NFL Training Camp: The real grind has long passed
By Andy Pollin
The NFL Films footage is as iconic as the Franco Harris “Immaculate Reception” or Joe Montana’s Super Bowl winning touchdown pass to John Taylor. Wearing a white t-shirt and a maniacal gap-toothed smile, Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi is perched on the five-man sled, yelling at his linemen as they push him around the field at St. Norbert’s College. THAT was NFL training camp!
“Fatigue makes cowards of us all,” Lombardi once proclaimed. He was going to have the toughest team in the league by running his players through a camp so brutal, they cringe at the memory 50-years later. They remember late teammate Henry Jordan once telling a reporter about Lombardi, “He treats us all the same – like dogs.”
Vince Lombardi would have turned 101 last month. He ran his last training camp 45 years ago, the one season he coached the Washington Redskins before dying of cancer at the age of 57. If he were still alive today, he’d realize his way of preparing for a season is as outdated as the Packer power sweep. Gone are the dreaded two-a-days. Teams are limited to one practice a day with plenty of water breaks and few conditioning drills. Players are now expected to come to camp in shape.
That wasn’t the case back in Lombardi’s day. Pro football didn’t pay enough to work at it year round. Most had offseason jobs to supplement their incomes – even coaches. You know the famous Tom Landry hat? He got in the habit of wearing the fedora when he went to work in the offseason in the insurance business. Not only wasn’t there time for players to stay in condition throughout the year, it didn’t seem important. Baltimore Colts Hall of Famer Artie Donovan, legendary for his love of Schlitz beer, once told me the most strenuous thing he ever did in the offseason was a 12 ounce curl. Getting players in shape was part of the process. And the process seemed endless.
Until 1978, NFL teams played only 14 regular season games, but there were six (6!) exhibition games. And if they scheduled you in the Hall of Fame game, which started in 1962, you played seven preseason games. Seven meaningless games! That was half the length of the freakin’ regular season!
Let’s take a look at the 1976 Denver Broncos. They beat Detroit 10-7 in the Hall of Fame game on July 24th. The coaches figured they needed more than three weeks to get ready for the game, so they had their players report to camp three days after the 4th of July. The regular season didn’t open until September 12th that year, which meant the Broncos were either playing meaningless games or practicing (remember mostly two-a-days in those days) for NINE WEEKS before they finally started playing real games. And most of those nine weeks were spent at training camp sleeping in the dorms at Colorado State, in beds designed for freshman girls. After all that, who had the energy left to START a full season?
This week I chuckled as I looked at the Redskins training camp schedule, which is being held in a year-old state of the art practice facility, built just for them in Richmond, Virginia. No dorm living for these guys. What made me laugh is the number of actual practices that will take place before they break camp – 15. I mean, 15 total. There are some additional “walk-throughs” in the afternoon, but the minimal hitting that the new collective bargaining agreement allows for, will take place in those precious 15 practices. Fifteen practices were included in just over two weeks of a Lombardi camp – these Redskins are only going to be in camp less than three weeks. August 12th, it’s over.
In the movie, “Brian’s Song,” it was pointed out how groundbreaking it was to have the black Gayle Sayers room with the white Brian Piccolo in training camp. Nowadays, not only don’t the players have roommates, if they did the living arrangement would last barely long enough to change the sheets.
The turning point of this new world way of training camp may date as far back as 1978. George Allen had worn out his welcome after seven years in Washington and had returned as head coach of the Los Angeles Rams, the same team that had fired him after the 1970 season. By ’78, Carroll Rosenbloom had purchased the Rams and wanted Allen back in Los Angeles. The contract negotiations were interesting. Both men were represented by Ed Hookstratten. It was “The Hook”, who had negotiated a record $125 thousand contract, a driver and an unlimited expense for Allen in Washington. Now he was working for both employer and employee.
Anyway, the deal got done and Allen opened up camp with the brand-new shorter exhibition schedule. There now would be just four preseason games to compensate for adding two regular season games. Allen, always paranoid about getting outworked, kept his new team on the field for three hours at a time. The players didn’t like it and looked sluggish in the first two exhibition games. When linebacker Isiah Robertson walked out of camp in protest, Rosenbloom had seen enough. In what has to be the shortest coaching stint in NFL history, Allen was fired after only two preseason games.
While that may seem like a prescription for disaster, it wasn’t. Assistant coach Ray Malavasi took over and led the Rams to the NFC title game, and a year later to the Super Bowl. Allen resurfaced in the USFL a few years later – and later still coached at Long Beach State. However, he never again coached in the NFL. Allen died almost 25 years ago. Wherever he and Lombardi may be these days, they must be having a good laugh over what has become of the training camps they once cherished.