When Pride Still Mattered Chapter 9 - Cult of the New
This may be a personal bias (or vendetta?) on my part, but Chapter 9 of When Pride Still Mattered reminded me that a lot of hiring decisions are made for bad reasons.
There’s a lot of other stuff in this chapter, but it basically boils down to an exploration of how and why Vince Lombardi ended up as the offensive coordinator of the New York Giants, and it shows that hiring always has been a fraught proposition.
Some backstory here: between 2015 and 2018, my wife and I moved around quite a bit, including two interstate moves for jobs. As a result, both of us have been through the hiring process quite a few different times. I’ve submitted more job applications than I care to admit, and I’ve been a finalist for nearly two dozen different positions in that span and after. Getting hired is tricky, and I’ve been turned down for a lot of different reasons, ranging from “we lost funding for the position” to “we actually had two internal candidates we were looking at, we just brought you in for a different perspective.” And just to show it’s not limited to me, my wife once lost out on a job because, and I swear I’m not making this up, the hiring manager told her “we’re concerned your husband might not understand the working hours and time demands of this job.” That is an actual thing that happened.
My point is, I have a lot of personal evidence that nobody seems to really have this hiring thing figured out, and this chapter reminded me of that fact in a big way.
To wit: Vince Lombardi was at least nominally considered for the New York Giants’ head coach position before the Mara family decided instead to go with Jim Lee Howell, an objectively worse coach who, nonetheless, appealed to the family because they knew him and he had “the aura of a pro.” Howell, meanwhile, didn’t want to hire Lombardi as his offensive coordinator, preferring to go with a different candidate with whom he was familiar. But the Maras — Wellington Mara, in particular — leaned on him to go with Lombardi, in part because of the connection he shared to the family dating back to his Fordham days. We’re two decisions in and we’ve already made one bad decision for bad reasons and one good decision for bad reasons.
But that’s not all! Lombardi wouldn’t even have been available for the Giants’ job had West Point not had an internal policy about assistant coach salaries. Lombardi wanted to stay at Army and continue to work with Colonel Earl Blaik, but Blaik told him he’d maxed out his salary, so off he went. Another $1,000 would have kept him there. Who knows how high Army would have climbed?
On top of that, Lombardi may not even have stuck things out with the Giants if not for the simple fact that Fordham University didn’t want to continue having a football program anymore. Things had continued to spiral for the Rams after Lombardi left his alma mater for Army, but explicitly and implicitly, it seems like Lombardi always wanted to go back there. He wanted to restore the glory of Fordham, but Fordham didn’t want its glory restored — or even to play football at all. But what if they had? What if they’d stuck it out with football for another three years? What if the football backers at Fordham had convinced the school leadership to take one more big swing? You have to think Lombardi would have been a shoo-in for the job. What, then, is the legacy of Lombardi?
But there is one bit of positive decision-making here. After a year on the job with the Giants, Lombardi returned to his mentor, Colonel Blaik, about returning to Army. Either because Lombardi told him so or because he realized it himself, Blaik correctly surmised that Lombardi’s wife, Marie, enjoyed her life in New York. And so, Blaik advised Lombardi to return to the Giants and wait things out, biding his time for a bigger opportunity.
Human resources decisions aside, this stands out as an interesting and consistent feature of Lombardi’s life. At key points, friends and mentors advocated for him, gave valuable advice, and walked through difficult decisions with him. Tim Cohane tirelessly supported his friend and colleague. Colonel Blaik served as the Yoda to Lombardi’s Luke Skywalker. We should all be so lucky to have people who care about us working with us at important times.
Interesting Notes
Another one for the “what’s now mundane was once revolutionary” file: Vince Lombardi’s football bible. Today, a coach taking painstakingly detailed notes about opposing schemes and players is taken as a given. There are entire companies that exist to do just this. It’s almost quaint to picture Lombardi doing all this himself.
Still another example for our mundane/revolutionary file: Lombardi insisting that the Giants take pictures of plays as they happened, giving the New York sideline instant information from a new perspective. Imagine that! Wanting real-time information bout how the game is playing out.
Lombardi is often portrayed as the patron saint of the running game, but Lombardi himself seemed to realize that a modern offense had to include, if not prominently feature, the passing game. It was taken as conventional wisdom that you couldn’t run the ball much in the NFL, so how did Lombardi open up his ground game? Passing. He introduced the threat of the pass to set up the run — almost entirely backwards from the “establish the run” stuff we hear today.
I am also amused at how, in a chapter titled “Cult of the New,” Lombardi is hailed as an innovator for proliferating rule blocking, also known as zone blocking. Zone blocking schemes were later “discovered” again in the 1990s via Mike Shanahan, and today they’re again sweeping league (or, perhaps, have swept the league) as another “new” trend. There is really nothing new in football.