HIRED BY THE MAN WHO FIRED FLIPPER
In Miami, as in Baltimore, Shula would not have the luxury of a silent owner. Joe Robbie never quietly receded into the simple life of rubbing—and bending—elbows in a VIP suite with other swells, leaving the team to the football people. Like Carroll Rosenbloom, he was an unapologetic fop and meddler, a man with an opinion about everything and eager to make it everyone else’s opinion. He loved to tell the story of how he had morphed from a lawyer in South Dakota to Hubert Humphrey’s trusted money raiser to the mover of the Lebanese cartel behind the Dolphins. Robbie, as Sports Illustrated’s Mark Kram wrote in 1969, “just isn’t right, especially not for Miami, the capital of the smooth façade. He looks like the business agent for a labor union, wears electric-green anklets, and his grip on a cocktail glass is that of a longshoreman holding a schooner of beer.”1
Maybe, but Robbie was no interloper. Like “despotic emperors of commerce,” Kram went on, “he certainly has their tunnel vision, their touch at the wheel and deal and their insensitivity to intimidation . . . even his detractors . . . suggest that he may be without peer in the cobweb corner of sports finance. He is, they say, a shrewd manipulator of men and money, tough as a wharf rat and as charming as a rent collector.” Indeed, when the city stopped paying for the celebrity TV dolphin Flipper to swim in a tank at the Orange Bowl, Robbie wouldn’t pick up the tab. Thus was Kram’s piece titled THIS MAN FIRED FLIPPER. Despite the criticisms that accrued as the Dolphins failed to swim, Robbie gave himself high marks. “I brought pro football here when nobody else would get near the place,” he said. “I protected football in this community.”
Robbie put Don Shula into his own fishbowl, but Shula quickly became the clenched-jawed face of the team. He had a half-hour weekly TV show, co-hosted by Dolphin radio announcer Joe Croghan, on Channel 10, directly preceding the brand-new Monday Night Football, which in time would regularly feature his team. But he would never hold all the power of a Lombardi, who could dominate his small market in Green Bay, and he would constantly need to please Robbie. He also had to share power with one of the regime’s holdovers, Joe Thomas, who had been Robbie’s first hire in 1965 as director of player personnel. Thomas, who started out as Weeb Ewbank’s scouting maven in Baltimore, was a shrewd team builder, having put the Minnesota Vikings into the elite. So, while Shula was the titular general manager, Thomas was the de facto GM. Shula would share power without complaint, at least for a while.
Any complications that may have lay ahead were not on Shula’s mind as he began packing up for his new home in Miami—Dorothy and the five kids were moving with great regret, having sunk roots deeply into the Baltimore community. They sold their house on Pot Spring Road—with apt symmetry—to Gene Shue, coach of the NBA Baltimore Bullets, then found a sumptuous home on the 16th green of a golf course at 16220 West Prestwick Place in Miami Lakes, a six-square-mile grid on the southeastern tip of the state. The location offered the Shulas what they wanted, a slice of suburbia just miles from downtown. But he had no time to settle in. Needing to hire a staff yesterday, the first—surprise, surprise—was Bill Arnsparger, who’d had a change of heart about his “business opportunities” when Shula got a new job. He was hired as defensive coordinator and line coach. Shut out from his Colt aides, Shula next reached back for old cronies, plucking Howard Schnellenberger away from George Allen to be offensive coordinator.
As Schnellenberger recalled, “The team hadn’t won, but Shula always had the smell of a winner. He said, ‘I didn’t come to Miami to change the players. I came to change the attitude in the locker room.’ I said, ‘You talked me into it.’ ”2
Shula hired as offensive line coach Monte Clark, whose work containing Gino Marchetti in the ’64 title game still made Shula shudder. Clark was about to retire, but Shula played by the book and got permission from Blanton Collier to sign him. Next to arrive was Mike Scarry, an NFL lifer, one of the old Paul Brown gang, who had played center and linebacker in the dinosaur days and in his 60s was scouting for the Redskins. It was an offbeat selection, but Shula saw his staff as a mix of football minds and personal chums. That was obvious enough when he hired Carl Taseff, who had replaced his old running buddy as defensive back coach with the Lions, but had been out of the game since ’66. Sentimentality overruled need, since Shula had already retained Wilson’s defensive back coach, Tom Keane, whom he had also played with in Baltimore. Shula assigned Taseff to the offensive backfield, but his real role was to spread the gospel of Shula as a peerless potentate. Carl did just that, ensuring his employment virtually in perpetuity.
As for the players, the talent was there, which Wilson freely took credit for. Indeed, Robbie’s “highly satisfactory” judgment of the previous years was not lost on Wilson. The Dolphins’ 12 wins over their first three seasons, he said, “equaled or bettered the record of any expansion team in history,” and in the fourth, “we were taken out by injuries.” Feeling slighted, he refused to stay in the organization; instead, he left the game, muttering about Shula. Two years later, he was still saying he had turned over “a ready-made team” to Shula, and “Joe Doakes could have coached that team” to great success. Painting Shula as an ingrate, he recalled that he’d doubled Shula’s Lions salary and helped get him the Colts job—“I practically wrote his contract for him”—claiming he himself turned down the job.3
Wilson overstated his success and understated the enormous difference Shula would make. Right from the get-go, Shula’s hiring sparked thousands of new season-ticket sales. But he was right that—as with Shula’s first pro team—the Dolphins were not doormats. Mercury Morris, the team’s hip-swiveling halfback drafted in ’69, agreed that “the nucleus for a championship team [was] already in place.”4 Wilson handed Shula an offense led by a young and proven quarterback, Bob Griese; a deep backfield with battering-ram fullback Larry Csonka and halfbacks Jim Kiick and Morris; and a defense anchored by middle linebacker Nick Buoniconti and right defensive end Bill Stanfill. Griese and Csonka came as first-round picks in ’67 and ’68, Stanfill as the first-round pick in ’69.
Buoniconti, a former team captain at Notre Dame, came in a trade in ’69 after seven seasons with the Boston Patriots, five as an All-Pro. Judged an “old” 28, at five-eleven and 220, he was undersized for his position, but was the only linebacker with a law degree, and he could think as fast as he could cover a play. In Miami, he made first-team All-Pro; Griese had gone to the AFL Pro Bowl twice; Kiick, Stanfill, and center Tom Goode once. The biggest need was on the offensive line, which resulted in Griese being sacked an AFL-high 33 times in ’69 despite missing five games. He also threw more interceptions than touchdowns. When Shula first met with him, in spring camp at St. Thomas University in Miami Gardens, he told Griese to quit scrambling; he wanted him to stay in the pocket.
“Make me a pocket and I’ll stay in it,” the quarterback replied.5
Shula also saw problems in the secondary, his area of expertise. He and Arnsparger would install the same double zone scheme that had failed with the Colts, and he figured he had two keepers: right corner Lloyd Mumphord, who as a rookie in ’69 grabbed five interceptions, and third-year strong safety Dick Anderson. Unhappy with the other holdovers, he would start two rookies, Curtis Johnson at left corner and Jake Scott at free safety—a gamble, but one he thought he could win, based on a week-long interval over the summer when a wildcat players’ strike called by John Mackey left only rookies in camp, their ears blistered by Shula’s verbal fusillades, prompting a headline reading “HIT, HIT, HIT,” CHANTS SHULA TO DOLPHIN ROOKIES.6
Shula had more high cards than he knew. When he arrived, he had been given a splendid gift from Blanton Collier, who, saving on payroll, made arguably the worst trade ever, sending the balletic receiver Paul Warfield, an All-Pro for the third time in ’69, for a third-round draft pick. Shula had been a fan of his since Warfield played for Harding High in Warren, Ohio. The son of a preacher, he was in his prime at 28, with remarkable athletic ability. He would look almost lazy loping down the field, then make a subtle pivot, shift gears, and get open, the product of hours of repetitive practice and film study. A highly sensitive man, Warfield believed the trade was racially motivated, and he nearly quit rather than accept the trade to a city he wanted no part of. And he was just one of many African Americans on the team who felt the same way, something that threatened to wreck Shula’s efforts before he ever coached a game.
They weren’t wrong. Dade County, wrote a local reporter in 2016, “has [a] long and hideous history of discrimination—particularly in Miami Beach, where wealthy elites could enforce their biased whims.”7 At one time, incredible now, signs in hotels read, “Always a view, never a Jew.” By the ’50s, African Americans were the ones denied those views. There had been small gains by the time Shula got to town—in 1971, a black woman would be named Miss Miami Beach—but the first black Dolphins players felt Jim Crow lived in their own locker room.
Of the various cliques on the team, one had been a beer-chugging pack of good ol’ boys led by the South Carolina–born Georgia graduate Jake Scott, who proudly called themselves the Redneck Club. Mercury Morris, in a bylined article in the Miami News in 1969, wrote of “a sticky situation here at the Dolphins’ camp. . . . There’s a de facto segregation being practiced here and it’s as much my black brothers’ fault as anyone else,”8 for putting up with it. Years later, Morris wrote a memoir in which he claimed Buoniconti had “whacked” the black runners in practice while going easy on Csonka and Kiick, and that he and the linebacker almost came to blows over it.9
Other recently arrived black players had also had to think hard about coming to Miami. One was free-agent Packer tight end Marv Fleming, who had spent seven years in Lombardi’s liberal regime. Guard Larry Little, who had grown up in south Florida and been signed by San Diego out of all-black Bethune-Cookman, was traded to the Dolphins in ’69. Looking back, he admitted, “I didn’t particularly like the trade.”10 He liked it less when Shula greeted him not with hello but “How much do you weigh?” When he answered 286, the coach ordered, “I want you at 265.” (He’d made a similar demand of Csonka in their first encounter.) Little made the target, and as Shula expected, he became quicker, paving the way for him to be named the AFC’s outstanding lineman three years in a row. Left unspoken in public was the companion negative opinion black players around the league had of Shula, which was stoked by several black Colts players. Not only Mackey, but now Bubba Smith went on the record, saying:
When things went wrong, it seemed to me [Shula] picked mostly on the black guys. I can’t function right when someone is always hollering in my ear. If the team was having trouble, he’d come over to me or John Mackey or some other black player and ask us to try harder. No one has to tell me or Mackey to put out more in a game. Hell, that’s insulting.11
To most players, Shula was an equal opportunity scold, save for the slack he had shown Unitas, and white players who had been ripped by him had little sympathy for black men who felt the same sting. It’s revealing that no one ever labeled Shula as racist, unlike some of Tom Landry’s players in Dallas, where the racial divide was starker and the assumption was easier to make, given Landry’s deep Texas roots. The truth was, Landry, caught in a cultural clash, simply didn’t know how to deal with racial clefts on his team, and for years just left them hanging with passive indifference. By contrast, Shula, the son of immigrants, had a clear sense of cultural differences. Another of his early signings was a bald, pint-sized, left-footed soccer-style placekicker born in Cyprus, Garo Yepremian.
Yepremian, who made ties as a supplemental craft, looked like a Muppet and had been ridiculed by Alex Karras when he’d played for the Lions, as the guy who would allegedly say, in a thick accent, “I keeck a touchdown.” Actually, he had once “keecked” six field goals in a game, but side-winding soccer-style kickers with funny-sounding names and accents were not yet fully accepted. For Shula, it was enough that Yepremian had become a citizen and enlisted in the army for him to be convinced the little man had the right stuff to play for him. Yepremian was grateful. After losing his job in Detroit, he said, “I wrote letters to 21 pro teams but Don Shula was the only one interested in giving me a chance.”12
Diverse characters seemed to find refuge on the Dolphins. Wilson had also left Shula with defensive tackle Manny Fernandez, a descendant of Spaniards who sailed to Hawaii. The front office wanted him to do some publicity for the team, speaking what they assumed was his native tongue in Miami’s Little Havana section. “Sorry,” he said, “I don’t speak Spanish at all. Not a word.”13 Fernandez arrived at camp on his Harley, shortly after he had broken his jaw and nose and lost seven teeth when he crashed it going 120 miles an hour.
Shula’s Dolphin rosters would include men of disparate backgrounds, some eccentric, some left-wingers, some right-wingers, black men and white crackers, some atheists, some holy rollers, some suck-ups, head cases . . . all of whom were united by a common gene: a willingness to do anything to play.
Still, Shula had to address the racial tensions. Already, he was working on a historical trend, with the Dolphins’ highest-paid players being Warfield and Fleming, the former under a four-year, $280,000 contract. Knowing he had to make important symbolic gestures, in the first full team meeting of spring camp, he watched the whites congregate on one side, blacks on the other. Shula ordered everyone to group by position. Whereas many teams, including Wilson’s Dolphins, had blacks room with blacks, whites with whites, during training camp, Shula put Warfield in with Griese, with whom he would have to develop an innate connection on the field, and Fleming with backup quarterback John Stofa; similar interracial pairings were made in this manner.
Detail-oriented as Shula was, he even placed pick combs and Afro Sheen in the locker room, though he seemed not to understand what they were for. Once, he asked Csonka, “How did the Afro Sheen go over?” Replied the hirsute fullback, “What the heck are you asking me for? I’m Hungarian like you are.”14 Shula’s attempts at being a brother from another mother may have been, as Morris said, “a bit awkward,” but the effort counted.
His mission was to apply his system, a conservative, low-risk attack built around the running game, mainly passing when the defense was softened up. Csonka was a six-foot, three-inch, 240-pound slab who ran in short, pigeon-toed steps with no outside speed, but a keen sense of where the hole would open. He would blast through it, head down, not falling until gang-tackled. Once, when he was knocked out cold, they called for a stretcher. Csonka, coming to, refused it. “I’m not gonna be carried off in front of all these people,” he said, and half-crawled to the sideline.15 Kiick, smaller and not much faster, had the same fanatical drive and was a jarring blocker and dependable pass catcher.
They had come to the pros at the same time, Csonka, indeed a Midwestern Hungarian like Shula, having starred at Syracuse and then been the Dolphins’ No. 1 pick in ’68. Kiick, a Jersey-born son of a World War II army lieutenant who also played briefly as a running back for the Steelers, went all the way to Wyoming to play college ball, then was drafted in the fifth round. They quickly complemented each other, both married, both carousers—as Csonka would often say, “Me and Kiick and Jack Daniels had a big night together.”16 But they were also men of intellect, wit, and sarcasm. As if out of a comedy sketch, they had names no one could spell right and a Cuckoo’s Nest/Easy Rider sensibility. To Mercury Morris, they were “a clique unto themselves.”17
They fit in quite well under Wilson, in an atmosphere more like a men’s smoker—or, as Schnellenberger called it, “a floating cocktail party.” Griese recalled Wilson and his assistants drinking their lunches at Johnny Raffa’s restaurant near the Orange Bowl, then “returning for the afternoon practice breathing alcohol into the huddle.”18 Csonka, with no pushback from Wilson, lauded him as a “great guy”—a description few players ever offered for Shula. Wilson, he said, “wasn’t too concerned with the room check. . . . He told everybody, ‘If you’ve got something good going somewhere and you’re going to miss the curfew, give me a phone call.’ That’s the kind of coach that most football players appreciate, that they want to win for. Just to keep him around.” When Shula arrived, Csonka’s world changed. “For football knowledge,” he said, “George wasn’t as meticulous as Shula is. And he wasn’t as good a sideline coach.”
Schnellenberger, characteristically, was blunter. As a coach, he said, Wilson was “horseshit. Everyone knew he was horseshit.” Shula’s coaching style was a change. His low-key pep talks, to Csonka, were “rational, not rah-rah. He’s smart enough to know he can’t bullshit bullshitters. . . . That’s what Shula keeps saying. ‘Be yourself.’ ” The problem was, Shula knew all too well who and what he and Kiick were, because he used to be them.
He didn’t trust either of us. He knows a hell-raiser when he sees one, because he was one himself. When he [played,] his teammates used to go get him the night before a game and put him in a car to get back for curfew. He’s up every morning for mass and communion. He’d like everybody to believe he’s always been this way, but he knows that me and Jim know better. We’ve heard the stories from guys he played with.19
Shula had less success trying to understand other players, who reflected a different side of the Baby Boomer crowd. Mercury Morris, for example, was a human paradox few could grasp. He had come to the team as a third-round pick in ’69 out of West Texas State, where he set NCAA rushing records quickly broken by O. J. Simpson. At six feet and a sinewy 200 pounds, he had blinding speed—he had been given his nickname, after the wing-footed god, in college—and Wilson played him mostly as a kick returner. He led the AFL in return yardage that rookie season.20 He surely had a mercurial mouth—when Wilson said he’d be happy with a 7–7 season, Morris clucked that he wanted to go 14–0—and some of the best moves were off the field; he would leave games and practices with two women, one on each arm.
Unsure that Morris had the proper attitude to be a pro, Shula would also relegate him to kick returns, making him the first of many Dolphins to grouse about playing time. Before long, all three runners would be in a cat-and-mouse game of tweaking Shula, whom they feared, but never saw as sacrosanct in the Lombardi sense. This was likely the better way to go about coaching men in the ’70s. And Shula could always get his point across, no matter who was balky. Csonka learned that on day one of Shula’s first spring camp, when he called in sick with the flu. When he did make it in, Shula was all over him, blistering him as too fat, and had him run a 40-yard dash. Somehow, Csonka ran it in 4.7 seconds, his best time. As Kiick learned about the new guy, “Shula’s not the kind of coach you want to win for as much as you want to win for yourself. Because . . . winning keeps him off your ass.”21
Knowing what he had in Csonka, Shula leaned on him hard. As a rookie, he had sustained two concussions, a broken eardrum, and a busted nose, his 10th since high school. But he was indomitable, incurring a penalty once for knocking a would-be tackler cold with a forearm shiver. According to Buoniconti, Shula “literally had to teach Csonka how to run with the football. He used to run straight up and down and Shula [got] him to lead with his forearm rather than his head.” Shula and Taseff, he said, all but “reengineered” Csonka to be a top performer.22
Shula himself needed refining. He was still young, still blue-collar, still old-guard, but the unyielding shell around him loosened a bit. As he had done with Tom Matte, he bonded with analogs of himself, often Ohio-bred fire-breathers. Csonka sort of qualified, and if he was easily the most scabrous, Shula gave him the most slack to prick him. But when he spoke, grown men jumped. As part of an overall professionalizing of an operation that sorely needed it, players were ordered into the gym daily to lift weights, run endless laps, sweat through four-a-day practices, and jog those dreaded gassers at the end of the day. When the player strike called by Mackey ended in early August, he had the veterans do a 12-minute run before breakfast their first day back. Some, like Csonka and Little, used to piling it high at the buffet table, were put on strict diets.
Shula mandated wearing sports coats and ties on the road, while forbidding long hair or “excessive” beards, which no one really knew the meaning of but didn’t test. The 11 p.m., lights-out curfew in training camp, barely an hour after all the team meetings were done, was inviolate; no time was allowed for visits with wives or girlfriends. Csonka called it “a system designed for children, not adults,” and described Shula’s camps as “prisons.” Shula was the warden, Monte Clark the enforcer, taking names, lurking in dorm and hotel corridors, handing down fines. Since Shula knew all the ways to beat a curfew, those avenues were shut down. He would hand a football to the hotel elevator operators, instructing them to ask any player who broke curfew to autograph it, so that he knew who to fine. Ego-driven players always fell for it.
On the field, Griese was his generalissimo. He looked like a farm boy, missing only a stalk of hay in his mouth, but had proved at Purdue that he had a killer instinct. He also had a refreshing lack of ego, accepting the role of “game manager” rather than long bomber, which AFL quarterbacks had seemed to believe they had to be. Never would the mild-mannered Griese sass Shula or, Lord knows, refuse to run a play he sent in. He was a natural defense reader, a masterful play faker, and never pretended he had a great arm, though he could deliver one deep when needed. Even Schnellenberger, his own position coach, said Griese “couldn’t beat you with the pass.” But he could with his brain. The apotheosis of Shula football: low-risk, high-percentage, pounding all the time. At last unfettered by the polar opposite of Unitas, Shula had the ideal mechanic to run a game the way he had always wanted to.
Cracking the whip during the preseason games to show he meant business, Shula beat Chuck Noll’s Steelers 16–10, Paul Brown’s Bengals 20–10—Shula’s first game at the Orange Bowl, where, at his urging, artificial turf had been installed—and Dick Nolan’s 49ers 17–7. Then the Colts came to Miami for a game meaningless to everyone except Shula, the Colts, and over 76,000 fans who jammed their way into the Orange Bowl on a humid Sunday night, the most that had been there since Shula’s longest day. Despite all the negative quotes from the Colts—Bubba Smith now vowing he would “make Shula sorry he left”23—Shula shied from any inflammatory comments, though Schnellenberger recalled him as being “wound tight as a drum.” The secondary picked Unitas twice, Kiick ran for 78 yards, Griese threw a touchdown, and the Dolphins won 20–13. It left Shula grinning, crowing that his new team was “finding out how much fun it is to win,” but it also gave the Colts incentive to bring him back to earth in their two regular-season matches.
The south Florida papers, already kissing up to him, ran splashy headlines about Shula’s “Debut Success” and “Winning Start.” Another was: THE INCREDIBLE MIAMI DOLPHINS DO IT AGAIN, above a story swooning that Shula “could run for mayor. Maybe even governor.”24
They remained primed, though they lost the last two preseason exercises, one to an emotional Packers team only three days after Lombardi died on September 3, the other to the Falcons on a field goal with four seconds left. Yet Shula wasn’t entirely sold on his own team. Though key positions were held by good, smart, tough pieces, the offense had little speed save for Morris, who would see little time in the backfield. Shula flirted with signing the Olympic sprinter Jim Hines, but would go into the season with Warfield as his only game breaker; the other wideouts, Howard Twilley and Karl Noonan, were dependable but not exactly scary. Shula did deal for his old Colt receiver Willie Richardson, who would catch only seven passes all season and so detested Miami that he went right back to Baltimore in 1971.
It would be Shula’s defense that took him up or down. It was strong, mobile, with the peripatetic Buoniconti flanked by linebackers Doug Swift and another rookie, Mike Kolen. Up front, the incumbents on the line—ends Stanfill and Jim Riley, tackles Fernandez and John Richardson—could stack up well against opponents’ running backs but were less adept at swarming quarterbacks. The deep backs, especially the two rookies, were gambles, though Anderson and Scott were gems. There were holes to plug on both lines, tweaks needed. But Shula came into the season with his usual swagger, knowing that Lombardi’s death had made him the champagne of coaches. One newspaper story quoted an oddsmaker as saying that Shula was the only coach who could influence a point spread the way Lombardi had. But then, Shula knew all about point spreads, and the thought made him shudder.
The Dolphins began the Shula era against the Boston Patriots (they weren’t the New England Patriots until a year later) on September 20 in Harvard Stadium, one of the worst fields to play on. The Pats were one of few teams who would be underdogs to the Dolphins. But while they would suffer a disastrous season, their coach fired midyear, they ruined Shula’s debut. It looked good after Scott intercepted a pass and Kiick ran in a five-yard touchdown in the second quarter to put Miami up 14–3. But they never scored again. Griese, forced to throw, was held to 13 completions in 32 attempts and was intercepted twice, leading Shula to yank him for backup John Stofa. He and Griese—who called it the worst game of his career—were sacked eight times. The final was 27–14, Shula’s men outgained 301 yards to 214.
A loser one week into the merger, Shula was in no mood to spare the players. “I gave the team a tongue lashing,” he said, grousing that “we were giving away offensive gifts.”25 He had to stay on the road for the second game, against the Houston Oilers, another lesser team. And now a more controlled Griese completed 10 of 17, one a short touchdown to Twilley, and handed off 41 times to Csonka and Kiick, who in tandem gained 136 yards. The defense made a goal-line stand and forced three fumbles. It ended at 20–10, Miami. “I thought we had a good football team,” a relieved Shula said, “but we wanted to prove it.”26
The team now began to roll. In the home opener, against Al Davis’s Raiders, the Orange Bowl nearly erupted when Griese hit Warfield in full stride with a 49-yard TD in the second quarter, Warfield eluding three defenders with a 360-degree pivot. The 20–13 victory was the first Dolphin win ever over the Raiders, with the defense intercepting Daryle Lamonica four times. Griese only had to throw 16 times, completing eight for a stunning 180 yards, Warfield with 120 yards on just three balls. Csonka and Kiick rushed a combined 30 times for over 100 yards. The template was formed.
The next week, savoring every minute, Shula stomped Weeb Ewbank’s Jets in the wind tunnel of Shea Stadium, 20–13, the Dolphins’ first-ever win there. Shula handled Namath the way he expected to in the Super Bowl. With the Dolphins taking the lead early, a far less confident Namath threw into the teeth of the double zone 40 times, and completed 17 for 240 yards but was picked thrice. Hounded all day, his passer rating was 31.2; Griese’s hit 100, as he went 14-for-24 for 240 yards, throwing touchdowns to Warfield and Twilley. Braucher happily wrote that the Dolphins had “shocked” and “humbled” the Jets with “the best defensive effort of its 5-year history.”
Shula called it “our most important victory, wonderful, just wonderful.”27 But this reverie was premature. After beating the Buffalo Bills 33–14, Shula had to play the two games that gave him palpitations. First, Blanton Collier’s Browns came into the Orange Bowl and left with a 28–0 win, outgaining Miami 339–165. Griese would hear boos late in the game, leaving some writers to ask if the Dolphins wilted in the 83-degree heat, supposedly their home advantage.
After Shula insisted, “We’re a better football team than we showed today,” Braucher wrote, “They’d better be,”28 since the next game was in Baltimore, with the Colts still stinging from the preseason loss. Under McCafferty, they were riding high at 5–1. The media Shula once owned was in a taunting mood, Cameron Snyder cheekily writing of the “return of the prodigal coach,” calling the first-round pick gained as compensation a “dowry” for the Colts.29
McCafferty kept a lid on any snark from his players, while Shula heaped praise on the city and team he ditched. Gracious fans gave him an ovation before the kickoff. But that was it for the niceties. McCafferty’s team, favored by seven points, piled it on, scoring on an 80-yard punt return and a 99-yard kickoff return. A series of flubbed punts by Larry Seiple and two more Griese picks made it easy for Unitas, who threw a touchdown to Eddie Hinton. Then Morrall, mopping up, ran up the score with a TD pass to Tom Mitchell. Final toll: 35–0.
When Shula, who now had lost consecutive shutouts, giving up 63 points, congratulated McCafferty, he was given a mock ovation as he jogged off. Asked if he appreciated that, he glared, “I found absolutely nothing nice about today,” adding that “things can’t look any bleaker for us than they did today.”30 The Colts were smug, speaking of Shula as if he were yesterday’s news. Tellingly, they gave the game ball to Carroll Rosenbloom.
Shula was now 4–3 with half the season left. If there was any good to being drop-kicked by the teams that haunted him, one significant development was that Mercury Morris, finally given a shot, glittered. He carried eight times for 89 yards against the Colts and caught three passes for 68 yards, displaying speed the team badly needed. Morris still wasn’t content with the action he saw, and Kiick wasn’t happy with his carries being reduced, but the running game was a three-headed hydra, all three backs with their own strengths. It didn’t do much good in the third week of hell, against the Philadelphia Eagles, when they again fell behind, 24–0—having yielded an astonishing 89 straight points—and lost 24–17. Surveying the wreckage, a caustic Shula said the team had excelled only in “ineptness,” though he didn’t help matters when, down 24–0, he sent in Yepremian to kick a field goal.
To Braucher, the Dolphins were “floundering,” the defense “porous.”31 The season seemed beyond redemption. And that’s when they found their backbone. Because of Shula’s drill-sergeant methods, they were in shape to win the last six games, tuning up for the rematch with the Colts with a 21–10 win in New Orleans. The schadenfreude after the first game disappeared in the broiling heat of the Orange Bowl turf. The Dolphins toyed with the Colts. Scott returned a punt for a 77-yard touchdown, Griese ran in one score and hit Warfield for another. The linebackers blitzed Unitas silly, forcing him into two picks. The final was 34–17. There was no game ball for Rosenbloom this time—now it went to Shula.
Saying he was “totally pleased” with the triumph, Shula was now in the hunt and his team thumped the Falcons, Patriots, and a Namath-less Jets. The Dolphins closed by decimating the Bills 45–7—bringing their record to 10–4, not far off the Colts’ 11–2–1—and taking the sole wild-card slot, a major success for Shula, who nonetheless was snubbed in the Coach of the Year voting, won by Dick Nolan. Still no sweetheart, he had certifiably become more human to writers who used to dread talking to him, but now were warming to him as an underdog.32
Shula’s gamble on the secondary paid off. All four starters excelled, picking off 31 passes, Anderson leading with eight. Still, the defense, though second against the run, came in 22nd against the pass. The run-based offense was solid, leading the AFC with 148.7 yards a game, Csonka the leader with 874, winning him a Pro Bowl slot. Griese and Warfield also were honored, though it was glaring that Griese had 12 touchdowns and 17 interceptions. But success seemed to only accentuate the bitching. While Morris’s carries were a breakthrough for him, his and Kiick’s gripes would become a recurring, tedious theme. No one complained about winning, though it hardly seemed a reward that the Dolphins’ first-ever playoff game was on the road against the Raiders’ motley cast of outcasts and chain-gang refugees.
Two days before the December 27 game, Robbie picked up the tab for a team dinner at a local restaurant on Christmas. But Al Davis wasn’t big on Christmas spirit. It rained all week in Oakland, and on the morning of the game, the field at the turbid, foreboding Oakland-Alameda County Stadium was like quicksand. This was the kind of thing Raider opponents had come to expect, including groundskeepers drenching the field with hoses if need be. It paid off, too. The Dolphins, slipping in the mud, gained 118 rushing yards, but Csonka would carry only 10 times, Kiick 14, Morris eight. With Shula believing it would be more formidable to throw, Griese went 13-for-27 against the Raiders’ infamous bump-and-run coverage and had two touchdowns, the first a 16-yard dart to Warfield to put the Dolphins up 7–0. It was 7–7 at the half, a real battle. But in the third quarter, the great veteran cornerback Willie Brown cut in front of a sideline pass, snared it, and flew 50 yards for a touchdown. Then, in the fourth quarter, Lamonica sailed one that Rod Sherman reeled in and took all the way, 82 yards. It ended 21–14; for Shula, the same story, different team.
He seemed itchy to indict Davis, but held back. In the locker room, wrote Ed Pope, Shula looked like “he had spent the afternoon making mud-pies” and brooded about the “treacherous” conditions. “But I don’t want to say too much about that,” he said, biting his lip. “After all, both teams had to play on it. . . . The fact is, our season just came to a screeching halt.” He was asked if the Dolphins were a Super Bowl–level team. Flashing the Shula glare, he said, “How can I answer that at a time like this? All I know is that I’m not happy with things right this minute.”33