as two talented rookies—defensive lineman Bubba Smith and safety Rick Volk—earned starting jobs. The Colts were still unbeaten when Chuck went into the hospital for an emergency appendectomy on Friday, October 27. He was in the hospital for the Colts’ 17–13 win at Washington that Sunday, but he returned to work the next day. “I was afraid to stay out of work any longer,” he told the Baltimore Sun. “I was afraid they’d find out they could get along without me.”

Six days after Chuck’s return, Baltimore’s defense sacked Bart Starr six times in edging the world champion Packers, 13–10, before a deafening din in Memorial Stadium. After seven games, the Colts were undefeated, at 6–0–2, caught in a breakneck race with George Allen’s Los Angeles Rams, at 5–1–2. The win over the Packers marked the first of four straight weeks the Colts gave up 10 points or less. While the players in Chuck’s secondary were slow-footed, they were exceedingly well trained.

The Colts were still unbeaten, at 11–0–2, heading into the regular-season finale against the 10–1–2 Rams. But on that day, the Colts’ offense broke down miserably, and the Colts’ defense couldn’t hold out against a gifted Rams’ offense and a raucous Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum crowd. After the 35–10 loss, their first of the season, the Colts’ campaign was over. In that single stroke they were eliminated from it all—no playoffs, not even a spot in the loathed Playoff Bowl.

The following spring, Chuck crossed paths with a young Morgan State running back named John “Frenchy” Fuqua, a garrulous, irrepressible Detroit native who’d come to Baltimore on a football scholarship. The Morgan State team played its games at Memorial Stadium as well and shared some workout facilities with the Colts. “The guy that I was trying to impress at the time was Don Shula,” said Fuqua. “He didn’t have time for it. But Noll sat down and talked to us.”

“What position do you play?,” Chuck asked Fuqua.

“Running back,” he said. “I played guard in high school—I was an all-city guard for my last two years in Detroit.”

“I played the line,” said Chuck. “That’s good; you ought to be a good blocker.”

It was a quiet conversation but left a mark on Fuqua. He would notice what other African American players already had. Chuck was undemonstrative; he didn’t presume to be hip, nor did he condescend to black players the way so many coaches of the era did. Yet among the staffs he worked on, Chuck seemed to be the coach most attuned to black athletes. “Chuck is probably the least color-conscious person I know,” said Marianne. “His coaches used to tease him because couldn’t remember if some of his players were black or white. He couldn’t remember their names and he couldn’t remember their color. Those weren’t important things to him.”

Early evening, April 4, 1968, Marianne was ironing when the news came over the radio that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis. Baltimore, like so many American cities, was inflamed by the incident. Chuck was out of town on a scouting trip; Chris and Marianne watched the National Guard trucks rolling over the freeway bridge just a block away from their Towson home.

The summer of racial unrest was felt in Cleveland as well. On the streets of 141st and Harvard, there was the same kind of urban change going on that had marked Chuck’s childhood. The white families were moving out to the suburbs. Attendance at the school and the church was declining. St. Mary of Czestochowa was the last white Catholic enclave in that area of the city. After some flare-ups with public school children, the parochial school began letting their students out a half hour earlier. The children would walk down the street from the school each day, a little more isolated in the neighborhood. “It got integrated pretty bad,” was how Rita put it. The classes were smaller, the parish was smaller, and through the summer of discord in 1967, black and white youth in Cleveland seemed to find less common ground.

By the beginning of the 1968 season, the template had been set for the Colts’ coaching staff. Shula, the energetic firebrand, was at the top, demanding and enthusiastic, more than willing to call out players as he perceived the need. In contrast, the assistants were more low-key. On offense, John Sandusky had a loud bark and a barrel chest, but his critiques poked rather than bit. On defense, the studious Arnsparger and Chuck devised cerebral, sound defensive game plans employing more zone defenses than was the norm in the NFL.

Among the staff, Chuck’s nickname was “Knowledge” (or, a little more sharply, “Knute Knowledge,” bestowed on him by Upton Bell), and he and Marianne gravitated to John and Ruth Sandusky and Bill and B. J. Arnsparger.

In the off-seasons, they remained close—the Nolls, the Arnspargers, and the Sanduskys. Some days, they’d all get sitters and go out on the town. “In hindsight I see why because the assistant coaches didn’t make much money back then,” said Gerry Sandusky, John’s son. “They still worked crazy hours. They were all Catholics, so they all had kids. There was this connectedness of nobody else understood their lives. They had these low-paying, high-pressure jobs. You had to beat the Packers on Sunday or you might not be around to pay the tuition at Catholic school for your five kids. It was a crazy degree of pressure. My dad was a South Philly guy. He put ice in his red wine. He wasn’t a fancy-schmancy guy. Chuck was that rare guy who was very well educated and became very refined in life and could relate to anybody at any point of the spectrum. As different guys get higher up on the coaching food chain they tend to lose a little bit of connection with the guys who are doing the work. I think my dad identified Chuck early on as someone who was going to be fabulously successful but never lose sight of his friends.”

Some on the Colts and elsewhere in the NFL were already noticing Chuck as a potential head coach. “Arnsparger was extremely smart,” said Upton Bell. “He was good at spotting weaknesses and suggesting what we should be doing. Chuck was quiet, too, but he had a real command. I thought even then that he would be the better head coach.”

The Colts’ defense possessed an array of seasoned old pros like Billy Ray Smith and Odell Braase, interspersed with some game-changing young stars, including Bubba Smith, the imposing defensive lineman who was moved to end prior to the ’68 season, hyperemotional linebacker Mike Curtis, a converted fullback whose personality perfectly suited the marauding mind-set of the defense, and the athletic safety Rick Volk, in just his second season, who covered more ground and seemed more attuned to Chuck’s philosophy than the previous safety, Alvin Haymond.

The late ’60s was a time of social unrest, but Baltimore on Sundays was still the province of Nixon’s silent majority, shift workers and middle managers for whom the Colts were the center of their social life. The Colts’ crowd—Cooper Rollow of the Chicago Tribune had dubbed the stadium “The World’s Largest Outdoor Insane Asylum”—carried a fervent, collegiate air. The big, round stadium bordered by 33rd and 36th streets just north of downtown, was a shambling, inviting structure. The Colts’ late kickoff times (2 p.m.), combined with the fog coming in from the Chesapeake Bay, gave the second halves of their home games an eerie, noirish quality, and the clamor of the fans was heightened by the percussive, blaring accompaniment of the Baltimore Colts Marching Band.

Marianne and Chris sat together, high in the stands, in front of a group of loud, often abusive fans who’d figured out they were the family of one of the coaches. “There were these people who would sit behind us and always heckle us, a mother, daughter, and son,” said Chris Noll. “They would just give us the hardest time and be really nasty to us. One time, we came up and there were two drunks in our seats, and these people effectively threw them out—they defended us; they were like our best friends.”

There were worrisome portents in the ’68 preseason, when Unitas suffered an arm injury that would sideline him for much of the season. Weeks earlier, Shula had cannily traded for the journeyman veteran Earl Morrall, who’d lost any hope of starting for the New York Giants with their acquisition of the dynamic scrambler Fran Tarkenton. Morrall’s first-quarter pass in the season opener against San Francisco was intercepted and returned for a touchdown, but the Colts quickly righted themselves and marched to a 27–10 win. Two weeks later, against the Steelers, the Colts’ defense tied an NFL record with three interceptions returned for touchdowns in a 41–7 rout. Watching the stampede on TV with Dorothy Shula at the Shula’s house, and aware that Baltimore’s success would only increase Chuck’s chances of getting a head-coaching offer, and that the hapless Steelers might be in the market for a new coach, Marianne had a premonition. “I just had this sudden thought,” she said. “My God, we’re going to be in Pittsburgh next year.”

On the field, the Colts were adept at mounting a pass rush with just four men, but Chuck had taken to blitzing part of the time, usually with the maniacal Mike Curtis coming in from the outside. After an October loss to the Browns, Baltimore righted itself with a 27–10 rout of the Rams, a measure of vengeance for the previous year’s season-ending loss, marked by a host of big plays (including one in which Curtis tackled the Rams’ quarterback Roman Gabriel by the head, which would be replayed on NFL Films’ productions ad infinitum for decades to come). From that point, through the rest of the season, the Colts’ defense was irrepressible. It was the first of seven games in which the Colts held their opponents to 10 points or less. They’d already clinched their division title ahead of the final regular-season game against the Rams.

The playoffs began on December 22, a cold, rainy day in Baltimore, as the Colts fought a young and rising Vikings team to a 7–0 halftime lead, then broke the game open in the third quarter, when Curtis again made a game-changing play, ranging in from the side to snatch a Joe Kapp pass out of the air and return it for a touchdown and a 21–0 lead.

The next week, the NFL Championship Game, was Chuck’s first return to Cleveland Stadium as a coach. Chuck hadn’t been in Baltimore when the Colts were steamrolled by the Browns in the 1964 NFL title game, but Shula still bridled at any mention of the game. The Browns had remade themselves in the wake of Jim Brown’s retirement, and Blanton Collier’s well-coached team had found itself behind Bill Nelsen, another in a long line of quarterbacks who’d disappointed in Pittsburgh only to succeed elsewhere. Leroy Kelly had been the league’s leading rusher, scoring twenty touchdowns in all, and wide receiver Paul Warfield had scored another dozen.

In the week before the game, Chuck and Arnsparger watched film of the Browns’ 31–20 playoff win over the Dallas Cowboys, as well as Cleveland’s 30–20 win over the Colts, the only game Baltimore lost in the regular season. Chuck devised a defense that keyed on tight end Milt Morin, frequently used by the Browns to aid blocking for Kelly. “We didn’t change our defense in any basic way,” said lineman Odell Braase. “We simply read their offense better.” The Browns were stymied, their deepest penetration of the day was to the Baltimore 33-yard line. The game was 24–0 by the end of the third quarter, and Shula kept piling it on, just as he’d felt the Browns did in 1964. Writing in Sports Illustrated, the gravely serious writer Tex Maule intoned “seldom in the long history of NFL championship games has one team so thoroughly dominated the other.”

After the win, the Colts returned to Baltimore for a New Year’s celebration. The next weekend saw a Saturday and Sunday in which Shula and then Chuck celebrated their birthdays, before the team flew to Miami on the Sunday before the game.

By the time the postseason began, it was clear that Chuck was going to be considered for some of the vacant head-coaching jobs. He told suitors he wouldn’t talk to anyone until after the Super Bowl. Shula, who’d been contacted about Chuck by some teams, appreciated the focus. The first two interviews—with the Steelers and the Bills—were scheduled for the days following Super Bowl III.

The Colts were installed as 17-point favorites, reflecting the lopsided outcome of the first two Super Bowls, the Colts’ ransacking run through the NFL, and the fact that the AFL representative wasn’t the Raiders but instead the lightly regarded New York Jets, seen as little more than a group of supporting players surrounding celebrated bachelor quarterback Joe Namath.

“I remember clearly that it was like, ‘The Jets? Pfft,’ going into it,” said Chris Noll. “The expectation was we were going to wipe them out. There wasn’t even a doubt.” This exaggerated sense of confidence wasn’t exclusive to the Colts’ camp. After the Packers’ decisive pair of victories in the first two Super Bowls, conventional wisdom held that it could be another decade or more before the AFL caught up with the talent level of the NFL.

“We certainly were aware that we had dominated and we were 17-point favorites,” said Don Shula. “Anytime you are 17-point favorites, you know, you’re very guarded, and you have to make sure that your players don’t think you are 17-point favorites. That was discussed, and we tried to do the same things preparation-wise that we had done to get there, and be in that position. But it didn’t happen.”

By the weekend before the game, the betting line had gotten up to 19 points. There was, after two lopsided Super Bowls, an air of anticlimax about this one. NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle addressed this concern in his annual press conference the Friday before the game, announcing that the league would consider altering the structure of the postseason tournament after the merger in 1970, so that two NFL teams (presumably more evenly matched) might meet in the final game. The New York Times headline the following day read, “Rozelle Indicates Tomorrow’s Super Bowl Contest Could Be Next to Last.”

There was no feeling of overconfidence in the coaching staff. Shula and his assistants understood well that Weeb Ewbank—still a revered figure around Baltimore for having guided the Colts to their first two world championships—was a coach to be reckoned with. But Chuck knew, better than anyone, what the new league was capable of. He hadn’t spent much time coaching against Namath, but he understood the power of the Jets’ offensive line, and the deceptively fast Don Maynard, who’d given Chargers’ defensive backs fits over the years.

By kickoff, the Colts had been down in Miami for seven days, practicing, lounging in the sun, entertaining all media requests, and losing their edge. “I think Coach Shula could have been a little more disciplined with the guys,” said Preston Pearson. “The media could come and go right up to your hotel room. And the guys really didn’t send anybody away. Guys, as guys will, had women going in and out the front door, out the back door. I can’t tell you how many possibilities that Bubba Smith may have had with his entourage of people going in and out. And the rules allowed that.”

Back at the hotel that week, Chuck was more tense than usual. He’d talked to the team, but he sensed that they were—like an overconfident teenager—tuning him out. “Everyone was loose that week but Chuck,” said Marianne. “All week long, he was really worried about the game.”

The Colts were bored and restless and growing increasingly annoyed with Namath, whose comments were generating more headlines each day. On Thursday night, at the Miami Touchdown Club dinner, he’d guaranteed the Jets would win. “Football players who are real good don’t have to talk,” said Bubba Smith in response.

Chuck’s concern, as it happened, proved well-founded. Throughout the season, Chuck and Arnsparger had kept the Colts’ defense simple, focusing on a four-man rush, occasional blitzes, and mostly vanilla coverages, rarely veering far from the base strong-side combination zone that served the team well. But during Super Bowl III Namath, weaned on the complex defensive looks and strategies of the AFL, audibled the Jets out of trouble and was able to run on linebacker Don Shinnick. (By halftime, Gaubatz was asking Shula and Chuck to put in the faster outside linebacker, Ron Porter, in place of Shinnick, to help with containing the Jets’ running game. “Shinnick was better on pass coverage,” said Gaubatz. “But that run around my right side, they were just eating us up.”)

In truth, the Colts’ defense played well. The Colts’ offense, however, committed a raft of mistakes—not just the five turnovers but numerous missed opportunities, ranging from Earl Morrall missing wide open receivers to dropped passes to missed assignments. Shula eventually brought in the sore-armed Unitas, who drove the Colts to a touchdown, but it wasn’t enough to avert a 16–7 upset win for the Jets, which cemented Namath’s position as an iconic figure in the sport, as well as the Colts as an overconfident team that had let down the NFL.

And when it was over, Chuck trudged off the field, not shocked so much as despondent. In the locker room, there was more shock than disappointment. The Colts showered quietly. Unitas, hard-bitten as ever, walked up to owner Carroll Rosenbloom and apologized. So complete was the Colts’ apparent dominance, some players never got over the feeling. (Forty-five years after Super Bowl III, Gaubatz said, “The only way they could beat us is if that game was rigged; and it was rigged.”)

When the team bus returned to the hotel, Chuck glumly greeted Marianne. “He was obviously devastated,” she said. “I have never seen him quite so.”

As they were laying on the bed, Marianne gently pointed out, “We really have to go to this party.” For players and coaches alike, attendance at Carroll Rosenbloom’s postgame party was mandatory. Chuck sighed, resignedly. But moments later, they heard a loud commotion down the hall. Marianne went out to investigate and came back moments later. “It’s Rick!,” she said. “Something’s wrong!”

Volk, Chuck’s prized safety (and young Chris’s favorite Colt) had suffered two concussions during the game and willed himself back out onto the field after each one. But by that evening in the hotel, he’d gone into convulsions in the bathtub. Chuck went with the ambulance that raced him to the hospital, where Volk’s condition stabilized.

Later, Chuck made his way back to the hotel, and he and Marianne forced themselves to join the second bus heading out to Rosenbloom’s predictably funereal postgame party. “I remember Chuck getting on the bus,” said Upton Bell, “and he had a terrible look on his face, just talking about Volk, and the shock of it.” At the “party,” the Cowboys’ Tex Schramm would later remember, the usually magnanimous Rosenbloom spent much of the party pouting behind a potted plant.

They got back to the hotel after midnight. It had been the worst day of Chuck’s professional life. With a team that was heavily favored, the Colts had failed to carry the standard of the National Football League. As disappointed as Chuck was, he didn’t dwell on the defeat. Instead, he did what he always had done. He got over it and got ready for what was next.