Joe Gibbs is the GOAT and your argument is irrelevant
June 5, 2019
by Eric Hill
Legendary Redskins head coach Joe Gibbs was recently inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame, which is a thing that I now know exists. Gibbs left football in 1993 to spend time with his family. To most of us, that would mean taking the kids fishing or building a tree house or something but to Gibbs, it meant starting a NASCAR team, where he went on to win three championships. I admittedly don’t know much about NASCAR but that can’t be easy.
Imagine if Jeff Gordon, Cole Trickle or Ricky Bobby decided they didn’t feel like dominating NASCAR anymore and decided to form an expansion team in the NFL and then won a bunch of Super Bowls. Crazy, right? That’s why anyone who says Joe Gibbs isn’t the best coach of all time is wrong, plain and simple.
Lombardi? Meh. Walsh? Please. Belichick? Close but no cigar.
It’s Gibbs and Gibbs alone.
All those other coaches are fine in their own right but it’s easy to see the source of their powers.
Belichick has coached 24 NFL seasons and has a record of 261-123 with 31 playoff wins and six Super Bowls. It doesn’t get any better than that, does it? But without Tom Brady, Belichick is a very mortal 54-63 with one playoff win. That’s greatness personified, eh?
Walsh went 92-59-1 with three Super Bowl wins. How did he fare without Joe Montana? I couldn’t tell you because he always had him. I can tell you, though, that Walsh was 1-3 in road playoff games and the rest of the NFC West had a combined .454 winning percentage while he was there. 10 years in a soft division with a Hall of Fame quarterback makes you look pretty good.
Lombardi belongs in a class by himself. Not so much because of his greatness, but because he coached in the pre-NFL-AFL merger era. His Packers were in the NFL West at the time, along with the Bears, Colts and a bunch of chumps. 12 of 14 games were against this own division. His road to the championship consisted of going 3-1 against Chicago and Baltimore, taking care of business against the also-rans and then Boom! They were in the championship game. No playoffs, just the league championship game. Once the Super Bowl era started, he had to pull out one additional win against a JV squad from the AFL.
Lombardi also had the luxury of 10 (10!) Hall of Fame players on his roster for nearly his entire tenure in Green Bay, including Hall of Fame quarterback in Bart Starr.
Perhaps Lombardi’s greatest accomplishment was turning around the perennially terrible Redskins in 1969, with the help of Hall of Fame quarterback Sonny Jurgenson, of course.
The list goes on: Chuck Noll was 82-97 without Terry Bradshaw. Tom Landry won 15 playoff games in 11 seasons with Roger Staubach, and only five in 18 seasons without him. Don Shula won only three titles in 33 years despite coaching John Unitas, Bob Griese and Dan Marino.
And then there’s Joe Jackson Gibbs.
In 16 seasons, Gibbs went 154-94 and 17-7 in the playoffs while playing in a division that had a combined .519 winning percentage. He won three Super Bowls with three different starting quarterbacks. His five road playoff wins are as many as Walsh (1) and Belichick (4) had combined. Road playoff wins are a big deal because Gibbs was able to go into a hostile stadium against a higher seeded team and pull out a W five times in 16 years. That’s amazing. And he did all of this without ever having anything close to a Hall of Famer under center.
Gibbs took an eleven-year hiatus from coaching from 1993-2003. This wasn’t the kind of retirement where the coach becomes a color analyst in the booth or a talking head that’s around the game all the time. Gibbs went milk-carton missing from the NFL, not even watching games for a long stretch. When he returned, he was shocked at how much the game had evolved since he left. He was back in the playoffs by year two because a great coach is a great coach.
Let’s say aliens invade earth and our only hope of getting them to leave is to play them in a game of football. Let’s also say that the aliens hijack all of our best football players for their team and leave only a scrappy band of misfits to play for team Earth. Yes, I know it’s the plot from Space Jam but work with me here. Who would you want to coach that team? A guy who won six championships with the best quarterback of all time or the guy who once coached a group of replacement players, including a quarterback who was on work release from prison, to a 13-7 win over a Dallas Cowboys team that featured Randy White, Too Tall Jones, Tony Dorsett, Danny White and 17 other full-time players?
Yes, I know that’s the plot of The Replacements, but that movie is based on that game. Close your eyes for a moment and picture a world without Shane Falco. Now open them and thank Joe Gibbs that you don’t live in that apocalyptic wasteland.
I’m not saying those other guys aren’t great coaches—they are. There have been plenty of coaches who couldn’t win with Hall of Fame quarterbacks. Dan Reeves had John Elway, Don Coryell had Dan Fouts, Shula had Marino and none never won one title, let alone multiple. It takes a combination of a great coach and a great quarterback to form a dynasty.
The reason Gibbs was the best of the best is that he broke the mold.
When evaluating a great coach, the ability to do more with less is trait number one for me. That’s why I begrudgingly respect the hell out of Bill Parcells. He is the only other coach to win more than one Super Bowl with different quarterbacks, Phil Simms and Jeff Hostetler. It’s also why Tom Flores doesn’t get enough love. He had an overall average record in his long career but he’s the third and final member of the ‘Multiple Super Bowls Without a Hall of Fame QB Club,’ by winning two with Jim Plunket. Plunket wasn’t terrible but he was an oft-injured journeyman, kind of a Sam Bradford prototype—winning two championships with him under center was quite a feat. Talking heads like to argue whether or not Don Coryell belongs in Canton but I’d table that discussion until after Flores gets in.
Speaking of the Hall of Fame, if any of you still want to argue that some of those guys are better, how many Halls of Fame are they in? Just the one? Oh, well good for them. Gibbs is in two Halls of Fame, or is it Hall of Fames? You know what? If not for Joe Gibbs, we wouldn’t even have to consider that question.