Schmidt Told Ford, Lions Where They Could Stick Their Edsel

There they sat, the two Lions football greats – one still playing, the other out of pads but still on the sidelines every Sunday. And they spoke at a watering hole, tossing down beverages of their choice.

“I can’t take it anymore,” the retired player, by now the team’s coach, said to the player/drinking partner, in so many words. “They’re killing me. Sometimes I don’t know what they want from me.”

More drinking, and more words of frustration and anger were spewed by the coach. It was a moment from a long-ago era. Can you imagine Bill Parcells complaining about Jerry Jones to a player? And over a beer?

The player listened to the coach and thought for a moment.

“Well, then, why don’t you quit?,” he asked the coach, who was once his teammate on some of the greatest football defenses ever seen in Detroit.

The coach looked the player square in the eye.

“That’s the stupidest ---damn piece of advice I’ve ever gotten!,” the coach bellowed before taking another swig of beverage.

This was the scene, according to former Lions defensive tackle Alex Karras, as described in his book, Even Big Guys Cry. He was drinking some pops with coach Joe Schmidt, circa the late 1960’s. Schmidt was in the midst of his six-year run as head coach.

Little did anyone know that those six seasons would be looked at now, some 34 years after they ended, as the salad days of Lions football – post-championship years of the 1950’s.


Schmidt giving it to the Packers in his inimitable way


Schmidt was, in some folks’ eyes, the greatest Lion ever, as a player. The oft-credited inventor of the middle linebacker position. A Pittsburgh kid who fit in nicely in the shot-and-beer town of Detroit, where he played from 1953 to 1965. Where he won some championships, and knocked on the door of a few others. And he appears to be, as history grows kinder and kinder to him, one of the franchise’s greatest coaches ever, too.

The latter honor is bestowed accidentally, but there are always the numbers.

Schmidt coached the Lions from 1967 to 1972, supplanting Harry Gilmer, whose feeble two-year run ended with fans in Tiger Stadium throwing snowballs at his cowboy hat-attired head as the team ran off the field following a season-ending loss.

In those six seasons, Schmidt’s record was 43-34-7, plus a playoff loss following the 1970 season. In his last four seasons, Schmidt went 34-19-3. If a Lions coach accumulated such a record nowadays, the mayor’s residence would await him. Maybe even the governor’s mansion.

He didn’t quit that time, as described above, sitting and sharing some drinks with Karras, his old teammate. Something caused Schmidt to stick it out. But in January, 1973, Joe Schmidt told the Lions to take their job and shove it. Right around this time of the month, in fact.

General managers of our teams have been one of two types, it seems. The wildly successful, walk-on-water guys whose every move sails through unquestioned by even the scalawags talking into cell phones in their cars to the sports talk radio stations. Or, they are the objects of disdain, disgust, and contempt. No in-between.

Russ Thomas was the latter type. Oldtimers like me can’t help but chuckle during this current era of disdain, disgust, and contempt with Lions president and de facto GM Matt Millen, for we never thought another Lions executive could turn a town off like Russ Thomas turned everyone off during his decades-long run as Lions GM. But we were wrong.

Thomas was cheap. He was stubborn. He didn’t get along with coaches. He was abhorred by players. And his teams rarely were anything more than a plodding, .500 ballclub. Yet he was in the good graces of owner Bill Ford Sr., and thus was able to retire and leave the team on his own accord, after the 1989 season.

Sound ghoulishly familiar, at least some of it?

Schmidt was stubborn, too, and a damn good football coach. The records during the seasons from 1969 to 1972 were, as follows: 9-4-1; 10-4; 7-6-1; and 8-5-1. So it’s reasonable to assume he had a firmly-planted cleat as Lions coach.

But Schmidt couldn’t abide Thomas, and it’s presumed that he was one of the “they” Schmidt was complaining about to Karras that night over drinks.

After the ’72 season, Schmidt believed the team needed A,B, and C. Thomas must have thought they needed D, E, and F, because the two were butting heads. Schmidt took his beefs to Ford, and basically issued an ultimatum, according to those who might have known: Me, or him (Thomas).

Ford opted for him.

Ziggy is the word, and Joe Schmidt is credited with coining it. It means a coach got fired. And it’s distinctly a Detroit word.

So the apparent loser of an internal power struggle, Schmidt committed a self-ziggy. He quit the Lions, shiny record and all, and got out of football entirely.

You know the rest, for the most part.

It is Schmidt, along with – gasp! – Wayne Fontes who rank #2 and #1, respectively, in career coaching wins accumulated after 1964, when Ford bought out the consortium of over 100 partners and became sole owner. But it is only Schmidt who is the possessor of a winning record, of anyone who wasn’t an interim coach, in that time.

Had Ford somehow been able to broker an arrangement back in 1973 that would have enabled Schmidt to remain as coach of the team, I believe he – Schmidt – would have been coach here well into the 1970’s, at least. And I think winning football would have been the order of the day.

Today the Lions have Rod Marinelli, and I still am among those who believe he can be the right guy, if provided with the proper talent. In Schmidt’s six seasons as Lions coach, the team won 43 games. In Millen’s six seasons as de facto GM, the team has won 24 games. But Millen is in no power struggle with his head coach. And even if he were, it would be wiped out by his close bond with Ford.

Just like Russ Thomas’ close bond with Ford, the strength of which led to the departure of the greatest Lions coach since the Kennedy administration.

We just didn’t know it at the time.