The Washington Commanders limped into Sunday’s bye on the heels of a 45-15 loss to the Miami Dolphins. The ugly defeat dropped Washington to 4-9 and assured the firing of coach Ron Rivera and his staff once the season ends. The Dolphins, meanwhile, improved to 9-3 and maintained their firm hold on first place in the AFC East. By the fourth quarter, many of the Washington faithful had departed FedExField, which consequently looked like a sea of aqua-blue Dolphins supporters. It was an ugly sight if you’re a long-suffering Washington fan, one similar to what we’ve seen in recent years with fans of our NFC East foes commandeering the stadium. I’m sure Washington’s new ownership group cringed when witnessing the color change.
While at the game, I thought about an angle that would reflect on my newly published biography on Hall of Fame coach George Allen, George Allen: A Football Life. Sure enough, one of his top three coaching rivals in his 12-year NFL coaching career was Dolphins legend Don Shula. Green Bay’s Vince Lombardi and the Cowboys’ Tom Landry marked the other two.
Actually, the fiercest stretch of the Allen-Shula rivalry was in the 1960s when Allen coached the Los Angeles Rams and Shula the Baltimore Colts. The two teams collided eight times between 1966, Allen’s first season in L.A., and 1969, Shula’s last season in Baltimore. They met only twice after that, with Shula coaching the Dolphins and Allen the Redskins. In all, Shula topped Allen 5-4-1 record in head-to-head competition. Today, Shula holds the most wins for an NFL coach with 325.
In 1966, the two teams played in different divisions. But a league-wide realignment starting in 1967 placed both in the Coastal Division, along with the San Francisco 49ers and Atlanta Falcons.
Statistically, the Rams and Colts were dead even that year. The both finished 11-1-2, with the Rams scoring 398 points and allowing 196, and the Colts scoring 394 and allowing 198. For George Allen, the 1967 Rams were the best team he coached in his career, even better than his 1972 Redskins team that finished 11-3 and advanced to Super Bowl VII.
The first `67 game, played in Baltimore, ended in a 24-24 tie. The second game carried major playoff implications. The Rams were coming off an emotional 27-24 win over the Packers that was decided when a late-game blocked punt set up the Rams’ winning touchdown. In the season-finale, the 10-1-2 Rams hosted the 11-0-2 Colts at the Los Angeles Coliseum.
The Colts boasted a dangerous offense led by quarterback Johnny Unitas, the NFL’s most valuable player, tight end John Mackey and flanker Willie Richardson—all consensus first-team All-Pros. Baltimore’s defense was on par with the Rams’ defense as the best in the NFL. The Colts’ secondary, in particular, was considered superb. Because the first Rams-Colts clash ended in a tie, the winner would go to the playoffs based on the rule that the team scoring the most points in the game gets the nod. With the stakes so high, the Associated Press called the game a “little Super Bowl” that had “captured the imagination of pro football fans.” Arthur Daley of The New York Times also hyped the rematch: “It promises to be a spectacle of such irresistible appeal that it may elicit the highest television ratings of all football offerings to date. The fantastic comeback of the Rams against the Packers was such powerful drama that it acted as a build-up for another expected thriller.”
The Rams, led by their Fearsome Foursome defensive front four, dominated the Colts before a sellout crowd of 77,277 at the coliseum. In a 34-10 Rams win, Unitas spent much of the game on the seat of his pants and rushing his throws. Facing unrelenting pressure, he was sacked seven times and threw two interceptions, after taking eighteen sacks in the previous thirteen games. Rams quarterback Roman Gabriel, writing the script of the best season of his then seven-year career, followed a 20-of-36, 227-yard, three-touchdown performance against the Packers with his greatest game as the Rams’ quarterback to date: 18-of-22, 257 yards, three touchdown passes. The Rams’ eighth straight win tied a team record set in 1952.
That the 11-1-2 Colts missed the playoffs would be an unthinkable today, with seven teams from each conference qualifying for postseason play and teams with losing records winning divisions. In the first round of the playoffs, the Packers beat the Rams at Milwaukee County Stadium, 28-7.
Shula and Allen met 4 more times with both teams in the Coastal Division.
“It was like a war against the Rams,” Bill Curry, a Colts center at the time, told me. “It was an incredibly fierce rivalry. It was that Coastal Division thing. We played them home and home. You knew you were going to be sore for a week after those games. But it was fun to play a great team like that.”
All along, Shula was wary of his divisional foe. “George was a great coach, very thorough, very well prepared,” he said in a 2001 interview. “Just a very meticulous guy. He burned the midnight oil.”
Allen and Shula resumed their battles when Allen became the Redskins’ head coach in 1971. In the 1972 preseason, the Redskins beat the Dolphins at RFK Stadium, 27-24. It was Miami’s last loss in the 1972 season. That year, the Dolphins and Redskins squared off in Super Bowl VII in Allen’s former stomping ground, the Los Angeles Coliseum.
Shula was under pressure to shed the nagging image that he couldn’t win the big one. His Colts lost in the NFL championship game to Cleveland in 1964 and suffered an embarrassing defeat to Joe Namath’s New York Jets in Super Bowl III. The Cowboys blew out his Dolphins the previous year in Super Bowl VI.
But it was Allen, not Shula, who looked and sounded uptight during Super Bowl week. Always a nervous wreck in the days before games, he took his skittishness to a pre-Super Bowl extreme. He came across as ornery, petulant and impatient in the presence of reporters, voicing disgust that print and broadcast media, about 1,400 of whom descended on Los Angeles for the game, demanded so much of his and his players’ time.
On the field, the Redskins reflected Allen’s nervousness and looked flat most of the game. Miami’s 14-7 win solidified the Dolphins’ unblemished 17-0-0 mark, which stands today as the last time an NFL team has posted an undefeated, untied season.
In the final Allen-Shula clash, the Redskins beat the Dolphins in a thrilling 1974 game at RFK Stadium. Quarterback Sonny Jurgensen’s touchdown pass to running back Larry Smith with time expiring gave the Redskins a 20-17 win.
