Great coaches evolve, and Don Shula in Miami was a perfect example. Just ask Dan Marino.
Dan Marino admits he was intimidated the first time he met Don Shula. He was a rookie quarterback at the time, reporting for minicamp ahead of his debut season with the Miami Dolphins. He never met with Shula or any of the Dolphins scouts in the lead-up to the 1983 NFL Draft because, he assumes, Miami thought there was no way Marino would fall all the way to No. 27.
The two talked on the phone briefly when the Dolphins picked Marino with the penultimate selection of the first round, but their first real conversation happened when Marino showed up in South Florida for minicamp. Shula told the rookie to be ready to start.
“What he told me was, ‘I want you to come in good shape. Prepare yourself this summer as if you’re going to come in and be the starter,’” Marino said. “He made an impact on me right away that way. He believed in me. ... That just gave me a lot of confidence right off the bat.”
Marino started the season as the backup and took over six games in, earning the first of his nine Pro Bowl selections. For the rest of Shula’s career, coach and quarterback were inextricably linked, and Marino quarterbacked the Dolphins to Shula’s final Super Bowl appearance — Super Bowl 19 in 1985.
On Monday, Shula died at 90, and his former players from all eras reflected on the life and legacy of the winningest coach in NFL history. Although he wasn’t on the team for either of Shula’s two Super Bowl victories, Marino was perhaps the greatest player Shula ever coached.
For the first half of his career, Shula was a staunchly old-school coach. Miami ran the ball and played defense, and it worked. When Marino arrived in 1983, Shula adapted.
Nat Moore had already been an All-Pro wide receiver. Mark Duper was a player who missed his rookie season with an injury, and Mark Clayton also went to the Dolphins in the 1983 Draft. They formed one of the best receivers corps in the league for Marino, who quickly became one of the best quarterbacks in the league.
Shula accelerated Marino’s growth by asking the quarterback to call his own plays in practice. He always gave quarterbacks the freedom to call plays in games.
Miami never even had a quarterback throw for 2,500 yards in a season before Marino arrived. In 1984, Marino shattered NFL records by throwing for 5,084 yards as he led the Dolphins to Super Bowl 19.
“He was willing to open up to other things in football that he wasn’t used to beforehand,” Marino said. “The one thing for me is he was very demanding, but also he would listen to your ideas and your thoughts. And maybe he wasn’t that way in the ‘60s and the ‘70s with the teams with the perfect seasons, but with me he was great that way.
“That is what a great coach — a coach like Coach Shula or any great coach —would do is you evolve to the talent that you have and their abilities, and what they can do best. And I think he noticed that we had two really special guys on the outside in Duper and Clayton, and the fact that I was coming in and a quarterback that had a chance to be pretty darn good. You evolve to that and that’s what he was doing as a head coach, and that’s just being smart.”
A prime example came in Shula’s penultimate season: the “Fake Spike Game.”
The Dolphins charged back from a 17-point deficit against the New York Jets and trailed by three with 38 seconds left in East Rutherford, New Jersey. With one timeout and the ball at the Jets’ 8-yard line, Marino acted as if he was going to spike the ball and stop the clock. Instead, Marino faked the spike and threw for a game-winning touchdown against the unsuspecting New York defense.
The Clock Play wasn’t Shula’s brainchild. It was Bernie Kosar’s suggestion, brought to Miami from the Cleveland Browns when the backup quarterback joined the Dolphins earlier in the year.
“He was a guy that understood, let your players play the game,” Marino said. “You always knew it was there and it was one of those things that it was the perfect timing, he let you do it and in that game he let me kind of take over the second half and do my thing to be able to bring us back, but that goes back to me saying he evolved in a way from the old running game, pound the ball with the teams he had before to let his players play and understand the personnel he had.”
This story was originally published May 4, 2020 at 6:58 PM.
