Sid Gillman doesn’t register much in the rankings of great coaches of all time. But ask somebody like Jon Gruden or Dick Vermeil to discuss Gillman, and they will talk as if he invented the game.
To a degree, Gillman did. Before there was Bill Walsh, there was Sid Gillman.
In a new book, Sid Gillman: Father of the Passing Game, Josh Katzowitz tells the untold story of one of football’s greatest innovators. As a coach with the Los Angeles Rams in the 50s and then with the San Diego Chargers in the 60s, Gillman pioneered the wide-open approach to offense. He was the first coach to set players in motion and to spread the field with receivers. Among the people who worked under Gillman were Chuck Noll and Al Davis.
Gillman had a fascinating, and at times, controversial career. Katzowitz writes that anti-Semitism might have cost Gillman, who was Jewish, the head coach job at Ohio State that eventually went to Woody Hayes. Gillman also had stormy relationships with many players in the pros, including Hall of Famer Lance Alworth and John Hadl, who declined to be interviewed for the book.
Here is my Q/A with Katzowitz:
What gave you the idea to write about book about Sid Gillman?
When I was researching my first book – Bearcats Rising, a book about the University of Cincinnati football program – I got to learn about Sid, because he coached there in the late-1940s to the mid-1950s. For whatever reason, that time frame in American history really fascinates me. It was when my grandparents were in the prime of their lives, and it was around the time when my parents were born. I looked into maybe writing a book on Sid, and I was shocked to learn that even though he was this coach who was in the same pantheon as guys like Vince Lombardi, Paul Brown, Woody Hayes and Bill Walsh (and a guy who had impacted those coaches’ careers), nobody had ever written a book about him. He’s just this very innovative coach whose schemes live into today’s NFL, and he’s fallen through the cracks of history.
Hadl, Alworth and the Paul Brown family declined interviews for the book. Why?
As much as many of today’s coaches have been influenced by Sid, he was not popular among his pro players (he was liked much better by his college players). He was a strict GM who oftentimes would rather cut a player than give him a raise, and players had a hard time separating Sid the GM from Sid the coach. Plus, Sid could simply be a jerk. Former Oilers QB Dan Pastorini summed all of that up perfectly when I talked to him about Sid. I know Sid and Paul Brown hated each other, and that dislike has been filtered down through their family trees. Lance Alworth had a bad experience at the end of his time with the San Diego Chargers. That might be why he didn’t want to talk. I never heard back, so I don’t really know. As for Hadl, I’m not really sure. When I did talk to him, he told me how close he and Sid were (he hired Sid be his offensive coordinator for the L.A. Express, for god’s sake). It might simply be because there was a really well-done ESPN.com piece a few years back that detailed the steroid program Sid was running with the 1963 Chargers, and that might have turned off some of those players to discussing their playing days under Sid.
Were you surprised that he was denied jobs because of his religion?
In retrospect, not really. I’ve never dealt with anti-Semitism on that level in my life, so I didn’t really think about it before I started researching. But then the family tells you that he would have gotten the Ohio State job instead of Woody Hayes if Sid wasn’t Jewish and you start reading Sid’s interviews in which he talked about being black-balled from a Big Ten head coaching job because of his religion, and it dawns on you that it was a real problem for him during the 1940s and 1950s. There was a great line that owner Dan Reeves made when Sid left Cincinnati to take the L.A. Rams job in 1955. Before he officially accepted it, Sid made sure to let Reeves know that he was Jewish. And Dan said something along the lines of, “Hell, that might help you here.”
Was he better as an innovator than he was as a coach?
Considering he never won a Super Bowl and the biggest championship of his life was the 1963 AFL title, I’d lean toward innovation. If Sid wasn’t such an innovator, if his offensive schemes didn’t live on, nobody would think to remember a guy whose career record in the AFL/NFL was 122-97-7. That’s not to say he wasn’t one of the best X’s and O’s guys around at the time, because he was. And that’s not to say he couldn’t turn around a mediocre organization, because he certainly did (he was the first coach in the Cradle of Coaches at Miami (Ohio), he made Cincinnati a power and his work turning around the Houston Oilers won him the AFC coach of the year in 1974). But if people remember him today, it’s because of his vertical stretch offense and his influence in Bill Walsh’s West Coast Offense. Not because he won a couple division titles with the San Diego Chargers.
How much would he have loved today’s pass-first game?
As my CBSSports.com colleague Pete Prisco told me, “THIS is Sid Gillman’s NFL.” You know, even after he retired from coaching and consulting, teams still sent him game film every week to evaluate their offenses and to hear his ideas. If Sid were alive today, he’d be 101 years old. And it wouldn’t surprise me if he was firing up his DVD player every week to watch as much football as possible. He would not be able to get enough of watching guys like Aaron Rodgers, Peyton Manning and Tom Brady and evaluating coaches like Bill Belichick and Sean Payton.
How should his legacy be viewed?
Unless you’ve studied your football history or you’re a football coach, Sid doesn’t really have a legacy. Five years ago, I didn’t know who Sid Gillman was either, and for those of us who were born after Sid was done coaching, he’s basically an unknown entity. One reason I wrote this book was to bring Sid to the masses, to the millions of people who switch over to the RedZone channel every Sunday to watch every touchdown scored. Sid’s innovation is a major reason they’re watching this offensive renaissance and why the NFL is as popular as it is today.
Anything else?
What makes Sid such a fascinating character is not just the football. It’s about his family, his religion, his race relations, and his bad qualities (and he certainly had some). It’s about why everybody who met his wife, Esther, fell in love with her. It’s about how Sid responded when his only son came out of the closet to him, and how that son has lived with AIDS for the past 30 years. In my eyes, the way in which he died just about sums up his life’s work. It wasn’t just about Sid. It was about everybody and everything that surrounded him. In order to write an interesting biography, you need a fascinating character. Sid certainly was that.