godfater21 said:
He did it because Shula looks to the past and embraces it.
But seriously, I have a ton of respect for Shula for what he has done as a head coach don't get me wrong. But i have to agree with Jimmy Johnson. the past was nice but let's face it the perfect season was 33 years ago. you need to look at the future. that is something i believe hurt shula near the end of his career. the game was changing around him, yet he still looked to his past success and tried to keep up using outdated offensive and defensive schemes. and as far as him praising Saban already it is not warrented. unlike Shula and most people on this board i will not praise a coach that has yet to man the sidelines on sunday. if Saban draft picks pan out and the team wins than he will earn my respect. i will not just give it to him because of his potential. there have been way to many promising COLLEGE coaches that have fallen on there face recently.
Again, evaluating the past is pure subjective and I'm sure everyone is partially correct and part bonkers. My take is quite a bit different from yours.
Basically I think Shula was a hard working coach who lacked great insight or personnel evaluation. He was fine until extremely sharp minds like Walsh and Gibbs came into the league as head coaches. When the game changed to much bigger and more athletic linemen and linebackers in the early '80s Shula was caught napping for years and never really adjusted. I knew we were doomed before the '84 Super Bowl when Bill Walsh basically ripped Miami's defensive personnel before the game, emphasizing they were small and not quick. You almost never hear a head coach be that blunt before a big game, especially against a legend like Don Shula.
But it could not have been more accurate. While the NFC brutes were stocking up on the Hogs, or Lawrence Taylor and Carl Banks, or Richard Dent and Mike Singleton, or Fred Dean and Michael Carter, the AFC pantyhose passing teams fresh off the '83 draft were drafting dainty WRs to go with their QBs and DBs to cover the WRs. When one conference evolves via muscle and the other via finesse you are rewarded with a decade+ of marvelous Super Bowl massacres.
Shula never ran the ball enough in the Marino era, which drove me nuts. But he drafted so poorly you can't tell how much of that was design, how much was strategic flaw, and how much was necessary default to the one weapon you had -- Marino's right arm. Older coaches tend to become lazier and rely on the passing game more than in their earlier years. The running game requires physically moving massive humans out of the way. Passing is dinking it over their head. You have seen the same thing at FSU, ever predictable. Bowden used to run much more frequently and out of power sets when he was younger. Now it's we're FSU and the shotgun and little else.
It's actually remarkable to look at Shula's personnel acquisition record with the Dolphins. Everything in the first couple of years was magic, like picking up Morrall and Langer and Warfield and Keuchenberg. Then it dramatically falls off even while the glory years were in midstream. You had draft picks like Mike Kadish and Chuck Bradley and Darryl Carlton, then waiving players who became stars like Leon Gray and Gary Fencik. With rare exceptions we have drafted horridly when you evaluate 30+ years, making the franchise won-loss record kind of incredible.
