Don Shula
Don Shula
Donald Francis Shulais a former professional American football coach and player who is best known as the head coach of the Miami Dolphins, the team he led to two Super Bowl victories, and to the only perfect season in the history of the National Football League. He was previously the head coach of the Baltimore Colts, with whom he won the 1968 NFL Championship. Shula was drafted out of John Carroll University in the 1951 NFL Draft, and he played...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCoach
Date of Birth4 January 1930
CityGrand River, OH
CountryUnited States of America
I can't control the criticism. It's something you certainly don't appreciate, but by the same token, everybody is entitled to their opinion.
You take on what's right in front of you. You want to do the best you can with the opportunities that you have.
Losing a Super Bowl destroys all the good things that happened to get you there.
I never felt I knew it all. I always felt there's something new to learn, something new to do.
The thing we found out was, when you get to a Super Bowl, both teams are treated the same, talked about in glowing terms. But when the game is over, only the team that won matters.
Success is not forever and failure isn't fatal.
I'm not going to worry about the critics until some of my peers start saying I'm a softie.
I don't want a player that's content with not playing... But we wanted to play the guys that got us here.
Dan didn't like play-action; we didn't have a running game, so consequently we didn't have play action. Most of the stuff we did was drop-back passing or the shotgun, and Dan always was looking down field. He could sense where the pressure was coming from and quickly get the ball off.
Then somewhere along the line and it couldn't have been until late in the season we realized we had a chance to do something no one else had done: To win all the games. That became important, but if we had to lose, we wanted to make sure that it wasn't in the Super Bowl. If we ended 16-1, the season would have been a failure.
It's like he's invisible around here, ... You never see him, never see him, but, gosh, what a comfort it is for us coaches to know we've got somebody like that here. What a security blanket he is. We ought to make all of our grandsons learn to do what he does. Long snapping -- that's not a bad way to go.
It's a special place, and he has an appreciation for the tradition.
They both had to sacrifice, but they finally understood what I was trying to do.
We didn't win a Super Bowl together, ... and that's something I'll always regret, not knowing what that feels like. ...