November 17, 1968

Normally offseason league meetings are a dry affair, mostly occupying themselves with picayune rule changes, but in 1966 the annual meeting started with a great deal of personal bitterness. George Halas had lost his defensive coordinator and planned successor, George Allen, to the Los Angeles Rams. Halas sued for breach of contract and during discovery, Halas learned that Rams owner Dan Reeves had not whisked Allen away, but that Allen had reached out to him and other owners, impatient for his own chance at sitting in the big chair. Having won the suit, Halas immediately released Allen from his contract and allowed the hiring to go forward, having made his point, but that didn’t mean he let go of his bad feelings. Before the league could get down to its important business, Halas spoke on his ex-protégé: “George Allen is a liar! George Allen is a cheat! George Allen is full of chicanery!” Vince Lombardi was there, representing the Packers, and sensing that Halas’ anger did not stem from a deep passion for contract law, turned to Reeves and said, “Dan, it sounds like you’ve just got yourself a helluva head coach!”

George Allen was a hell of a head coach. He was also a man who could be accurately described as obsessed with football, the closest thing football ever had to a monk. It wasn’t just that he had a one-track mind for the game, it’s that he seemed to genuinely struggle with any other interface in life. He proposed to his wife with a telegram asking her to become his teammate. Allen demanded the same level of devotion from his players; his scheme had almost 300 different alignments with a hundred more sight adjustments and audibles they were expected to know. This complexity also meant that Allen had no time for rookies, which put him at odds with his new boss, Dan Reeves, who founded the Scouting Combine and started college scouting onto the path of becoming a cottage industry. A month into his tenure, Allen asked if he could also be the general manager. A puzzled and stunned Reeves asked, “George, you’re asking for my job.”

Under Allen, the Rams immediately emerged from the doldrums they had been in, going 8-6 Allen’s first year and 11-1-2 his second, losing in the playoffs to the eventual champion Packers. Allen did many things to turn the philosophical divide between him and Reeves into a personal divide. He moved the coaches’ offices outside of the Rams facilities to be closer to the practice fields, ignored phone calls from Reeves, and made up stories with Reeves as the villain designed to motivate players. Reeves considered himself a cultured man with many interests besides sports, and for Allen anything that didn’t happen on a football field might as well have been on the moon. The results on the field meant that Reeves was stuck with Allen, for better or worse.

The Rams had excellence on both sides of the ball. The offense was led by the tall and cannon-armed Roman Gabriel, called the West Coast’s answer to Joe Namath for his matinee idol looks, but the engine of the Rams was in their defensive line, known to the world as the Fearsome Foursome. This unit of Deacon Jones, Merlin Olsen, Rosey Grier, and Lamar Lundy, changed the game forever. Jones by himself merits a whole page. Deacon Jones was named to the NFL 75th Anniversary team and to the NFL100, and is still considered the greatest defensive end of all time. If nothing else, he should have the linguists on his side; he invented the term “sack” for tackling the quarterback in the backfield, elaborating the term colorfully for an NFL Films piece: "Sacking a quarterback is like you devastate a city, or you cream a multitude of people. It's like you put all the offensive players into a bag, and I take a baseball bat and beat on the bag." Though sacks would not be an officially kept stat until 1982, unofficially researchers credit Deacon Jones with one hundred and seventy-three sacks, still good for third on the all-time list. Olsen, too, is a Hall of Famer, though he was much more reserved than his line mate. He did not consider himself a violent man, just a man with a violent job. Grier was forced to retire by an Achilles injury in 1967, but he might have had the most eventful 1968 of them all. He volunteered for Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign, and was the man who wrestled the gun away from Sirhan Sirhan the night RFK was shot.

Grier was gone and Lamar Lundy was lost for the season too, but the Rams still got off to a hot start in the most crowded division in the NFL. The Rams had kept Baltimore out of the playoffs in 1967, despite Baltimore having lost only one game all year. In 1968 the margins for error would be narrow once again, and even after a 9-1 start the Rams found themselves tied with the Colts for the lead in the Coastal Division with a big game against San Francisco looming. At 4-5, the 49ers were already out of the race for the Coastal Division crown, but were still in position to play spoiler, as they had the week before when they lost to the Central Division leading Bears. Even in losing, the 49ers had ended the season of Gale Sayers and quarterback Virgil Carter, sending the Bears into a tailspin.

The 49ers weren’t afraid. They struck deep on the very first play from scrimmage, a sixty-four-yard pass from John Brodie to Kay McFarland that set up and eventual score. But Roman Gabriel answered right back, managing to burn the Sayers-slayer Kermit Alexander with a sideline route to Jack Snow to set up a quick responding touchdown. Brodie used his scrambling ability to keep out of the grasp of the Rams defense, getting sacked only once on the day, and also had some lucky bounces, like an open-field fumble from Brodie that went harmlessly out of bounds instead of into a Ram defender’s hand. The 49ers were shockingly up by ten with eight minutes left in the game. The Rams came roaring back, but they eventually had to settle for kicking the game-tying field goal with seventeen seconds left. Though better than a loss, the tie, which did not count in the standings, gave Baltimore sole control of first place.

Though they fought hard to avoid the loss, coming away with just a tie was enough to hobble the Rams and keep them out of the playoffs. Reeves tried to fire George Allen after the season, saying “I have had more fun losing with some other coaches than I did winning with George Allen.” His players disagreed, and the uproar from the Rams locker room meant Allen was back for at least two more seasons. These years were great, but also without a title, and Reeves was finally rid of Allen for good in 1970. The Fearsome Foursome never got the title that would accompany their already secure legacy, and Allen never got his title either. Some might call that a cruel twist of irony, but what if George Allen won the Super Bowl, and then the next morning, felt the same? Some people want to see the view from the peak of the mountain, but some people just want to keep climbing forever. Imagine the panic and dismay of such a man as George Allen reaching Mount Everest and still squinting at what’s left of the sky, alarmed at the lack of footholds.