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The log home Dan Fouts has lived in for nearly 4 a long time — the home he’s by no means leaving — sits on a volcanic ridgetop within the Oregon backcountry, hidden by seven snowcapped mountains and 40 acres of ponderosa pines. It’s a refuge the Corridor of Fame quarterback has come to relish the older he will get.
“It fits me,” Fouts says. “There’s not one other home in sight.”
He’s 72 now, out of a broadcasting job, his enjoying days fading farther from reminiscence. He’s requested if any regrets linger. He laughs.
“I want I’d been kinder to my teammates,” he says.
Again then, he might be ruthless and unrelenting, a hard-driving prick whose persistence ran skinny and mood ran sizzling. “All of us had our moments the place you’d simply had sufficient of him,” former teammate Hank Bauer says. Fouts famously used to put on a hat round that learn MFIC — Motherf—er in cost — however nobody wanted reminding. “He knew it, we knew it, everyone knew it,” Bauer says.
Fouts had his causes. “When you don’t have a cocky, conceited QB enjoying for you, then you definitely’re in bother,” he as soon as instructed a reporter.
The San Diego Chargers of the late Seventies and 80s didn’t have that drawback. They had been a staff forward of their time, colourful and controversial past their star quarterback. The storms the franchise confronted off the sphere learn like fiction as we speak — most likely as a result of some are. There was the alleged taking pictures of Fouts, in the midst of one among his Professional Bowl seasons, rumored to have been hushed up by native police. And there have been accusations, by the staff’s former proprietor no much less, that some gamers had been excessive on cocaine through the 1981 AFC Championship Sport.
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Fouts remembers the morning of Monday, September 25, 1978, when all of it actually began. He remembers seeing the smoke billowing up into the sky. A Boeing 727 had collided with a Cessna two-seater above the San Diego skyline; 137 lives had been misplaced in what was, on the time, the deadliest airline crash America had ever witnessed. “One of many worst days within the historical past of our metropolis,” Fouts says.
The Chargers gathered for a 9 a.m. assembly. Their coach, Tommy Prothro, had stayed on the stadium all evening poring by means of movie of a humiliating 26-3 loss to the Packers the day earlier than. The Chargers had managed solely a subject purpose. They’d turned it over 11 instances. They had been 1-3 on the season. Prothro had seen sufficient. He determined to give up.
He instructed the gamers. Then the brand new coach was launched, and as Don Coryell made his technique to the entrance of the room, Fouts muttered one thing below his breath.
Holy sh–, that is wonderful.
To that time, Fouts had performed nothing within the NFL. “A horrible profession,” he calls it. He was a bust, and greater than that, a headache. He spent his rookie season warring inside, torn between the Chargers’ coaches and their growing older, iconic starter.
Even at 40, Johnny Unitas by no means noticed the third-round select of Oregon as any type of risk — “He noticed me as somebody who’d go get him a beer,” Fouts says. The Chargers’ employees that yr was primarily made up of previous Giants and Packers, two groups that occurred to be chief rivals of the Baltimore Colts, the franchise Unitas spent 17 seasons with earlier than touchdown in San Diego in 1973. “The coaches needed me to do what they had been educating, not the issues Johnny was telling me off to the aspect,” Fouts says. “I didn’t at all times take heed to the coaches.”
Unitas harm his shoulder and lasted simply 4 begins in San Diego, by no means to play once more. Fouts took over and didn’t win a sport all yr. By 1978, he’d performed below three head coaches and 5 offensive coordinators. He’d gained 13 video games in 47 begins. Fouts had demanded a commerce, taken the staff to arbitration, misplaced, then threatened to retire at 26. However Fouts knew Coryell was a disciple of Sid Gillman, father of the ahead move, and that Coryell’s San Diego State groups used to outdraw the Chargers in their very own stadium.
Abruptly, there was hope.
Inside days, the brand new coach added a play to the offense — 989 F-rub sneak — that featured two go-routes on the surface with rookie first-round vast receiver John Jefferson as the first choice. The Chargers hardly practiced it, the assistant coaches by no means pondering Coryell would dial it up within the sport. Certain sufficient, that Sunday in opposition to the Patriots, Coryell known as it within the first quarter.
His assistants figured the bravado would blow up in his face. An argument ensued.
“Dan, if we get this protection, we’re gonna do that,” offensive coordinator Ray Perkins instructed Fouts.
“But when it’s this protection,” one other coach chimed in, “then go right here …”
Coryell stood in silence for a number of seconds, letting his assistants bicker.
Lastly, he spoke up.
“Ah, hell!” he shouted with a particular lisp that not less than one former Cardinals participant likened to Daffy Duck. “Simply throw the son of a b—- to JJ!”
Fouts did. Jefferson caught it. The Air Coryell Chargers had been born.
Below Coryell, the Chargers aired it out. “Eighty p.c of the time, my first learn was a deep shot,” says Fouts. (George Gojkovich / Getty Photographs)
4 a long time later, Coryell’s fingerprints are everywhere in the offenses that outline the NFL’s fashionable period. The transfer tight finish? The three-digit passing system? Utilizing pre-snap shifts and motions to establish the protection? Coryell’s Chargers had been the pioneers.
His system sought to use defenses in methods no offense did on the time. If Invoice Walsh’s famed West Coast scheme leaned on brief, fast passes designed to emphasize opponents sideline-to-sideline, Coryell’s vertical assault would stress them pylon-to-pylon, primarily with punishing deep pictures down the seams.
Put merely, they needed to air it out on each play.
“Eighty p.c of the time, my first learn was a deep shot,” Fouts says.
It was a timing-based offense constructed on belief and rhythm. Fouts was instructed to throw to spots, not gamers. “Danny, in the event you see the receiver open, you’re too late,” Coryell would inform him. It was an ideal match for Fouts, who didn’t have Dan Marino’s arm however was a grasp of throwing with contact and anticipation.
He’d dangle within the pocket so long as it took, penalties be damned. Fouts didn’t care. He’d take hit after hit, climb to his toes, then name the following play.
And he anticipated his teammates to be prepared.
“If anyone was off, not targeted, not concentrating, that used to get my goat fairly good,” Fouts says.
In a well-known change caught on movie, Fouts will be heard cursing at Corridor of Fame tight finish Kellen Winslow. “When you can imagine it,” Fouts says now, chuckling. “That was a preseason sport.”
That one time when Dan Fouts gave Kellen Winslow Sr the enterprise for being scared to go throughout the center 😂 #Classic #Chargers pic.twitter.com/E2NPg7VSVY
— Will Blackmon 🍷 (@WillBlackmon) September 10, 2018
His teammates got here to respect the hell out of him. Throughout video games, when defensive linemen would bark “I’m coming again!” after laying a vicious hit on him, Fouts would snigger them off. “I’m gonna be proper f—ing right here!” he’d shout again. They cherished that. They watched him play with blood trickling from his brow to his chin, with a broken knee ligament that wobbled like Jell-O, with a pulled groin and a separated shoulder and God is aware of what else.
Stated Coryell: “We have now an terrible time getting Dan to throw the ball away. He needs to take his possibilities in there.”
Stated Walsh, who labored for a season because the Chargers’ offensive coordinator: “He performed extra bodily soccer than anybody on that staff, together with the linebackers.”
And receivers coach Al Saunders: “To a person, each single man on these groups would let you know there wasn’t a harder quarterback than Dan Fouts.”
Fouts noticed it as his responsibility, the quarterback’s obligation. As a lot as he rode his teammates, he was at all times more durable on himself.
“As a quarterback, in the event you’re keen to take the hit, that’s an enormous deal,” Fouts says. “If I solely had a half-second to throw, I used to be gonna keep in there, no matter what occurred after that half-second.”
Stocked with offensive expertise — Fouts, Jefferson and Charlie Joiner at receiver, Chuck Muncie, Clarence Williams and Bauer within the backfield — the Chargers added extra weapons. Winslow arrived because the thirteenth decide in 1979, wideout Wes Chandler through commerce two years later and operating again Lionel James within the ’84 draft.
Coryell continued to innovate. In offensive conferences he cultivated creativity by asking his assistants for outlandish concepts. Early on, they’d throw some out, satisfied the boss would shoot them down. “ what? Danny can do this,” Coryell would reply. “Let’s attempt that on Sunday.”
“The coaches at all times had an empty chalkboard to work with,” says Saunders, who’d succeed Coryell as head coach in 1986. “Have you learnt how a lot enjoyable that was?”
So that they experimented. In these days, tight ends had been hand-in-dirt blockers, seldom used for something quite a lot of catches over the center. Coryell flexed Winslow out vast, then focused him all sport lengthy, turning him into one of the deadly weapons in league historical past.
“The pondering again then was the extra bodily staff would win every week,” Saunders says. “Don felt like, hey, let’s have the staff with the higher athletes win.”
His system was complicated in idea however easy in execution — “the genius behind it,” Bauer insists. Routes had been recognized by digits: odd numbers for out routes, evens for ins. A fast out was a 1, a medium out a 3, a nook a 5. A hitch was a 2, a hook a 4, a publish an 8. A go-route was a 9. Simple to memorize. Simple to name within the huddle. Fast to the road of scrimmage. The Chargers sped up. The remainder of the league spent years attempting to catch them. Now each offense in soccer makes use of some type of Coryell’s three-digit route tree.
Fouts by no means appreciated the shotgun, so the Chargers not often used it. Coryell inserted a handful of pre-snap shifts and motions to assist his QB sniff out the defensive protection he was about to see. Coryell cherished how briskly Fouts’ thoughts labored. It sometimes solely took him a second after the snap to substantiate his preliminary learn. He’d take his five- or seven-step drop and sling it.
“We’re gonna rating as many factors as we will within the first half,” Coryell used to inform his assistants, “then we’re gonna determine methods to win the sport within the second.”
The yr earlier than Coryell arrived in San Diego, Buffalo’s Joe Ferguson led the league with 2,803 passing yards. In his first full season in Coryell’s offense, Fouts erupted for 4,082 — the second QB in historical past to crest the 4,000-yard barrier (Joe Namath was the primary in 1967). The Chargers would lead the league in passing every of Coryell’s first six seasons, and Fouts would break the passing document three separate instances.
As Coryell continued to innovate — with Winslow, with pre-snap motion, with personnel groupings nobody had seen earlier than (two tight ends on the sphere on the similar time, 4 receivers out vast) — defenses had been compelled to reply, soccer evolution occurring in actual time. Winslow was such a mismatch for safeties and linebackers that groups needed to carry one other cornerback on the sphere to cowl him, the delivery of the nickel protection. The dime would quickly comply with.
“Who ran a nickel protection again then? No person,” Bauer says. “Who had 4 receivers on the sphere on the similar time? What? Are you kidding me? That was loopy.”
Coryell’s Chargers would encourage numerous imitators — and a catchy disco fight song — however they by no means made it to a Tremendous Bowl, which Fouts has by no means actually gotten over.
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San Diego gained 69 video games and three division titles throughout 9 seasons, twice reaching the AFC Championship Sport. The Chargers’ signature win got here within the 1981 divisional spherical, a 41-38 extra time victory over the Dolphins dubbed “The Epic in Miami.” “Most likely probably the most thrilling sport within the historical past of professional soccer,” Coryell known as it.
Lower than a decade earlier, Miami capped its good 1972 season with a Tremendous Bowl win wherein Bob Griese tried 11 passes all day. Fouts threw it a playoff-record 53 instances versus the Dolphins. Winslow caught 16 for 166 yards, two extra data, and was so battered and exhausted afterward he needed to be carried off the sphere.
“Best sport I ever performed in,” Fouts says.
The Chargers’ stirring run sputtered every week later in a 27-7 loss to the Bengals within the AFC Championship sport. The wind chill in Cincinnati reached 59 levels beneath zero; “The Freezer Bowl” they known as it. However Chargers proprietor Gene Klein got here to suspect one thing else was chargeable for his staff’s dreadful efficiency.
Cocaine use was a league-wide problem the NFL desperately needed to maintain quiet, and nobody fought extra fervently to vary the league’s lax testing coverage than Klein, who pushed for reforms for greater than a decade.
Klein claimed {that a} federal investigator later instructed him one among his gamers bought a kilogram of cocaine whereas the staff was in Miami through the 1981 playoffs, then smuggled it again to San Diego on the staff’s constitution flight. Towards the Bengals, “that staff was in a stupor,” Klein instructed Sports activities Illustrated. The proprietor later mentioned his staff’s drug use was the largest cause why he bought the membership to Alex Spanos in 1984. “What do I want lawsuits for, brokers, drug issues?” he mentioned. “Cellphone calls in the midst of the evening telling me that one among my gamers is hanging round in drug-dealing bars?”
The stress, he mentioned, had induced him two seizures.
Contained in the Chargers’ locker room, it was an open secret that some gamers used. And those who didn’t? They didn’t ask questions. “Every man was completely different in how they received prepared for the sport,” is all Fouts will say now.
“When it comes to cocaine, I didn’t do it and I don’t know if anyone did or didn’t,” says Bauer, who joined Coryell’s employees as a particular groups coach after retiring in 1982. “I can neither affirm nor deny that Chuck Muncie ever used any of my clear urine.”
On expertise alone, Muncie might have ended up with Fouts, Winslow and Joiner within the Professional Soccer Corridor of Fame. The 6-3, 227-pound athletic specimen grew to become the deadly counterpunch to defenses that may sit again in protection, weary of getting beat excessive. His 19 dashing touchdowns in 1981 set a league document.
“I truthfully don’t know if I’ve ever been round a greater pure athlete,” says Saunders, who coached within the NFL for 34 years. “He might’ve been an All-Professional tight finish. Might’ve been an All-Professional receiver. He was an All-Professional operating again.”
However as Muncie’s profession took off, his drug use spiraled. He later instructed teammates he was utilizing cocaine earlier than video games through the 1981 season — generally even at halftime. He began lacking practices, then flights to away video games. Lastly, the staff ran out of choices, buying and selling him to the Dolphins in 1984. Muncie flunked a drug check, nullifying the deal. He was out of soccer a yr later.
By 1989 he was in jail, convicted of trying to promote two ounces of high-grade cocaine, then mendacity to investigators about it. His legal professional would argue for a extra lenient sentence, contending that Muncie’s “setting” as a professional soccer participant was not less than partially chargeable for his drug use. Muncie served his time and turned his life round, mentoring younger athletes after his launch.
He additionally might have crafted one of many NFL’s best city legends.
Muncie might have been an all-time nice, however as his profession took off, his drug use spiraled. (Richard Mackson / Getty Photographs)
Amid an investigation into alleged misconduct by the San Diego Police Division, Muncie testified that Fouts was shot in the best arm throughout a dispute at an space condominium in the midst of the 1983 season. In line with Sports activities Illustrated, Muncie added that two off-duty law enforcement officials who labored part-time for the Chargers helped cowl up the incident to guard the staff and its star quarterback. The 2 cops denied a taking pictures ever occurred; each would later take full-time jobs with the membership.
A years-long investigation finally discovered no proof to corroborate Muncie’s account. However in a 1990 interview with Sports activities Illustrated whereas in jail he held agency. “I completely heard the taking pictures,” mentioned Muncie, who died in 2013. He’d waver within the years that adopted, denying his account, then re-confirming it, then denying it once more. However a San Diego district legal professional later instructed a choose that, in her opinion, Muncie’s testimony “had been truthful.”
Fouts has been adamant for years: it by no means occurred. “That was a Muncie,” he says now, shrugging it off. “I don’t know the place he received that.”
However he has an concept. Fouts injured his shoulder in a loss to the Patriots that season however completed the sport. He remembers mentioning one thing within the coaching room. “I mentioned one thing like, ‘I took a bullet for the staff as we speak,’” Fouts says. The QB would miss 4 straight with the shoulder harm, returning for 3 begins on the finish of the season, nonetheless enjoying effectively sufficient to earn his fifth Professional Bowl nod.
Though the investigation cleared the police division, the story lingered for years. “I did hear it,” Winslow later mentioned. “(However) Fouts was just like the CIA. You don’t query them. Or extra like, Fouts was J. Edgar Fouts.”
Requested in regards to the rumored taking pictures and subsequent cover-up all these years later, Bauer affords a realizing snigger, pauses for a couple of seconds, then lastly responds.
“I’ll plead the fifth on that one.”
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Fouts is usually requested what sort of numbers he would possibly put up in as we speak’s sport, with guidelines applied to safeguard quarterbacks and restrict downfield defensive contact. He was throwing for 4,000 yards when nobody else was. Final season, 9 quarterbacks did so.
“I’ll let you know this,” Fouts says. “If I performed as we speak, I wouldn’t have any payments to pay. And I may need a yacht, too.”
His three-decade broadcasting run ended quietly in 2020 when CBS didn’t renew his contract. His legacy rests with the staff he lifted and the offense that modified the game. The Air Coryell Chargers’ influence has been felt for many years, even when they continue to be ignored, and at instances, underappreciated.
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A brilliant younger junior faculty coach used to swing by their practices within the early Eighties; Coryell would at all times open up the gate so he might watch. 20 years later, Mike Martz would name performs for the “Best Present on Turf” St. Louis Rams. Bauer would sit at dwelling and shout out the play calls from his sofa. “Identical performs, similar shifts, similar verbiage as us,” he says.
Within the decade that adopted, Peyton Manning would win 4 of his 5 MVP awards enjoying in an offshoot of Coryell’s system.
Saunders, now retired, sat in shocked amazement earlier this fall as he watched the Dolphins dangle 70 on the Broncos. “Wow, that appears like us in San Diego,” he instructed his spouse. “Besides their coach type of appears to be like like a librarian.”
Coryell died in 2010. It took him seven tries to get within the Corridor of Fame — one thing that infuriated his former gamers and assistants — earlier than lastly being inducted final August.
“Him getting in,” Fouts says, “retains the San Diego Chargers’ legacy alive.”
Fouts isn’t chasing recognition. His quiet life within the backcountry matches him simply superb. He is aware of what his previous coach meant to the game, what Coryell meant to him and his teammates. Each on occasion, he’ll get stopped in an airport or a stadium by a stranger desirous to confess to him how a lot these groups sparked their love for professional soccer.
“They’ll inform me, ‘I can’t let you know how a lot I cherished watching you guys play,’” Fouts says. “And to me, that’s our legacy.”
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; pictures: Stephen Dunn, Deal with Sport/ Getty Photographs)
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