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.

[ND72]

Fear