What made Lombardi great??

[GrnBay007]

I was reading a book my son brought home from school - Heroes of Football by John Madden. Of course there was a section in there on Lombardi.
From John...


Vince Lombardi was my idol. It's as pure and simple as that. When I was a young coach I studied everything he did. When I was a junior college coach I went to a football clinic in Reno, Nevada, where he was speaking. I thought then I knew everything about coaching. That day, Lombardi spoke for eight hours...about one play: the Green Bay sweep. That's when I realized that my knowledge of coaching was superficial. I learned about real depth that day, about how much knowledge goes into what can seem the simplest of things. When Lombardi took over the Packers, he went back to basics, started from the very beginning, and built from there - step by step. He was truly an incredible coach.

What do you think, or what have you read that made Lombardi such a great coach?

[Joemailman]

A number of players have said that Lombardi was a master at knowing when a player needed a kick in the rear and when he needed a pat on the back. I think that was a lot of it. Contrast that with a guy like Tom Coughlin who has a reputation as a tough guy, but is reviled by many players for always being negative.

[oregonpackfan]

A number of things made Lombadi great:

1. Commitment to Excellence. He expected and demanded every player and coach give 100% effort.

2. Motivating players to work for a common goal.

3. A vision for "The Big Picture" as well as giving attention to detail.

4. Inspirational leadership skills

5. Though he was demanding and hard on his players he still treated them like family members.

6. Realization that the team needed to be directly involved in the community affairs. This is a huge reason why Green Bay residents as well as Wisconsin residents so loved the Packers.

[The Shadow]

He refused to accept less than excellence.

[Little Whiskey]

star, hornung, taylor, nitschke

[Joemailman]

star, hornung, taylor, nitschke

They were all there before Lombardi, and the Packers were the worst team in the league.

[Harlan Huckleby]

he was a mean S.O.B. Like George Halas, and many other old time coaches.

[GrnBay007]

he was a mean S.O.B. Like George Halas, and many other old time coaches.


The first time he met with his new team, Lombardi supposedly looked at the ragtag bunch in front of him and then held up a ball. "Gentlemen," he said. "This is a football, and before we're through, we're gonna run it down everyone's throats." He also told them he had never been associated with a losing team and wasn't about to begin now.

Old school.

Wish our current team could run it down someone's throat. Maybe down the road....

[superfan]

Lombardi was before my time, but I now regret not asking Fuzzy Thurston a couple Lombardi questions when I had the chance.

[MJZiggy]

Next year...

[Badgerinmaine]

Joemailman is right--all those guys came in 1956, 1957 or 1958. It's quite remarkable how good the Lombardi Packers teams were in spite of a whole bunch of drafts that were less than stellar. True, in most of his years the Packers would have had a weak draft position, and were competing with the AFL for players (for example, I didn't know until I started looking this up that the Pack drafted Daryl Lamonica, who went to the Raiders instead and started against GB in Super Bowl II). But there's probably no year where Lombardi was in charge where they had as good of a draft as they did in '56, '57 and '58, right before he came:
1956: Forrest Gregg (2nd round), Bob Skoronski (5th) Bart Starr (yup, 17th round)
1957: Paul Hornung (first pick in the draft), Ron Kramer (also 1st round)
1958: Dan Currie (1st round), Jim Taylor (2nd), Ray Nitschke (3rd), Jerry Kramer (4th round); they also took Ken Gray in the 6th, who did not stay in GB but who played a decade for the Cardinals.

None of the Lombardi drafts comes close to being as productive as that '58 draft. He did a lot to make them winners--but a lot of the big pieces were already there by the '59 season. Looking at some of those Lombardi drafts, you can also see why the cupboard was so bare by the time Phil Bengtson took over in '68. It's too bad Jack Vainisi, who was responsible for those early picks and stayed on with Lombardi, died so young of a heart attack.

[Badgerinmaine]

He was an outstanding teacher (and he really was a classroom teacher years earlier) who made sure that his players did a small number of things very, very well. I'd echo what others said about how he was brilliant in knowing when to offer the carrot and when to offer the stick. Another factor: He was much, much better at treating his black players with respect than a lot of other coaches of that time did, and they loved him for it. Many black players of the time believed that other NFL teams had an unspoken limit of four or six black players per team; Lombardi never did. (That's also part of why the University of Minnesota football teams were so good in the early 1960s--they recruited great black players from the South that the SEC teams would not let play for them back then).

David Maraniss' bio of Lombardi, When Pride Still Mattered is outstanding, but the way--it may be the best biography of anyone I have ever read.

[Harlan Huckleby]

it may be the best biography of anyone I have ever read.

Badgermaine's lifetime bio reading list:

1 A Life in Television by Michael Landon
2 When Pride Still Matters
3 Ross Perot: Under the Hood


And the winner is ...... When Pride Still Matters!

[Badgerinmaine]

it may be the best biography of anyone I have ever read.

Badgermaine's lifetime bio reading list:

1 A Life in Television by Michael Landon
2 When Pride Still Matters
3 Ross Perot: Under the Hood


And the winner is ...... When Pride Still Matters!
You forgot my Classic Comics bio of President James K. Polk. :mrgreen:

[ND72]

Fear

[Little Whiskey]

star, hornung, taylor, nitschke

They were all there before Lombardi, and the Packers were the worst team in the league.

your right. I was just trying to be a smart ass.

[run pMc]

I think oregonpackfan nailed a lot of it.

Read "When Pride Mattered". Good biography.

[Maxie the Taxi]

Vince Lombardi was great primarily because…

He believed in mind over matter. He realized that unless a player believes – really believes – he can be a champion, that player doesn’t stand a chance of being a champion. Lombardi spent every second on the job making his players believe in themselves. He turned Ray Nitschke from a cautious, doubting Thomas into a self-confident leader of the defense by making him believe in himself.

He was a master of treating every player the same by treating each player differently. He learned each player’s unique set of motivational buttons and set about pushing them remorselessly. He’d find out who needed a kick in the ass and gave it too them in spades. He’d find out who required dispassionate, reasoned teaching and supply it. He treated Starr with kid gloves because Starr couldn’t handle harsh, public chewings out. He’d mercilessly tongue lash Hornung and McGee because he knew they could take it and needed it.

He was a practitioner of the KISS method of management. He kept it simple. He believed football games were won by the players who blocked and tackled best. All of his schemes were basic and simple. He was a perfectionist, running simple plays over and over and over again until every block was perfectly executed. He believed that the way to beat an opponent was to attack and defeat the opponent’s strongest asset. If an opponent was strongest at stopping the run, he’d have his offense run right at that defense time and time and time again until in time it cracked. He believed that if you take away the opponent’s best weapon you force him to play off balance, relying on weapons he’s not used to wielding.

He was a master at delegating. He put Phil Bengtson in charge of the defense; he concentrated on the offense. He never undercut Phil’s authority. When he blustered, Bengston was the perfect good cop to Lombardi’s bad. Phil shared Lombardi’s fondness for the KISS principle. When, later in his career, Herb Adderley went to play for the Dallas Cowboys, Herb recounted that the Cowboys’ defensive playbook was as thick as the Dallas Yellow Pages. Green Bay’s defensive playbook, Adderley said, consisted of 10 pages!

He was a great General Manager. Although his college drafts weren’t extraordinary, he recognized talent on film and realized how that talent would best fit into his system. He used Hornung not as a quarterback but exclusively as a halfback. He traded for Henry Jordan and Willie Davis. Against all logic he used the undersized Jordan exclusively as a defensive tackle allowing Jordan to excel at that position. He broke some NFL taboos. He brought in NFL rejects like Chuck Mercein and Big Ben Wilson (I think he ticked off an owner or two by signing these guys off practice squads) and they performed under pressure and in the clutch.

He was where the buck stopped and demanded loyalty to the Packers above all. He refused to deal with agents. Legend has it he sent Jim Ringo packing because Ringo had the audacity to hire an agent. When Packer legend Jim Taylor signed as a pseudo-free agent with the New Orleans Saints, it is said Lombardi refused to speak to him until, eventually, they spoke after they both had retired.

Lombardi was the epitomy of “old school.” He taught character, principles and old school values like dedication, loyalty, perseverance and courage. Virtually every player interviewed after his death commented not on what Lombardi taught them about football but what Lombardi had taught them about life.

Lombardi was an anachronism even in his own era. He believed in black and white, good and bad, right and wrong, and he practiced what he preached.

[retailguy]

your right. I was just trying to be a smart ass.


I guess you pulled it off... :P :wink: