“I don’t think there’s ever been a coach who was more courageous about creating offense.” Dan Fouts on Don Coryell
Don Coryell was many things in his 85 years on this Earth. He was an Army paratrooper during World War II, a defensive back for the Washington Huskies, a longtime high school and college coach, the head coach of the St. Louis Cardinals and San Diego Chargers, and finally, a retiree living a gentle life in the Pacific Northwest. Most prominently, of course, was his work in the NFL from 1973 through 1986, when he took the Sid Gillman vertical passing game, added his own rushing formation concepts, and spun the NFL’s passing offense forward a generation. Coryell can be considered the functional link between the deep passing games of the 1960s and 1970s, and the West Coast Offense that followed into the 1980s and 1990s. As much as any coach in the history of football, Coryell preached the gospel of the nuanced, aggressive passing game wherever he went — and wherever he went, he got results.
On Wednesday, the Pro Football Hall of Fame announced that Coryell, who died on July 1, 2010, was named as the finalist for the Coach/Contributor class of 2023. From the HOF:
A four-hour meeting of the Hall of Fame’s Coach/Contributor Committee concluded Tuesday afternoon with Coryell emerging from the group of 12 Coach/Contributor candidates remaining under consideration as the Finalist for next year’s class of enshrinees. The Hall of Fame’s full 49-person Selection Committee will consider Coryell for election – along with 15 Modern-Era Players and three Seniors – when it meets to choose the entire Class of 2023 in January.
Coryell would be elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame if he receives at least 80% approval in the up-or-down balloting next year.
Last week, the Hall’s Seniors Committee chose Chuck Howley, Joe Klecko and Ken Riley as Finalists for the Class of 2023. Each of them also would be elected if he receives 80% approval at the January selection meeting.
Coryell had reached the Finalist stage in the selection process six other times: 2010, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019 and 2020. In 14 seasons as a head coach in the NFL after a lengthy career in the college ranks, he posted an overall record (including playoffs) of 114-89-1.
In St. Louis, Coryell was named Associated Press Coach of the Year in 1974, his second season with the Cardinals. He led the team to a 10-4 record and their first playoff appearance since the 1948 NFL Championship Game. They followed that breakthrough year with an 11-win regular season in 1975 that equaled the then-franchise record for victories in a season (1948, 1925).
After five seasons in St. Louis, Coryell became head coach of the San Diego Chargers, and with future Hall of Famers Dan Fouts, Kellen Winslow, and Charlie Joiner built the “Air Coryell” offense that ranked atop the NFL in numerous statistics. In his nine years with the Chargers (1978-1986), the team led the league in total offense five times, passing yards seven times (and was second another year) and scoring three times.
His 1980 and 1981 teams reached the AFC title games, falling one win short of the Super Bowl. Prior to Coryell’s arrival, the Chargers had not posted a winning record for eight seasons and had not qualified for the playoffs since appearing in the AFL title game in 1965.
Several Hall of Fame coaches voiced support for Coryell as a Hall of Fame-worthy candidate over the years, including Joe Gibbs, John Madden, Dick Vermeil, and Bill Walsh.
We’ve said for as long as we can remember that Coryell already should have been in the Hall of Fame, as a coach and as a schematic innovator. Let’s get into the details of why.
(Article adapted from The Genius of Desperation by Doug Farrar and Louis Riddick. Copyright 2018 Doug Farrar/Triumph Books LLC. Play diagrams by Doug Farrar and Lindsey Schauer. Used by permission).
How it all began
Coryell first got results as an innovator at San Diego State from 1961 through 1972, when he developed an explosive passing game that befuddled opponents, got his players into the NFL in impressive numbers, and set the stage for his own NFL induction. He had run one of the first iterations of the I-formation backfield at Whittier College before that and showed it to John McKay when Coryell was one of McKay’s assistants in 1960. There, he established the formation that would define USC as the epicenter of collegiate running backs for the next few decades. But when he joined the Aztecs as their head coach, it became about the kind of speed that could open up a vertical passing game that was impossible to consistently defend.
“There were a number of reasons why we developed the passing game with the Aztecs,” Coryell said years later. “We could only recruit a limited number of runners and linemen against schools like USC and UCLA. And there were a lot of kids in Southern California passing and catching the ball. There seemed to be a deeper supply of quarterbacks and receivers. And the passing game was also open to some new ideas.”
With that, Coryell inherited a program on the verge of collapse and turned it around decisively. The Aztecs compiled a 104-19-2 record under Coryell, had three undefeated seasons, and winning streaks of 25 and 31 games. Unusually for a smaller school, San Diego State sent a ton of quarterbacks to the NFL in the 1960s and early 1970s — Dennis Shaw, Don Horn, Rod Dowhower, Brian Sipe. Them, there were the receivers: Isaac Curtis, Haven Moses, Gary Garrison, and Tommy Reynolds. And the list of coaches he developed there included two Hall-of-Famers in John Madden and Joe Gibbs, along with Ernie Zampese, Tom Bass, and Jim Hanifan. Dowhower also learned to coach under Coryell’s auspices. The Aztecs moved from Division II to Division I in 1969, and Coryell moved to the NFL in 1973, after the Cardinals hired him.
The Cardinals were one of the original AFPA franchises (then in Chicago), but their long run hadn’t produced much in recent decades. Coryell’s new team hadn’t been in the postseason since 1948, and enjoyed sporadic spurts of winning at best. Coryell’s first year there saw the Cardinals match the 4-9-1 mark from the previous season, but the offense moved from 25th to 12th in yards, and 23rd to 11th in points. In the next three seasons, St. Louis would always rank in the top 10 in most offensive categories, and won at least 10 games in each of those campaigns — something the franchise hadn’t done since 1948, and wouldn’t do again after Coryell’s unceremonious departure until 2009.
Coryell found no issue in adapting his college schemes to the pros — with all the talk about the passing game, there was also a multi-faceted ground attack, and an offensive line led by Dan Dierdorf and the infamous Conrad Dobler that kept quarterback Jim Hart upright as well as any front five in league history. In 1975, that line allowed an unofficial total of eight sacks in the entire season, and Hart was on the field for just six of them.
“Don’s idea was to pass to set up the run,” Hart said in The Super 70s. “He wanted to attack the defense and move the chains in an era when teams would establish the run to set up the pass. Don actually wanted to run the ball even more that we did. It was only because of [assistant coach and offensive line mastermind Jim Hanifan] that we ever called running plays.”
Things started to go downhill for the Coryell Cardinals in 1977. Team owner Bill Bidwill was notoriously cheap, and let a large number of the team’s best players walk out the door instead of compensating them fairly. Bidwill refused to let Coryell have a serious hand in personnel matters, and things came to a head in January, 1978. It was then that Coryell stood Bidwill up when the two men were to have a meeting about the coach’s future — Coryell was on a plane to Los Angeles to inquire about the Rams’ open head coach position. Bidwill responded by refusing to let Coryell out of the last three years of his contract, blocking potential positions in Los Angeles and San Diego, and eventually locking him out of his own office.
“Don saw the handwriting on the wall, that nothing good was going to come of staying in St. Louis,” Hart said years later. “We were very upset that he left. We knew Don was going to be successful wherever he coached, and we wanted to be a part of it. His tenure with the Cardinals coincided with my best years, so to say I was sorry to see him go was an understatement.”
Bidwill finally and mercifully fired Coryell in February of that year, replacing him with Bud Wilkinson and saying, “I’d be inclined to seek out an offensive-oriented coach. I like offense.”
Well, he had that before. Wilkinson wasn’t a stick-in-the-mud as he has sometimes been portrayed — he tried to beef up St. Louis’ offense with no-huddle concepts and full-house backfields that were ahead of their time, but Bidwill had already poisoned the water. Coryell, on the other hand, was heading back to San Diego. The Chargers hired him to replace Tommy Prothro on September 25, 1978. At that point, the Chargers were 1-3, but under Coryell, they finished 9-7 with seven wins in their last eight games. Over the next four seasons, Coryell’s Chargers went 39-18 in the regular season and made the playoffs each year — not bad for a franchise that hadn’t made the postseason since 1965. With Dan Fouts at quarterback and a battery of talented players just waiting for a coach like him, the Chargers of the early 1980s became one of the greatest offenses the NFL has ever seen.
Air Coryell
It had become abundantly clear that Coryell could turn teams around drastically at any level with his offensive genius, as atypical as it may have seemed to others.
“He’s a pacemaker, a trend-setter,” then-Chiefs head coach Marv Levy said of Coryell in 1981. “Don was in low-cuts when the rest of us were in high-tops.”
That wasn’t to say that Levy, who later came around to a more explosive brand of offense as the Bills’ head coach in the 1980s and 1990s, was ready to adapt his own philosophies, no matter how well things worked in San Diego.
“I’d have trouble coaching his kind of offense,” Levy continued. “This guy in motion here, that one in motion there. There’s a certain disjointedness to it. I’d have trouble building the rhythm off an offense that way, building a ball-possession concept. In a way, it’s a mirror of the man himself. When you’re with Don, there’s a herky-jerky quality to him. He’ll get up, walk somewhere, come back, sit down, get up again.”
Through his overall offensive structures may have thrown off some of his colleagues at first, that may have had more to do with the fact that in the 1970s, the NFL was an earthbound league for the most part, and Coryell, along with Bill Walsh, was bringing different ideas to the field. Because to paint Coryell as an unbalanced offensive designer solely concerned with his quarterbacks hurling the ball through the air as much as possible would be a complete misrepresentation and a disservice to how balanced his best offenses truly were. In St. Louis, Coryell had fullback Jim Otis and scatback Terry Metcalf, and the Cardinals finished in the top eight in rushing attempts, rushing yards, and rushing touchdowns in both 1975 and 1976. The rushing attempts diminished somewhat in San Diego as the passing offense opened up, but the Chargers ranked first in the league in rushing touchdowns in 1981 and 1982, and fourth in yards per attempt in 1982. This was based on the trade with the Saints that brought Chuck Muncie to the backfield during the 1980 season. Then, Muncie was the bellcow, while James Brooks was the Metcalf-style scatback. It was a primary construct of Coryell’s offense to have both, until the Chargers started doing revolutionary things with tight end Kellen Winslow, and veered to the one-back offense.
“The beauty of Air Coryell is, it works against any defense,” Chargers fullback Hank Bauer told NFL Films years later. “You want to pressure us, fine. You want to stack to stop the run, fine. You want to be stupid and try to play man coverage outside, fine. It’s all timing, and reads by the receivers, and reads by the quarterback. It’s very difficult to defend, and nobody had seen that.”
The stats prove the theory. The Chargers led the NFL in passing every year from 1978 to 1983, a six-year mark unrivaled in NFL annals. In 1979, Fouts became the second player in pro football history to throw more than 4,000 yards (following Joe Namath in 1967) when he amassed 4,082 yards; he then went on to best that mark by quite some measure in the next two seasons, with 4,715 yards in 1980 and 4,802 yards in 1981. Only a strike-shortened season prevented him from doing it again in 1982, but in that season, he led the league in passing yards for the fourth straight year, with 2,883 yards in just nine games. John Jefferson became the first receiver in NFL history to gain more than 1,000 yards in each of his first three seasons. When the Chargers traded Jefferson away due to a contract dispute, Coryell plugged in Wes Chandler, who led the league with 129 receiving yards per game in 1982. In 1985, the year San Francisco’s Roger Craig became the first running back to rush and receive for more than 1,000 yards in the same season; it was San Diego back Lionel “Little Train” James who actually set the NFL record for receiving yards by a back with 1,027. Joiner, Winslow, and Fouts all made the Hall of Fame, and each one of them — to a man — would tell you that without Coryell, none of that would have been possible.
As San Diego’s passing game became more complex, the Chargers faced more nickel and dime defenses than ever — perhaps more than any other offense had to that time in NFL history. With so many defensive backs taking linebackers off the field, San Diego’s run game became a force multiplier. Backs were also used as read decoys and pawns in Coryell’s offenses — he’d send them out on quick screens, and as Fouts read the defense downfield, he had that escape hatch if an enemy defense actually did cover all his targets. And it was Coryell’s version of the three-digit passing game that welded everything together.
Coryell's three-digit passing game
As with many schematic entities throughout the NFL’s history, the origin of the three-digit play-calling system is somewhat nebulous. Coryell is recognized as one innovator, though Sid Gillman used it with the AFL Chargers. What Coryell did with it made the argument over who was responsible for the “big bang” irrelevant — he took the three-digit system to the point where he could walk into an NFL huddle in the third decade of the new millennium and immediately recognize the calls in many of today’s offenses.
The three-digit system Coryell developed at San Diego State was out of necessity — as the coach of a smaller college, he would acquire his players through less traditional recruiting methods (as an independent college at the time, San Diego State wasn’t under the watch of conferences regarding transfer and eligibility regulations), and would often endeavor to have a new receiver on the field the same week he joined the team. So, as opposed to the wordier calls of the time, Coryell devised his own system that designated the routes for his receivers, and made things easier and quicker for everyone. That in itself was a nice idea, but what made Coryell’s system special is that the three-digit concept did not decrease the complexity of the route concepts. It was a malleable system that could form itself to various passing concepts, and that’s why it’s used by many NFL coaches to this day, in different iterations.
In Coryell’s system, Gillman’s system, and the systems since, the numbers in the play call were and are based on routes for the backs and the inside and outside receivers. The outside receivers have the same route numbers, while the inside receivers and backs have their own numerical catalogue of routes and numbers. If the outside receivers didn’t mirror their routes, that would be included in the call.
For example, on an “I Right 54 Y 719” call, “I Right” is the formation, “54” is the blocking scheme (54 to the weak side, 55 to the strong side), and “Y 719” tells the receivers what to do, from right to left. The Z receiver runs a deep 7 route and turns in if there’s zone coverage. The Y receiver (most likely a tight end) runs a shallow 1 route 5-7 yards upfield, across the formation. The X receiver runs a deep 9 route.
It’s a two-back play-action play, with the fullback replacing the Y receiver to front-side pass protection, and the halfback taking the play-fake and heading up between the guard and tackle (these assignments are covered in the 54 blocking scheme designation). Fouts looked to the Y receiver (let’s say Winslow) as his first read, with the X receiver as the second read and the halfback outlet up top as the bailout. Fouts would see all of this and make his call in the time it took to drop back five steps.
A more likely call as the Chargers started to spread the field with Winslow away from the formation might be “I Right Flex Roll X 388”. Here, the X receiver runs a long crossing route from a wider split, while the Y tight end and Z receiver run their own individual deep 8 routes. The quarterback rolls right and eyes the flexed X receiver as his first read, with the Y and Z receivers hopefully open if the defense comes down on the X. No matter the call, the quarterback and his receivers were easily on the same page.
This stuff was hard enough for defenses to deal with, but it became just about impossible to defend consistently when Coryell added his dizzying motion concepts to the pre-snap phase of the play.
Modernizing the offense with pre-snap motion
In his 1983 playbook, Coryell made it very clear why he was so tied to pre-snap movement as a key construct of his offense:
- To create a personnel advantage by creating coverage mismatches on our receivers or backs.
- To create a personnel advantage by effecting changes in run support and force responsibilities.
- To create secondary movement in an effort to better enable our quarterbacks to recognize coverages.
- To get our personnel in better position to execute their given assignment.
- To create problems for the defense in man under coverages when attempting to hold or bump receivers at the line of scrimmage.
- To create an opportunity for indecision, confusion, and/or mis-alignment by the secondary.
- To cause movement on the part of the defense in an effort to realign their personnel with the coverage calls and changes and not allow them to set themselves and react to familiar offensive patterns. Make the defense play “on the move.”
- To force opponents to spend practice time and effort an adjusting to movement patterns rather than improving defensive skills and schemes.
- To create a visual complexity to the defense, yet be able to run the same basic plays from a variety of looks.
It’s specifically important to delineate Coryell’s reasons for using pre-snap motion as much as he did, because when you look through these nine points, you see a lot of the NFL’s current passing philosophy in there, and before Coryell perfected his structure, that wasn’t the case to this degree. Coryell’s motions could come in all kinds of forms — halfbacks flexing out wide from the backfield, wide-side receivers moving inside slot receivers in moveable “twins” looks, and the “Roving Y” moving all over the place.
Anticipation was also a big part of the Coryell passing game — he wanted his receivers to break to the ball as it was thrown and beat the defender to the ball. Coryell also tasked and trusted his receivers with leverage reads — they would adjust their breaks based on how the coverage was leaning. From the pre-snap phase to the end of the route, the idea was to have the defense on its heels no matter what it did.
The "Roving Y" tight end
Coryell did move his tight ends out wide from time to time at San Diego State, and J.V. Cain played the role of the hybrid receiver/tight end at St. Louis, but it was really Winslow who redefined the position with his own special physical abilities and mental acumen, married to Coryell’s expansive philosophy. The Chargers selected Winslow out of Missouri with the 13th overall pick in the 1979 draft, and after a rookie season in which he was limited with a leg injury and caught just 25 passes in seven games, he came back with a flourish the next two years, leading the NFL with 89 catches in 1980 and 88 in 1981. Winslow was the perfect prototype of the modern tight end — he was big enough to overwhelm cornerbacks and safeties, beating even aggressive double coverage easily with his physicality, and quick and agile enough to make life nightmarish for the linebackers of the day. Moreover, he bought in completely to Coryell’s system and became an outstanding route-runner and catalyst for the entire offense. There were other tight ends of the era who had the ability to do what Winslow did, like Cleveland Ozzie Newsome and Oakland’s Todd Christensen, but Winslow was the one in the right place at the right time.
It didn’t hurt that Coryell had some great assistants early on with the Chargers. Joe Gibbs was a tight end for Coryell at San Diego State, and he later coached the offensive line at San Diego State from 1964-1966, the running backs at St. Louis from 1973-1977, and he graduated to the position of Coryell’s offensive coordinator with the Chargers in 1979 and 1980 before moving on to a long career with the Washington Redskins as head coach in which he won three Super Bowls with three different quarterbacks. But with the Chargers, it was Gibbs, the former tight end, who consulted with Coryell, receivers coach Ernie Zampese, and offensive line coach Jim Hanifan to find the best ways in which to get Winslow more involved.
The solution? Flex him out more often from the formation, and make him a moving target on every down. Not a messenger tight end available in a situational role, but the crux of a receiver corps that had Joiner and Jefferson and Chandler and Muncie and Brooks… when it all was working, it was too much for any defense to stop, and Winslow was the white elephant of the pack. He was a force multiplier in San Diego’s pre-snap packages, because wherever he went from and to, the defense was going to guess wrong and wind up in a bad spot. If you’re an outside left cornerback, and you’re expecting pre-snap to cover the Z receiver on a go route, and all of a sudden, here comes Winslow outside the Z receiver in motion from the left side of the formation and run an 18-yard skinny post, what are you supposed to do? WInslow, more than anyone in Coryell’s offenses, made the math difficult-to-impossible for anyone facing him — and in so doing, inspired generations of coaches after him to work those same math problems.
“During the early years of Air Coryell, the strong safety wasn’t much more than a glorified linebacker,” former Broncos defensive coordinator Joe Collier said in The Games that Changed the Game. “Basically, a run defender who could cover an average tight end. You put a guy like Winslow in the slot, and he’s going up against coverage that’s a lot slower than he is. It’s not the matchup on defense we liked. So, we’d try to give that strong safety some help, like bringing a linebacker out to him, or bringing the other safety over to help.”
Of course, when you put that much attention on Winslow, someone else was going to win their inevitable one-on-one matchup, and that’s one reason it seemed that on every passing play, at least one Chargers receiver was open throughout the down.
Winslow ended his career with 541 catches for 6,741 yards and 45 touchdowns, and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1995. The game he’s best remembered for is the 41-38 Chargers win over the Miami Dolphins in the 1981 divisional playoff round — Winslow caught 13 passes for 166 yards and a touchdown, and was pawed at by Miami’s defense throughout the game to the point where he had to be helped off the field by teammates after the game, due to injury, cramps and dehydration. It was an epic performance, though several bitter former Dolphins swear to this day that Winslow was engaging in a bit of method acting.
Still, his place in NFL history is unique and eternal — Winslow was the tight end who truly made it acceptable for tight ends to be the primary targets in NFL passing offenses on a week-to-week basis.
Coryell's legacy is clear. It's past time to honor the man.
As much of an innovator as he was, Coryell obviously passed away without seeing his own induction in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Coryell’s teams were never able to make the Super Bowl, and his distant relationship with his own defenses were a serious cause, and the Chargers were never able to mount a serious defensive threat after defensive end Fred Dean was traded to the San Francisco 49ers in a fit of cheapness from team owner Gene Klein. Dean went on to a different level of greatness and eventually the Hall of Fame under Bill Walsh, and a defense that was once as stout as its offense was about to be historic quickly fell apart.
You can point to Coryell’s own shortcomings when looking at his 3-6 postseason record, and there’s merit to that — but there’s also truth to the idea that if Coryell had ever worked with an owner as concerned with the product on the field as he was with the checkbook, things would have been different. He retired after the 1986 season and moved back to Washington State, and his cabin in the island woods.
And in that retirement, he saw his influence bloom. No matter the record, Coryell’s place as an all-time NFL innovator is secure. Not only because his concepts worked so well when he was coaching, but because the coached of today will tell you that those same concepts build a serious part of their own playbooks. More specifically, if you were to superimpose the most expansive versions of the passing game Coryell unleashed in San Diego over the most challenging passing offenses of the modern age, it would be a fairly easy fit.
“We’ve lost a man who has contributed to the game of pro football in a very lasting way with his innovations and with his style,” Fouts said upon his old coach’s passing. “They say that imitation is the highest form of flattery — look around, it’s there.”
“If Don Coryell walked in and looked at our call sheet, he’d recognize about half the plays,” then-Redskins head coach Norv Turner said in 1999. “It’s not about plays; it’s about personnel, execution, getting people to believe and doing it right.”
Mike Martz, who took the three-digit system to St. Louis and the “Greatest Show on Turf” Rams, perhaps says it best.
“Don is the father of the modern passing game. People talk about the ‘West Coast’ offense, but Don started the ‘West Coast’ decades ago and kept updating it. You look around the NFL now, and so many teams are running a version of the Coryell offense. Coaches have added their own touches, but it’s still Coryell’s offense. He has disciples all over the league. He changed the game.”
From the roving tight end, to pre-snap motion, to a new level aerial assault, Don Coryell created a new schematic face for the league. His concepts would spread far and wide, to the next generations of innovators and champions.
