“Just keep matriculating the ball down the field, boys…”
Hank Stram’s rookie card, part of the 1960 Fleer set that introduced the American Football League to collectors—though the Denver Broncos had no coach in the series because, well, no one knows.
There really is no logical explanation for how and why Hank “The Mentor!” Stram became a professional football head coach. Here’s his resume:
Purdue—assistant coach (though he was the baseball head coach)
SMU—assistant coach
Notre Dame—assistant coach
Miami FL—assistant coach
No NFL or AAFC experience—and no football head coaching experience. At all. Lombardi at least was a high school head coach and had worked with the NY Giants before becoming LOMBARDI. But, Stram impressed a third string tight end at SMU while he was there with his intelligence and coaching acumen—some rich kid named Lamar Hunt.
When Hunt was turned down by Bud Wilkinson and Tom Landry for the head coaching position at his new Dallas Texans club, he checked in on Stram…who saw a golden opportunity and rode it for fifteen years, three AFL titles and a Super Bowl title. What should have been a disaster proved to be sheer brilliance. It was Stram who remembered a kid he coached at Purdue who was rotting on the Cleveland bench—Len Dawson. And it was Stram who used his college connections (especially Lloyd Wells) to get the inside track on the black Southern college talent. And it was Stram who, for a fee, allowed himself to be wired for Super Bowl IV, making “65 Toss Power Trap” the single most famous football play call in history. But when he held onto his veterans for too long, Hunt cut him loose.
Stram tried to make lightning strike twice with the Saints, but despite having his playbook distributed on Wonder Bread football cards (which I think was brilliant), meddling ownership and drug problems (as well as Stram’s determination to play Joe Gilliam instead of Archie Manning, which failed twice thanks to Joe’s drug woes) led to his firing after losing to the expansion Tampa Bay Buccaneers, ending their two-year losing streak. Stram would never coach again, but would become television’s top analyst pre-Madden.
An intensely vain man, he also owned a collection of toupees that grew progressively more hideous until his last ones looked as if they were fed twice daily.
Here’s Steve Sabol’s story about Hank Stram
