Don James has a statue outside of Husky Stadium. Jim Owens’ image is sculpted on Montlake, too. Mike Holmgren took the Seahawks to a Super Bowl 17 years ago, and Pete Carroll won one eight years later.
But the greatest coaching mind to come out of Seattle might not be listed in the paragraph above. That one may very well have belonged to 2023 Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee Don Coryell.
Most fans don’t associate the late offensive guru with the Emerald City, but it’s not only where he was born and raised, but where he played college football. Coryell was a defensive back at Washington in the late 1940s and got his coaching start as an assistant at UW in 1950. The details of that season coaching the Huskies 73 years ago aren’t abundantly clear, but it kicked off one of the most innovative and impactful careers in football history.
Of course, most people who think about Coryell tie him to the city of San Diego, where he coached at San Diego State for 12 seasons before leading the Chargers for nine. He flipped the Aztecs from miserable to magnificent with top-fuel speed, taking over a team that went 2-12-2 in the two years before his getting the job and then generating two undefeated seasons while compiling a record of 104-19-2 during his stint at SDSU.
It wasn’t until Coryell reached the NFL that he graduated from victor to visionary. The highflying, deep-ball-dominated offensive attacks that define today’s game? One could make a strong argument that Don is most responsible for it.
Coryell’s Chargers led the league in passing seven times in an eight-year stretch. Bolts quarterback Dan Fouts averaged 320 passing yards per game in 1982, which stood as an NFL record until Drew Brees broke it in 2011. Not until Coryell arrived had teams emphasized the pass over the run, something those San Diego squads did consistently. The reason it worked?
For starters, Coryell put his receivers in motion — a response to new rules limiting how much contact defenders could initiate at the line of scrimmage. Actually, he put everybody in motion — running backs and tight ends alike. It helped create space for pass-catchers in a way that defenses struggled to adapt to — so much so that San Diego reached the playoffs in each of the first four full seasons in which Coryell was at the helm.
But he didn’t stop there. Coryell was also the coach who started having tight ends run routes like wide receivers. Chargers TE Kellen Winslow is likely a Hall of Famer because of this concept. Winslow led the league in receptions in 1980 and 1981 — compiling 2,355 receiving yards over that span — and helped pave the way for the likes of Tony Gonzalez, Antonio Gates and Rob Gronkowski.
Don’s offensive philosophy was dubbed “Air Coryell” — an attack that rarely had any set formations and always had at least two receivers downfield. The latter is essentially the standard today, but was ingenious at the time.
So why did it take Coryell — who passed in 2010 — so long to get inducted? Well, his teams didn’t do so well in the playoffs. The Chargers never got out of the first round during Coryell’s time there, and didn’t even reach the postseason in his final four seasons as head coach. Innovation doesn’t tend to outweigh success in the minds of HOF voters — and an NFL win-loss record of 114-89-1 isn’t overly impressive.
But if you look at his coaching tree and of the testimonials he has received, Canton just doesn’t seem complete without him.
At San Diego State, Coryell recruited future Hall of Fame coaches Joe Gibbs and John Madden as assistants. Delivering a eulogy at Coryell’s funeral, Madden said “You know, I’m sitting down there in front, and next to me is Joe Gibbs, and next to him is Dan Fouts, and the three of us are in the Hall of Fame because of Don Coryell.” Then, referring to Coryell not yet being enshrined, he said, “there’s something missing.”
Mike Martz, who won a Super Bowl as the offensive coordinator of the 1999 Rams said of Coryell: “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.”
Football is the most popular game in this country, largely because of it’s offensive style. You can thank a certain Seattle native for that.
This might not be the city that most revered Coryell, but it should be damn proud of the fact that it produced him.