Hall’s procedural changes enabled long-overdue breakthrough. Cooperative
efforts broke the stalemate for late Chargers coach.

By Tom Krasovic
Aug. 4, 2023 5:59 PM PT

It took forever, but the day is upon us.

The late Don Coryell, whose San Diego Chargers teams exhilarated much of
America between 1978 and 1986, will in fact be enshrined into the Pro
Football Hall of Fame, Saturday in Canton, Ohio.

Set off the Chargers Cannon. Donald David Coryell is taking his place
among the sport’s greats.

Coryell changed how professional football was coached, played and
viewed, fostering a more entertaining sport. Able to turn around forlorn
NFL franchises in St. Louis and San Diego, he furthered greatly the
league’s rise into a revenue giant that every year now apportions close
to $400 million in national media money to each of its 32 clubs, no
matter their competence.

Above all, Coryell’s football immortality owes to his brilliance as an
innovator.

Propelling him as well, however, were his cooperative skills, our theme
today — and couldn’t a lot of walks of life benefit from improved
cooperation?

Coryell was the lead conductor in a football symphony. The song wasn’t
“Kumbaya “ — Dan Fouts and teammates bickering often — but the
performances were often harmonious. There was a flow, a precision to how
“Air Coryell” breezed down the field. As impressive as the parts were,
the whole was often better, beginning with the quintet of blockers
working in unison.

Don’t forget that back in the 1960s, when Coryell led the football
Aztecs of San Diego State, the cooperative efforts of thousands of San
Diegans laid the foundation to his burgeoning career here.

Per landslide-level approval by local voters, public money built San
Diego Stadium on time and on budget.

In effect, San Diego bought low on the NFL and Major League Baseball.

Move forward to recent years. Fittingly, to end a 35-year stalemate that
denied Coryell’s induction into the Canton shrine, it took a
cooperative, common-sense effort.

What had devolved into Tower of Babel-level of dysfunction — Hall of
Fame voters advancing Coryell to the finalist stage seven times, only
for him to be rejected because rules stipulated that his contributions
to football could not be taken into account — finally gave way to a
solution.

Foremost among those who brokered critical rule changes was new Hall
president Jim Porter, a husband, father of four daughters and the
publisher and CEO of the Canton Repository newspaper.

“I give Porter a lot of credit,” Clark Judge, a Hall voter for 13 years,
said Friday. “He always says he wants to get things right. He’s getting
it there.”

Kudos go also to Hall voters such as Judge, a former NFL/Chargers
reporter for the San Diego Union-Tribune; and colleagues Rick Gossselin
(Dallas), Jeff Legwold (Denver), Ron Borges (Boston) and Ira Kauffman
(Tampa), among many others.

They suggested Porter prevail upon Hall executives to combine the
“coaches” category with the “contributors” category. To more than offset
that coming reduction in inductees, they suggested increasing the
enshrinement rate of seniors — those who’d been denied election for
25-plus years.

Mercifully, the solution nixed the yearly ritual that had become as
ridiculous as running Fouts into a stacked defense.

Here’s how it went at voters’ meetings: Advocates spoke for Coryell.
Skeptics pointed out none of his Cardinals or Chargers teams reached the
Super Bowl, noting also his 3-6 playoff record. Pro-Coryell voters
lauded his indisputable football-enhancing innovations and a coaching
tree whose branches included Super Bowl winners such as head men Joe
Gibbs and John Madden and assistants such as Norv Turner, Mike Martz and
Ernie Zampese.

None of that mattered, they were told, correctly. Because he wasn’t
nominated as a contributor. Nor could he be.

When the categories were combined, Coryell advanced as smoothly as
Kellen Winslow running an F-post route and gathering a Fouts spiral.

And, if not for changes wrought by Porter and others, would the Coryell
enshrinement happen Saturday?

“No, no way — nope,” Judge said.

The head-butting is over. Don Coryell got his bust.