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
We didn't have any champagne to toast each other. But we did have some Diet Cokes up there. We lifted the Diet Cokes.
It's a special place, and he has an appreciation for the tradition.
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.
When we got them together for the first time on the field, ... and had Woodley throwing on one side to a group of receivers and Marino on the other, it was so evident the ability Dan had throwing the football. Woodley was an athlete playing quarterback and Marino was a quarterback playing quarterback. You could just look at it and see, even in the simplest passing drills, that Marino had that great skill.
His delivery was kind of chest-high, ... The ball would leave his hand and just explode.
Invariably, the morning after the game, one of them was waiting outside my office to complain that he was not getting the ball enough, ... I never kept them happy. One was always complaining he wasn't in the game enough.
He took over a tough situation. They were on probation, and the scholarships were down. He had to get that turned around. He's done a good job. They are going in the right direction, but he's got Florida coming up, LSU coming up and Tennessee and Auburn coming up. He's got his work cut out for him.
He took over a program that was going through a lot of problems and he's trying to get it turned around, ... This would be a big step for him. (A win) would show they are headed in the right direction . . . That's a big job he's got, following Bear Bryant at the University of Alabama, 83,000 people. . . . College football is just very exciting. The fans are so loyal.
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.
When you're 0-2 in the Super Bowl, they say unkind things about you. They say, 'He can't win the big one.' And that's the worst thing that can be said about you.
I can't remember missing a practice because of illness.