Veeshik_ya wrote:Jeremy Crowhurst wrote:Hey, tell us a little more about how Johnson was a master of the salary cap!
I'm more than willing to destroy you in a tit for tat if necessary, but first I want to hear a compelling case for/against Dungy or Johnson from you.
Go:
Oh dear Lord (and no, that's not me addressing you), does your grandiosity know no bounds?
Very well.
Johnson did something that many others have done, both before and after him -- taken a team from the basement to the Super Bowl in a few years. But he also did something nobody else has ever done -- left his team at its peak, giving an opportunity to judge him on an apples-to-apples basis.
Jerry basically screwed Johnson out of the chance to get into the Hall of Fame when he said "anyone can coach this team to a Super Bowl" and then proved it. Barry Switzer's record coaching the team is almost as good as Johnson's, and Switzer had to operate within the confines of the salary cap while Johnson didn't (its first year was 1994). I think we all agree that Barry Switzer is not a Hall of Fame calibre coach.
So then you say, well, he built that great Dallas team. You say he built it on his own, acting as chief scout and G.M., others would suggest Bob Ackles played a major part in that, but fine. We'll say that Johnson did it all. But what did he do? He had a first-ballot Hall of Fame QB waiting to be plucked first overall in the draft, then he was the beneficiary of the most lopsided trade in the history of pro football. Is it to Johnson's credit that he was the guy on the other end of the phone when Mike Lynn decided to blow his brains out? You apparently say yes, it was a testament to Johnson's team building skills that he got another GM to make such a terrible, terrible deal. Others would disagree. Obviously, the Cowboys made some great pickups by trade and free-agency, and Johnson is undoubtebly entitled to some credit for that. But a lot of the key pieces were already there in 1989 -- Irvin, Tuinei, Newton, Norton.
Well, maybe I'm being too harsh on good old Jimmy. Is there anything else on his resume that we can use to evaluate his candidacy, to see if he showed his stuff somewhere else? Why yes, there is!
You guys can compare Jimmy in Miami to Shanahan going, or Gibbs returning, to D.C., but the reality is that Jimmy was still in his coaching prime. He was still a young man, and was only seven years removed from his first season as the head coach in Dallas. And while it's true that he didn't sink the ship in Miami, holding steady for four years does not scream "Hall of Fame". He had four years to build the team his way, and granted, he was limited to using only his own team's draft picks to do so, but the result was a team that wasn't anything special, and in fact did better under the next guy -- also, nobody's nominee for a Hall of Fame coach.
It's easy to fall in love with the two rings and say he should get in just for that reason alone. I expect that at some point, that is exactly what will happen. But for me, you judge a candidate by looking at what he did, what contributions he made. A big part of that is looking at the guy there before him and the guy there after him and asking, was he better than that guy? For guys like Shula, Noll, and Walsh, the contributions that they made are undeniable. In Johnson's case his success is relatively fleeting, his contribution to it is not at all clear (thirty years later Jimmy and Jerry still don't agree on the role each played in building that team), and most importantly, when given a chance to duplicate that success, he couldn't come anywhere close.