Despite Shula’s pedigree, the old-guard sportswriters assumed that the resumption of the old league’s primacy in the Super Bowl (the Colts’ win as an AFC team included) was the natural order of things. George Allen, who had never coached his way to a Super Bowl, was pimped as a stabilizing force. Tex Maule, always loyal to the old NFL, believed the Redskins were “The Top-of-the-Hill Gang,” who “appeared to grow stronger as the season progressed,” while Griese “cannot be expected to be in top form.” Allen’s geezers, he concluded, “should win . . . by at least 10 points and perhaps by as many as 21.”1 Another eminent scribe, Jim Murray, wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “The Redskins are sure to hand the Dolphins their shoes and ask that they bring them back by morning shined and leave them outside their door.” This consensus altered the point spread; at first favored by a point, by kickoff the undefeated Dolphins were a three-point underdog.
Shula was not without tinsel of his own. Weeks before, he had stepped into Lombardi territory when an illustration of his bulldog features was on the cover of Time, though casting him somewhat tepidly as MIAMI’S UNMIRACULOUS MIRACLE WORKER, who had turned a “lotus land” of sun and mah-jongg into a cauldron where “hoarse cries of ‘Dee-fense! Dee-fense!’ [emanate] from a bathing-suit salesman dressed in a robin’s-egg blue sports jacket.”2
For Shula, more distracting than the puffery about Allen’s team was Allen himself, who even the anal Shula granted was methodical to the point of being annoying. Although the two men were close and often spoke on the phone, Allen clearly wanted to get under Shula’s saddle. He called the Dolphins “a fundamentally precise team,” but added, “I haven’t seen Csonka—what’s his name? Larry?”3 He also said that the Dolphins executed so well that “they’re not that impressive. They’re like a baseball team with six guys batting .300, not home runs but singles and doubles.” Shula also was slightly paranoid about longtime rumors that Allen—a prototypical Bill Belichick—spied on his opponents. He sent Dolphin equipment boys to check the trees outside the practice field for guys with binoculars; when they shook a few, so the story went, a hobo fell out of one, but no spies.4
Although Shula obligingly praised Allen’s team—Larry Brown, he gushed, was “great”—he believed he could lose only if his team screwed up.5 Trying to harness their concentration, tightening the slack he cut them a year before, he put his players into a hotel in Long Beach, the Edgewater Hyatt, though Csonka and Kiick easily found their way to Newport Beach and Marina del Rey on free days to hang out in whatever bars they came across. Shula by now had stopped even trying to control them.
And, truth be told, in general he seemed almost mellow. Tex Maule believed he was “relaxed and amiable throughout, and almost elfin” in interview sessions. He allowed the players to wear informal attire like jeans and sneakers, and some black players looked very un-Dolphin-like in Soul Train-style leather vests and caps. Ed Pope saw those pregame days as “Don Shula’s loosey-goosey week,” compared with a “jittery and testy” Allen—who was more so after Rozelle fined him again, $2,000, for concealing a player injury during the playoffs.6 But Kiick, for one, didn’t quite buy Shula’s outward calm. “Shula kept telling us that he was more relaxed than the year before,” he said, “but I think he was fighting it. I think he was trying to make himself believe it.”7
Shula was no amateur at mind games; while he acknowledged that Jake Scott had hurt his shoulder in the Steeler game, he never let on whether it was separated or just bruised, leaving Scott’s status as questionable, which affected the betting line and Allen’s plans. But what curdled him the most that week was Carroll Rosenbloom. Livid that the man who ditched him would be playing for the title on his home grounds, Rosenbloom lamented that both teams had coaches who “broke all the rules in football.” Getting uglier, even for him, he called Shula a “pig” and “a loser of the big ones,” and predicted he would lose because “Allen is a winner” and “I’ve seen [Shula] freeze up too many times in the big ones.”8
Shula hit back, saying his old boss “has done nothing for three years but downgrade me not only as a coach but as a human being.” The worst part, he added, was that his family had to read the hurtful remarks. His son David, he said, told him, “Dad, I thought you were honest,” breaking his heart.9 But he wouldn’t take the bait, refusing to “get in a verbal battle with a man of this nature because I’m no match for him.” Rather, he called Rozelle, hoping for some kind of action against Rosenbloom. Rozelle said he’d get back to him about it. He never did.
The game plan was again simple. “We wanted to take away their short, inside passing and we wanted to whip them up front, which takes away the run,” he said. He also knew that Kilmer’s weak arm couldn’t beat him with sideline throws, and thus the Dolphins would overplay the slant-ins to the middle. The X factor would be the intensity that drained from the team in the last Super Bowl. But he was helped out in this respect by no less than Richard Nixon, who this time stuck his nose into the game’s hype by picking the Redskins, Allen being a loud courtier of his. “I wouldn’t want to be Griese,” said the man whom no one in America would have wanted to be within two years. Csonka, who despised Nixon, not to mention all dilettante politicians, who he said turned football into “an apple pie thing,” responded by making it a battle cry. “If he’s rooting for the Redskins,” he said, “I don’t see how we can lose.”10
The Dolphins were also loose on game day. Leaving the hotel, Scott, whose status was still in question, was late. Shula, impatient, growled at him, provoking Scott to say, “S’matter, coach, you thinkin’ about going down as the coach with the most losses in the Super Bowl?” Staring straight ahead, Shula said, “Just be ready to play.”11 He had, of course, told Earl Morrall that months ago. But now Morrall was the forgotten savior, about to see another Super Bowl he had led his team to end with him on the bench. On the other hand, Kiick, who had started only four games so far, got the nod, sending Morris onto the field with a scowl.
That late afternoon of January 14, 1973, was a typical warm, smoggy winter day in LA, the crowd in the ancient tureen 90,102. A TV audience of around 75 million tuned in. The field—covered with smooth grass, now Shula’s favorite surface—was like a soft green bed as he led his team out of the tunnel. Clad in a white polo shirt, matching belt, and gray slacks, he had been typically terse in the locker room. “We’ve waited in line,” he told his men. “We’ve worked too hard to lose this one.” Once on the field, he seemed almost serene compared with the manic, overwound Allen, who in his maroon slacks and white shirt immediately descended into a mass of tics and thumb licking. Early on, the defenses ruled. Then Griese, who would pass only 11 times, completing eight for 88 yards, found Warfield on the sideline for 18 yards on a first down. Three plays later, from the ’Skins 28, an unhurried Griese saw Warfield doubled. His second option, Howard Twilley, who had suffered a broken jaw and elbow during the season, faked a down-and-in on diminutive cornerback Pat Fischer and cut outside as Griese sent the pass skyward. Twilley caught it at the five and, with the five-foot, nine-inch Fischer clawing at him, tumbled in for a 7–0 lead. Elated, Twilley handed the ball to the back judge, Tom Kelleher, and patted him on the behind. “Don’t do that again,” Kelleher warned him.
Meanwhile, Kilmer was in the Dolphins’ crosshairs all day. Arnsparger’s wrinkle was to have Fernandez line up in an unbalanced front, as a nose guard, head to head with veteran center Lenny Hauss, who needed help from the guards to contain him, which freed up Buoniconti to pour in. Redskin guard John Wilbur, victimized often by Fernandez, said later of the Dolphin defense, “They’re like swarming bees. You think you’ve blocked them well, and you only get two, three, four yards before they’re all over you.”12 Coming in, Kilmer had planned to exploit cornerback Lloyd Mumphord, who replaced injured Tim Foley. But he never counted on the Dolphin linebackers and safeties sniffing out his passes. On the opening drive of the second quarter, he sent one for Charley Taylor, but it sailed over his head. Matheson, playing deep for a linebacker, tipped it, and Scott, lying on his belly, snared it one-handed.
However, the Dolphins hurt themselves, with a penalty nullifying a 47-yard TD pass to Warfield, so Kilmer was down just 7–0 when he took the ’Skins across the 50 for the first time. With a third-and-three on the Miami 48, as soon as he dropped back, a blitzing Doug Swift zeroed in. Kilmer forced one down the middle to tight end Jerry Smith. Buoniconti, in his mid-zone, barely had to move to pick it off. His 30-yard runback set up a short drive, during which Griese, on a third-and-four, threw to Jim Mandich, who made a diving catch at the two. Kiick then scored on a one-yard plunge, making it 14–0 at the half.
Shula’s blueprint was flawless. Griese had gone 6-for-6. Misdirection runs and trap blocking plays would propel Csonka 112 yards on just 15 carries, and Kiick and Morris 72 more. Larry Brown, meanwhile, was being targeted as soon as he lined up, combinations of linemen and linebackers erecting a wall he couldn’t get through. On the bench, he was wincing in pain. And things got worse for Allen in the second half. His kicker missed a 32-yard field goal. A Kilmer pass to an open Smith in the end zone hit the crossbar. On the next play, another end-zone pass went to Taylor. Scott, the game’s MVP, again intercepted it and took it back 55 yards.
But finally Allen got a break, if an incredibly strange one. After giving up a 49-yard run by Csonka, his defense made a big play, intercepting Griese in the end zone near the end of the third quarter. And then, with 2:38 left in the game, Yepremian attempted an insurance field goal from the 42. The snap to Morrall, the holder, was low and to the outside, and when the left-footed Yepremian sent it up, the ’Skins Bill Brundige got a hand on it, sending the ball skipping backward near the sideline. Yepremian got to it first. In such a situation, Shula had told him, he was to fall on the ball. Period. But the wee tie maker thought he could pass—though to whom, no one knew. Trying to get a grip with his tiny hand—his right hand—his arm went forward as the ball squirted straight up. As if playing volleyball, when it came down, he batted it into the air with both hands. It came down in the hands of cornerback Mike Bass, who tripped lightly down the sideline to score a ridiculous 49-yard touchdown, officially a fumble return.
The NFL Films clips would show spare Dolphin linebacker Al Jenkins on the sideline, unbelieving, shouting, “Damn!” While almost everyone else watching guffawed about the Gong Show play that seemed to prove Alex Karras right about “keeckers.” Shula, who’d seen some wild kicking plays in his day, could have had a coronary. But he had a game to win. All he said to Yepremian was, “Next time, fall on it!” He later said he felt “terrible” for Yepremian, pity not shared by all. When Yepremian came to the bench, the scabrous Bob Kuechenberg told him he’d made a “chickenshit play.” Buoniconti double-teamed him: “I’m gonna kill you, you little cocksucker. I’ll hang you with one of your ties.”13
With the game suddenly in doubt with two minutes remaining, Shula kept cool as he sent in his kickoff return team, yelling after them to watch for an onside kick. Allen, though, inexplicably kicked deep, and the Dolphin offense went in. Griese kept the clock moving with a gutty sideline pass to Warfield for a first down. With a minute left, they punted and the defense came in, the ball at the ’Skins 30. Two Kilmer passes fell incomplete. On third down, he tossed an ill-conceived screen pass to Brown, whom Stanfill dragged down inbounds for a four-yard loss, the clock ticking under 40 seconds. The last gasp ended, aptly, when Kilmer dropped back and Stanfill and Vern Den Herder made him into a ham sandwich, dropping him for a nine-yard loss as his helmet flew off, his face in agony.
A victory 42 years in the making for Don Shula was finally won. On the sideline, the Dolphins had begun moving toward him to carry him off on their shoulders, the now-customary ritual of ultimate coaching success. It was, after all, his win more than anyone’s, paid for by years of his own agony. With security lax, people were gathering around him, some of them strangers, shaking his hand, patting him on the back. As time ran out, he and Arnsparger embraced, Shula’s arm clutching his coach’s neck. He then was lifted on top of a scrum of players, his fist shot into the air, and he shouted as they lifted him. Symbolically, he was on top of the world, looking down at the rest of the NFL, his past failures seemingly momentarily irrelevant. He felt something tugging at his wrist, looked, and saw his gold watch gone. Clambering down, he saw the guy who took it, screamed “Hey!” and ran after him, yanking the watch out of his hand and glaring at him, deciding whether to lay him out. He decided he shouldn’t. Not now. Not on this perfect day.
Up in the stands, Dorothy, clutching a crucifix, had done a slow boil all game as boozy Redskin fans around her recognized and taunted her. As she began to shed joyful tears, one sore-loser fan mocked, “Aw, look, isn’t that touching? The poor thing’s gonna cry.” Upon which, it was reported, she didn’t let it go. Instead, doing what her husband always wanted to do at such moments, she “spun around and unloaded” with a punch to the guy’s nose.14
In the locker room, Shula stood beside the weeping Robbie as they took the Lombardi Trophy from Rozelle, Shula calling it the “ultimate” moment in his life, his men “the greatest team I’ve ever been associated with.” He joked that he didn’t know what he would tell them the next year, having used up his supply of motivational fodder, though he would surely find more.
He was, of course, the story, his redemption complete, though in a locker room full of men so conditioned by him, even in a victory of this magnitude, they seemed somber. Reporters sought out Yepremian, the man who almost marred perfection. Most who saw it had to laugh at the volleyball “pass,” but it wasn’t at all humorous to him. He sat at his locker, head buried in his hands, near tears, saying, “I almost caused a disaster.” Then, like a line from a Shakespearean tragedy, “That championship ring will hang heavy on my hand.” That night, at the team’s victory party at the hotel, he felt a sharp pain in his side, apparently from stress, and was helped to his room, where he sat in a tub of ice water until it eased.
But that was the only blight on the day when the axis of the NFL changed forever. Quoting Shula, the page-wide headline in the Herald read, FOR MIAMI, “THIS IS THE ULTIMATE,” a photo of Shula being hoisted running above a story about peace talks in Vietnam. Sports Illustrated’s story was simply called “17–0–0,” the cover photo showing Griese poised to throw. Maule, every word like a molar being pulled, granted, “It was not always easy, and far less dramatic than it might have been, but the Miami Dolphins finally demonstrated rather conclusively that they are the biggest fish in the pro football pond.”15 Ed Pope, whose suggestion to hire Shula had paid its biggest dividend in what he wrote was “a cake walk,” reported that President Nixon had called Shula, which Maule suggested might send Allen “into a catatonic state.”16
Schnellenberger saw Shula at that moment as a man who had found the holy grail. “He wasn’t relieved, he was cocky. I could see it on his face. He thought he had discovered the formula, the elixir. That he would win again and again. That there was nothing anyone could do to beat him. We all did. And you know what, he should have. Ask him today, and that’s the first thing he’ll tell you.”17
A year earlier, Pope had questioned the team’s courage and fiber. That was now replaced by giddiness all around south Florida. Another airport mob scene awaited the return of the team. In Miami, where the game kept almost everyone off the streets and beaches, the game’s highlights were shown over and over, and car horns blared for days. When that 40-minute movie of the game from NFL Films came out, it redefined the AFC as the new face of the once-unrestrained AFL, with Shula’s pug-like countenance the new bedrock of the league. The sublime basso of John Facenda’s narration identified the contrast between “the enthusiastic Washington Redskins” and “the somber Miami Dolphins.” The Redskins were a “romanticized” team; the Dolphins were all business. Thus did Don Shula, who once carried the romance of the old NFL, stamp “final” the parity the old guard feared, and was in fact the leader of the new guard, far more so now than even Joe Namath.
Nothing, it seemed, could dampen Shula’s ascendance to the top. On the bus ride to the airport, Dorothy told him about clocking the fan. “Don,” she told him, genuinely worried, “I’ve blown the whole thing. All the years, all the frustration . . . and now we’re going to get sued!” He just smiled, serenely unconcerned, knowing he was untouchable.18
Even George Wilson now wanted to share in Shula’s aura. While dining out in July, he saw Shula come into the restaurant. He went over to his table and congratulated him, then made a golf date. “I’m glad to be associated with him again,” said Shula, who also made a rapprochement, such as it was, with Carroll Rosenbloom.19 At the spring meetings, where C.R. had snubbed him the last time they met up, Shula put his hand out first, and this time Rosenbloom shook it.
“Don,” he said, “let bygones be bygones.”
Even so, Shula’s success seemed to stoke some questionable judgment. For one thing, it led him to let his guard down to cash in on his good fortune. Seeking investments, he had recently become a limited partner in a real estate venture called the Saratoga Development Corporation, run by Allen Glick, a San Diego lawyer and land developer. Glick also was rumored to be tight with mobsters who had control of Las Vegas casinos. But he was an Ohio guy, and Shula always had a soft spot for those. It’s also possible that he began listening to Al Davis more than he should have. Davis had formed the limited partnership, called Red Dog Investors, and sold Shula on coming in, as did some other very high-profile NFL figures, including Bills owner Ralph Wilson—and none other than Carroll Rosenbloom. Later, when it was prudent to separate himself from the deal, Shula would clarify that “I never met Glick. I just knew of a Mr. Glick by name.”20 Partnering up with Glick would be a far bigger problem for Davis down the road, but for Shula, a smaller fish in that stew, it would soon become clear that becoming involved with Glick was an unforced error.
Still, the halo over Shula’s head following the Super Bowl proved that everyone loves a winner, and that being one has its perks. He quickly signed for an advance to co-write his autobiography with writer Lou Sahadi. Cleaning up on their own, Csonka and Kiick signed to write their riff-heavy, jokey dual memoir with New York Times sports columnist Dave Anderson; Griese also penned a surprisingly candid book about the season. Shula couldn’t have been ecstatic that Butch and Sundance had taken public their private griping about his “childish” rules and how Shula had “stuck it” to Kiick, but it was the price of success in the new generation.
Garo Yepremian didn’t write a book; rather, as jokes abounded about his historic bumble, he would grow more depressed, too ashamed to even leave his home for weeks, then worry he’d be cut from the team. His fear was allayed when he received a letter from Shula, assuring him of his place on the roster. It helped him come out of his shell. Years later, at a golf tournament with Shula, he told someone that his old coach “wrote the most important letter I ever received.” Shula, though, didn’t remember writing the letter—and for good reason. It had been written by Dorothy, who frequently signed letters to fans for him, and took it on herself to ease the kicker’s worried mind. It worked. Soon, Yepremian himself was making jokes; one went, “President Nixon made me throw the pass.”
Dorothy could indeed speak for her husband, knowing him better than anyone. But even she was surprised by his transformation in the wake of winning it all. That winter, in a Sports Illustrated profile of Shula titled SITTING ON TOP OF THE WORLD, she told of “watch[ing] the peace on his face. He’d light up a big cigar, and sit there, and I’m thinking, ‘Happy at last.’ For so long he’d been so sensitive. Small, petty things would bother him.” They still would, of course. But as if perfection was a thematic imperative off the field as well, after decades of arising before him and making his breakfast—without variation, black coffee, grapefruit, eggs, and sausage—she said after the Super Bowl, “I’d get up and he’d already have the coffee made. And sometimes he’d even be cutting his own grapefruit.”21
Inevitably, given that all boats were buoyed by the perfect season, Shula’s staff was raided. The first target was Schnellenberger. Joe Thomas had taken a real liking to him in Miami, and when Thomas requested permission to approach the mustached assistant about becoming the Colts’ head coach, Shula quickly assented when Schnellenberger told him he would accept the offer. “Hell, they even threw a party for me,” said Schnellenberger. It seemed like a minor shuffle as the Dolphins received their championship rings, designed by Shula himself, with 17 encrusted diamond stones and the engraved slogans “Winning Edge” and “Perfect Season.” Shula replaced Schnellenberger with Bill McPeak, who had coached the Redskins in the ’60s and for the last five years was an assistant with the Lions.
At the draft, the most important draft picks made by Shula and Bobby Beathard were linemen, but Shula also took a QB, Virginia Tech’s Don Strock, a six-foot-five, 220-pound specimen of the new generation of linebacker-sized quarterbacks. He would ride the taxi squad as a rookie, but was in Shula’s future plans.
The schedule finally gave Shula a home game to begin a season. Against the 49ers, the Dolphins trailed 13–6 entering the fourth quarter, when Griese, who had been off all day, hit Warfield with a 10-yard touchdown. Yepremian booted two field goals, the defense rang up a safety, and the Dolphins prevailed, 21–13, for their 18th straight victory.
The streak finally ended the next game, at the hands of the Raiders in Oakland. The Dolphins kept it close, their stifling zone blitzes and tight coverage disrupting the Raiders’ normal air circus. However, John Madden’s runners gained 187 yards on 46 carries, and the Raiders’ four field goals put them up 12–0 before a late 28-yard touchdown pass to Mandich made the final score 12–7. Over the next two games at home, Miami blew out the Patriots 44–23 and the Jets 31–3. It was in the former that Shula and Bill Arnsparger saw firsthand the new era of NFL defenses. Pats coach Chuck Fairbanks, who had walked on the Oklahoma Sooners, leaving the stink of recruiting violations behind him, installed his Sooner 3–4 gap-two alignment. The set itself was nothing new, but Fairbanks applied his fourth linebacker mainly to stopping the run, and while his team would go 5–9 that season, the idea spread around the league.
Shula’s team, meanwhile, never really stopped winning. A Monday night affair in Cleveland—before which Csonka, encountering Howard Cosell in the same hotel the team was staying in, merrily ripped the broadcaster’s signature toupee off his head and flung it down the hallway—produced a gritty 17–9 win. They then cranked out 10 straight wins. Again, the schedule was on the soft side, and in consecutive November games, they shut out the Colts and Bills. The closest calls came in the next two weeks. On Thanksgiving in Dallas, they went up 14–0 in the first quarter, the second TD a 45-yard laser from Griese to Warfield, and won 14–7. Next came the Steelers, who played arguably the worst first half ever, falling behind 27–0, with Dick Anderson running back two interceptions for touchdowns. By game’s end, Miami had picked seven, three off Bradshaw, three off Joe Gilliam, Anderson tying a record with four. Chuck Noll’s boys then staged a furious comeback attempt, but fell short, 30–26.
The only real stumble was the penultimate game, the return match with the Colts, in Baltimore. Schnellenberger, who at 2–10 was going through hell, vowed that his team would get even with the Dolphins and not punt a single time. He made it stand up, too, thanks to a lackadaisical effort by Miami, who rested Griese. Behind Marty Domres, the Colts won it 16–3. After being glad-handed by Shula, Schnellenberger recalled, the Dolphin players “ran down the field to congratulate me.” That was the sole bright moment he would have. After finishing 4–10, Bob Irsay canned him and Joe Thomas made himself the new coach. Schnellenberger would sit out the next season before Shula asked him to return to the Dolphins sideline. “He said, ‘Howard, I need you.’ That’s all it took.”
Fans and reporters knew nothing of the clubhouse “cocktails” and painkilling shots being given to the players, nor the recreational drugs used by Mercury Morris. Headed for another 1,000-yard season, which would make him and Csonka the first pair of backs to each go over 1,000 twice, in that Steelers game he was hit hard by Mel Blount and came up screaming. “I think I’ve got a broken arm,” he told Shula, feeling like “someone had taken a blow torch to my shoulder and opened it wide.” In blinding pain, he crawled under the sideline bench. After the game, he was taken to a hospital for x-rays, which were negative; Dr. Herbert Virgin said he had no more than a neck sprain. Months later, when he was at the Pro Bowl, more x-rays were taken, showing fractures of his fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae—a broken neck. He would require delicate surgery, after which he would say, “I will have trouble the rest of my life.”
Morris, looking back, took Virgin to task, asserting that he had doled out those “mood pills” and either “blew the diagnosis” or even “diagnosed the fracture from the beginning and then withheld that diagnosis from me.” Given the team’s desire to see him in the lineup, he said, “a ‘misdiagnosis’ would have been most advantageous.”22
Virgin dismissed the allegations. The subject of hiding an injury, he said that year, “never came up.” The players, he went on, “trust the medical staff. . . . The players are considered to be my private patients, and the coach backs me up.”23
As it was, Morris’s relationship with the team brass was poisonous. During a Jets game, as Morris was running out of bounds, he barreled right into Virgin, who was knocked violently to the ground. While it was clearly an accident, under the circumstances, it made people wonder. Morris was so peevish that, as he would say, “I was more than pissed off. I was obsessed.” Once, practically jumping out of his skin due to dexies, he fumbled for a third time in one game. Wild-eyed, he hurled his helmet 50 yards. “I think you better sit down,” Shula suggested. After dashing for a 71-yard TD against the Pats, he recalled, “I came off the field wanting to shove the ball in Shula’s face.”24
Even without a drive for a perfect season hanging over them, the team was high-strung. But they were still winning, and finished 12–2. When they met Paul Brown’s 10–4 Bengals in the first playoff round, they tore it up, running 52 times, third-most in playoff history at the time, and gaining 241 yards. The 34–16 blowout sent them into another AFC title tilt, at home, against the always-tempestuous Raiders. This time, Al Davis couldn’t mush up the field with water hoses.
The Raider defense came out mouthy, taunting the Dolphins, but was quickly silenced. Shula’s intricate trap and misdirection blocking schemes cleared the way for Csonka to amass 117 yards, many on a play called “ 18 Straight,” off-tackle to the right. He scored thrice on short runs, the first two putting Miami ahead 14–0. “We had some success to the right,” Shula would say, grinning, of the Dolphins’ 266-yard rushing avalanche.25 The defense, meanwhile, swarmed the gimpy Snake Stabler and ganged up to stop the Raiders’ tendency to run to the left side behind All-Pros Art Shell and Gene Upshaw. The Dolphins coasted to a 27–10 victory, Griese needing to throw a mere six passes.
With Shula calling it “a great win against a fine team,” Ed Pope was convinced the Super Bowl was a formality, yipping that the Dolphins “may as well brace for that ‘dynasty’ tag people will want to pin on them.” Csonka and Griese’s numbers (39 and 12), he suggested, should both be retired “this minute,” and that if “Don Shula wore a number, I’d vote for that number to go on the wall, too.”26
The NFL decided to go ahead with Super Bowl VIII anyway. It would take place on January 13 in Houston’s Rice Stadium; the enemy would be Bud Grant’s Minnesota Vikings. It was a shot for the Purple People Eaters to avenge their defeat in the final premerger Super Bowl, and for 33-year-old Fran Tarkenton to prove he was more than a mad scrambler. He had done so during an 11–3 regular season before disposing of Allen’s Redskins and Landry’s Cowboys, aided by a running game led by All-Pro fullback Chuck Foreman. Receiver John Gilliam was also an All-Pro. Minnesota also had arguably the best offensive tackle in the game, Ron Yary. But, as always, the team’s bedrock was its aging defense, which gave up the second-fewest points in the league and more than 21 points only once.
They seemed daunting, but as Hank Stram had exposed in Super Bowl IV, Grant’s teams were on the light and slow side, and the headline-grabbing studs up front were vulnerable to trap blocking. Still, the Dolphins, whom Csonka called “a lot of quiet, hard-working players that like to go to the bank after the Super Bowl,” had learned to say only flattering things about any given foe. This time, there was no George Allen to unnerve them. But, taking no chances, Shula would again conduct practices on an isolated field—and there was an Allen-like interlude when Rev. Brennan Dalton, one of Shula’s traveling priests, saw “suspicious characters loitering near the practice field,” and “two men with long-lensed cameras” in a building across the street.27 Shula called the cops, but the men had fled, said one report, “in a brown Oldsmobile.”
Shula was worried more about injuries to Buoniconti (hip), Kuechenberg (arm fracture), and Fernandez (hamstring). They would play hurt, but the pain was felt by the Vikings. Miami was favored by six and a half points, and on a cool, foggy afternoon, covered the spread within five minutes, when a grinding drive led to Csonka scoring on a five-yard run. As Grant would admit afterward, “I knew we were in trouble after their first drive.” And their next drive was a near carbon copy: 10 plays, four minutes, two passes, Kiick banging it in from the one. Grant overplayed his linebackers outside to contain Morris sweeps, but his men were suckers for the Dolphins’ array of traps, misdirection plays, and cutbacks—which, Tex Maule wrote, “shunt[ed] aside the Minnesota defenders, especially Middle Linebacker Jeff Siemon, who was attacked by a bewildering variety of blockers.”28
Running 53 times, many through holes as wide as Minnesota, the Dolphins gained 196 yards. Csonka took by far the most handoffs of his career—33—ringing up a then-Super Bowl record 145 yards. Almost sheepishly, Griese called it arguably the best game of his career, throwing just seven times, completing six for 73 yards. Tarkenton did all he could, but Arnspager’s wrinkle was to line up Tim Foley as a linebacker, and he and Larry Ball came tearing through the line on blitzes. With Tarkenton having to pass—he would go 18-for-28 for 182 yards and a pick—the Dolphins went with three linemen and a nickel back, smothering the deep lanes, but neither did short or medium passing do any good. When the Vikes, trailing 17–0, did reach the goal line just before the half ended, Buoniconti slammed into running back Oscar Reed, causing a fumble recovered by Scott.
Several times, Griese asked Csonka, whose forehead was cut and bloodied, what play he wanted to run, and in the second half, after a 27-yard pass to Warfield—Griese’s sole pass of that half—Csonka notched his second touchdown on a two-yard run in the third quarter—a “roll right, trap left.” That made it 24–0, the game effectively over. Tarkenton’s touchdown on a four-yard keeper with 12 minutes left averted the shutout, and when a Seiple punt hit the turf, bounced up, and was downed on the three, wrote Maule, “a Minneapolis sportswriter threw his pencil on the floor and tore up his notebook.” On the field, a frustrated Alan Page drew a penalty for a late hit on Griese. After Csonka’s last carry, he was so spent he could barely stagger off the field, showered by an ovation from the crowd of mostly Dolphin fans. By then, the players were getting ready for another convoy of Shula. Paying homage to the line he had run behind, Csonka said, “You read about me saying I like to run over people, but that’s not true. Sometimes it works out that way, but if you look I’m sliding off a lot of tackles because the line has cleared people out so they don’t get a clean shot.”
Tex Maule, no longer shilling for the old guard, wrote that the game “had all the excitement and suspense of a master butcher quartering a steer,” echoing the common syllogism that Shula’s team was too good and too mechanical, and therefore a snooze. The Dolphin method, he sniffed, had a “certain esthetic appeal for serious students of the science of football, but left devotees of drama more than a little bored.” Not in Miami. The next day, with the Herald rhapsodizing the victory, its banner headline IT WAS THE DAY OF THE DOLPHINS, they came home to another victory party set up at the airport.
Shula, always the good son, had flown his parents to the game, and when he mounted a platform erected in the parking lot, he lifted the Lombardi Trophy, then introduced an elderly Mary Shula, the woman whose signature he once forged to keep playing football. She and Dan would soon be able to spend winters in a vacation home in Miami bought by their son, but Mary, frail as she was, smiled wanly, perhaps still not entirely happy that her son had disobeyed her and Dan’s orders to bag football for the priesthood.
He also brought to the platform Dorothy, who joshed the crowd that the Shula family had a dynasty ahead of it—and she might be the first woman coach. With the Shulas, anything seemed possible. Theirs was a world owned by the son of Hungarian immigrants, their generation having bred the most popular and profitable American sport.
Ed Pope slavishly anointed the coach he had recommended. In 10 years, he wrote, every team would “have the Shula imprimatur. Shula will still be coaching the Dolphins at age 54, and 25 of his former disciples will be in command of other teams. . . . Instead of being compared with Vince Lombardi, they will be measured against Don Shula.”29 Pope actually was not far off. The truth was that one couldn’t, and wouldn’t, be able to get very far in discussions of NFL team building and coaching without the Shula brand defining those parameters, long after the Super Bowl celebrations stopped.