When Pride Still Mattered Chapter 27 - Taking Charge in Washington
When I think about Vince Lombardi’s tenure in Washington, two questions come to mind. First, if he’d had time to really implement his vision, would it have ended up looking any different from his time in Green Bay?
Lombardi always wanted to run the ball. He wanted to run the ball with the Packers. He wanted to run the ball with the Giants. He wanted to run the ball at Army and at St. Cecelia’s. But is that because he believed that was the best thing to do or because he never had anybody worth throwing the ball with?
Bart Starr was certainly not a bad passer, but even a generous assessor would probably say he wasn’t terribly gifted when it came to putting the ball in the air. He made up for it with brains, to be sure, but he wasn’t the golden-armed pocket statue that we think of when we consider the great aerial artists associated with premier passing attacks.
Sonny Jurgensen, though, was a lot more of the prototypical passer, and I think it’s significant that in Lombardi’s only year at the helm in Washington, Jurgensen led the league in pass attempts. He threw 442 passes that year, the third most of his long career.
Is that enough evidence to say that Lombardi would have continued to throw more in Washington? I can’t say for sure, but it seems noteworthy that Bart Starr never threw more than 295 passes in a season and only broke 275 attempts twice. Maybe Lombardi was trying a new approach that better suited his new personnel.
But that dovetails with my second question: would Lombardi have stuck it out in Washington? Maraniss writes in this chapter that he was harboring doubts about his decision even prior to his first regular season in burgundy and gold. Were those real doubs, or was it one of those “you’ll have fun when you get there” situations that my mom always pointed out when I was having worries about a social situation. Would Lombardi’s doubts have disappeared had he been in Washington a couple of years and had some success?
The fact that we’ll never know and can’t know doesn’t help me with these questions at all.
Interesting Notes
For all the turmoil Lombardi had at home, it’s interesting to hear how deeply committed Marie Lombardi was to their marriage. “I feel sorry for the women who have to find their niche in life and can’t,” she said. “I never wanted to be anything but married to Vin.”
If you’re so inclined, here’s the house the Lombardi’s bought when he became the coach in Washington.
I think George Wilson’s perspective on Lombardi is common among coaches but is also self-evidently untrue after any amount of thought. “Give me the same material, I’ll beat him every time,” said Wilson of Lombardi, but that ignores how Lombardi got the material. He hand selected many of his key figures in Green Bay and shepherded them to become what they were. To say you’d beat him with the same material is to take a significant amount of credit for work that you could never have done. To that end, Wilson wasn’t much for developing material. He went just 68-84 as an NFL head coach.
This may just be how I think about things, but with Lombardi’s health clearly not in great shape throughout his early Washington tenure, I wonder when he realized things weren’t going to get better. When you have what turns out to be a terminal illness, when do you realize that it’s over? How do you handle that? How does a competitor like Vince Lombardi handle that?