More previously untold Don Shula stories come to light. Some could’ve changed team history
The passing of Don Shula last week has led to many well-deserved condolences, well wishes and remembrances about the coach and his legendary 33-year NFL career. And, as might be expected, when people start to recall their time with Shula, facts never before unearthed rise to the light of day.
One of those happened in 1998.
That season, the Denver Broncos opened the season with a 13-0 record and were seriously threatening the Miami Dolphins’ 17-0 perfect season mark, particularly on the afternoon of Dec. 13, when they traveled to the Meadowlands in New Jersey to play the 5-8 New York Giants.
Jim Fassel was the coach of that underdog Giants team that day as he was from 1997 to 2003. And in perhaps the most improbable defeat of an undefeated NFL team in December, the Giants beat the Broncos 20-16.
Fassel, obviously a competitor who wanted the best for his team, wasn’t exactly overjoyed after the game.
“It was a bittersweet thing for me,” he said by phone from his home In Las Vegas on Sunday. “I recruited John Elway out of high school. I coached him his whole time at Stanford. And I coached him a couple of years at Denver. He’s like a son to me.
“And I’m not going to give up and let John have a game, but they were [13-0] and had a chance to go undefeated, which would have been great for John. Anyway, we beat them. And I talked to John after the game. He said, ‘Jim, I’d like to have had that 16-0 record but, you know, we want to win the whole thing. We want to go to the Super Bowl and win. And they did.”
What happened next was something Fassel never expected.
During the following week, his phone rings and it’s Don Shula on the other end of the long-distance connection.
“He called me and he was very nice, very sincere, thanking me for beating the Broncos and keeping the Dolphins record [intact],” Fassel said. “He told me, ‘you’ll never pay for anything when you get down here..’ He said, ‘If you ever get to Miami, they’ll put you on their shoulders.’ He said if you ever get to Miami, they’re going to love you here.’ ”
A few days later Fassel got a box from Shula in the mail.
“He sent me a Miami jersey with my name on it,” Fassel said. “He sent me all kinds of stuff.”
Fassel says he has the Dolphins aqua No 1 jersey with his name on it in storage in his garage.
Fassel had never really had an extensive relationship with Shula prior to that fateful game. He served as assistant with the Giants, Broncos and Raiders in the early- to mid-1990s and he and Shula occasionally crossed paths.
“He’d say hello,” Fassel said.
But now the coach was in full appreciation mode for that 1998 victory. So in 2001, when Fassel took the Giants to the Super Bowl to play the Baltimore Ravens in Tampa, Shula made a point of visiting him in his hotel room the week before the game.
“That’s the first time it was face to face,” Fassel said. “Looking back on it, it was hard for me to really be happy about beating John. He’s really like a son to me, OK? But knocking them down and seeing Don Shula, because he was very nice to me, deep inside, I’m glad that my team kept [the Dolphins perfect season record] alive.
“Nobody’s broken that record. I never tell John that. But I had so much respect for Don Shula. And John Elway was going to play more and get other chances. It was just something that always touched me. That what a great coach he was. He was always nice to me and if I could help him keep the [17-0] for him, I was glad to do it.”
By the way, the week after Fassel’s team defeated the Broncos, a deflated Denver team came to Miami and lost again. It would be the last time that Broncos team would lose that season.
And what about the other facts coming to light in the last week?
Consider:
It’s often said one of the reasons Shula stepped away from the game after the 1995 season is because he didn’t want to make significant changes to his coaching staff or personnel department.
That, history states, moved then-owner Wayne Huizenga to “convince” Shula to “step aside,” as it was reported at the time.
But history needs some rewriting.
Shula was not quite so intractable as that picture paints him. In fact, he fully planned to make changes to the coaching staff and the personnel department after 1995, according to people who heard him say as much at the time.
And the changes might have been epic if he had carried them out or been given the chance to do so as he openly talked about with confidants.
For example, Shula was very loyal to his coaches, including offensive line coach Monte Clark and defensive coordinator Tom Olivadotti.
But that loyalty didn’t stop Shula from flying Pete Carroll to South Florida after the coach was fired by the New York Jets in 1994, according to a source familiar with the interview. This never-reported interview was kept quiet at the time because Shula didn’t want to offend Olivadotti and, perhaps more importantly, didn’t want his defensive coordinator to lose credibility if Carroll wasn’t hired.
Ultimately, Carroll took the defensive coordinator job with the San Francisco 49ers instead. And a decade later, when Huizenga interviewed him for the head coaching job, he wasn’t hired then, either.
The Dolphins defense, under Olivadotti, finished season tied for 10th in points allowed in 1995 with 332. The 49ers, coming off a Super Bowl win in 1994, allowed 258 points in ‘95 under Carroll.
After the 1995 season in which the Dolphins made the playoffs only to be immediately dispatched by the Buffalo Bills, 37-22 in a wild card game, Shula intended to make full-scale changes.
Those would include Olivadotti and Clark, who was his friend and had a long history with the Dolphins. And it included multiple people at the top of the personnel department, according to people close to the coach.
It seems Shula grew disenchanted with the makeup and chemistry of the 1995 team and especially the gathering of 19 former first-round draft picks. There were indeed 19 former first-round picks on Miami’s roster, but many of those were castoffs from the teams that drafted them and not playing like good first-round picks.
Shula also wanted Miami’s picks to factor more after Billy Milner and Andrew Greene, whom Clark advocated for in the run-up to the ‘95 draft, failed to do.
And, according to a source who heard this from the coach himself at the time, Shula was eyeing a little-known pro scouting director from the Detroit Lions to potentially lead Miami’s personnel department.
This Lions scouting director had worked for the Dolphins from 1985 to ‘89 as a college scout before going to Detroit. And Shula came to like and respect him during his time with the Dolphins so much that the coach thought him ready to be an NFL general manager.
Kevin Colbert was that former Dolphins scout and personnel man in Detroit.
Obviously, Shula never got to opportunity to call Colbert for that interview or make changes to the Miami personnel department or coaching staff.
Colbert continued with the Lions through 1999. He was hired by the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2000 as their director of college scouting and in 2010 became the team’s general manager and then vice president and GM.
This story was originally published May 11, 2020 at 12:00 AM.
