Win or Else : The Time Is Right Now for Coryell to Reverse the Chargers’ Decline

SAN DIEGO —  Alex Spanos had leaned back so far in his big blue office recliner, his face was almost parallel with the top of his desk. His nose served as a landmark, reassuring a visitor he was not about to vanish.

The Charger owner was in a momentary state of suspended animation as he pondered a question. This is an unusual posture for Spanos, who has a knack for quickly squeezing the ambiguity out of tangled matters. A Hamlet he is not.

After a pause of less than half a minute, Spanos addressed the matter of Coach Don Coryell’s job security. The reigning impression is that Spanos, a taskmaster of the first degree, will dismiss Coryell if the Chargers suffer through a third straight losing season.

“I would like a .500 record or better,” Spanos said, straightening in his chair. “I’m not asking for miracles, like making the playoffs, but I am wishing and hoping.

“I have been trying to give Don Coryell the talent he needs, and I think I have succeeded in giving him the ammunition to make it work. I’ve never seen him happier. Now let’s see what he can do. I think he’ll give me a winning season.”

A presidential speech writer could hardly have concocted a more judiciously worded statement, laden with layers of meaning. Spanos, who usually likes everything reduced to black and white, had carefully positioned himself behind his coach, while leaving the way clear for action if the “ammunition” he’s provided doesn’t prove to be enough.

Ron Nay, the Chargers’ chief scout and Spanos’ top adviser, provided a measure of elaboration. Again, the message was support for Coryell, with the qualifier that a winning record would be nice.

“Any coach in the National Football League is expected to win, whether we’re talking about Don Shula, Tom Landry or Don Coryell,” Nay said. “There’s pressure on every coach. We all know that.

“Don needs a winning season this year. No coach gets a chance to lose every year and stay around. There’s nothing unusual about the situation. Don knows he’s paid to win and expected to win, but there’s no ultimatum from us.”

Coryell hardly needs to have the situation diagrammed on a blackboard. He can count all the losing seasons of his career on the fingers of one hand between the thumb and little finger. Two of the three losing seasons he has endured have come in the last two years.

“I know he (Alex Spanos) expects a winning season and, hell, so do I,” Coryell said. “But I’m not going to worry about things I can’t control. I’ll just do the things I’ve done my whole life, and if that isn’t good enough, so be it.”

Coryell extended a thank you to his owner for footing the bill to bring more than 100 players to training camp, allowing for better practices and more competition for jobs.

“It was a big, big help,” Coryell said. “Other teams have been doing it that way for years, and we’re just starting to catch up. It will be hard to catch up in one year, but not impossible. I know we’re going to have to be vastly improved to keep pace (with other teams in the AFC West.)”

Spanos alluded to the happiness radiating from Coryell these days. It’s true, the coach does seem slightly more at ease than in recent seasons. When asked about this, Coryell laughed and said, “I thought I was always friendly.”

Rolf Benirschke, who has studied Coryell through the good times and the bad, said the coach hasn’t lost his ability to laugh at himself.

“He used to bust up the team by telling us we were a bunch of killer ducks, and he still has the disarming quality of saying something unintentionally funny,” Benirschke said. “He’s good at easing the tension without trying to do so.”

Coryell long has been labeled a one-dimensional man obsessed with football.

There is, of course, much truth to that, but he has shown the capacity for change by focusing attention on the team’s defensive needs. It may be late in the game, but it’s never too late to sign up some guys who can run as swiftly as the backs and receivers they’re supposed to cover or tackle.

“Every year, in my own mind, I’ve done the best I could under the circumstances,” Coryell said. “My coaches and I put a lot of pressure on ourselves, and as long as we’re doing our best, I’m at peace with myself.

“Heck, I want to win more than anybody. I push myself every year, and I’ve been the same since my first year in coaching.”

Defensive coordinator Tom Bass, who has known and worked with Coryell for 20 years, said he doesn’t see any radical changes in the man related to job pressure.

“We work the same hours we always have--long,” Bass said. “You should realize that we as coaches have our own expectations as far as winning goes.

“I don’t think anybody here feels any extra pressure. But I will tell you I have worked with coaches elsewhere who didn’t seem as concerned with winning as they should have been. I mean they weren’t willing to work the hours it takes.”

Neither Spanos nor Bass is giving the Charger staff a chance to plead lack of talent this time.

“At least we have the athletes now,” Bass said, seconding his owner. “Real pressure is trying to win when you don’t have them.”

The rebuilding of the roster to incorporate such players as Jim Lachey, Tim Spencer, Trumaine Johnson, Wayne Davis and Jeff Dale has not come without a price to the remaining veterans. There has been nearly a 50% turnover from last year.

“I miss the camaraderie I had with guys like Ed Luther and Drew Gissinger, to name just a couple,” tight end Eric Sievers said. “We were pals, but now my clique is gone. Those guys provided a form of escape, a way to vent frustrations, even if we were just sitting around shooting the bull or playing dominoes.

“It’s a different atmosphere now. There has been more time devoted to teaching young players, and there have been some new rules, with no one exempt.”

Benirschke noted the tougher discipline in training camp.

“To those of us who were here during the good times, it’s more apparent,” he said. “When you win, the rules are not as tight. When you lose, the first thing that changes is the regimen.

“When we were winning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we would practice in shorts and helmets from the fourth game on. Now we’re in pads all year, and we practice longer.”

The point here is that, while Coryell hasn’t changed much outwardly, he has made alterations in the way he approaches the job. The boss isn’t going to have much tolerance for a coach if the players are perceived as going through the motions at practice.

If Coryell has grown tougher, so has the job. The Chargers happen to be in the toughest division in pro football, and even Spanos must concede there are limits to the miracles that can arise in one year.

One of the themes Coryell has sounded through the summer relates to the rebuilding process.

“Al Davis says it takes four or five years, but we are going to try to do it a lot faster,” Coryell has said.

It doesn’t take a historian to find that Coryell is quite good at hastily rebuilding teams. He has been doing it all his life, starting at Wenatchee, Wash., Junior College in 1955. He took a team that was winless the previous year and went undefeated.

“All the places I’ve been were at or near rock bottom, and we rebuilt them in the first year or two,” Coryell said. “At Wenatchee I only had one assistant coach and he never had even played football. But we went to the Potato Bowl that first year.”

Coryell later made substantial improvements in the teams he found at Whittier College and at San Diego State. He won more than 100 games before moving to the NFL, where he became the first coach to win 100 in both college and the pros.

“That proves one thing--I’m old,” Coryell said, laughing.

Old and durable, he should have said. But not too old for what may be his last and most challenging task.