Visionary

It’s Feb. 2, 2020, and the Kansas City Chiefs have their backs against the wall. It’s halfway through the fourth quarter of Super Bowl 54, and they’re losing to underdog San Francisco 49ers 21–10. 

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The Chiefs made it this far because of their high-powered offense. Today, that offense is failing them. But with just over six minutes left in the fourth quarter, things start to click.

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Patrick Mahomes stomps his foot once and calls hike. Star tight end Travis Kelce takes off from his spot in the slot as soon as the ball is snapped, running a classic seam route. The uber-athletic Kelce beats a much smaller defensive back to the end zone. By the time he turns around, the ball has already left Mahomes’s golden arm. The flailing defensive back tackles Kelce before he can grab it. Easy pass interference. Ball to the one. First down.

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Seven plays later, the Chiefs are ahead. San Francisco stalls out on its next drive, and Mahomes and the Chiefs score again. This time, it only takes two plays. Whoever said “defense wins championships” never watched the Chiefs on offense — three touchdowns in under five game minutes to win the Super Bowl.

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So much of that game can be traced to one former Oxford, Ohio, resident: Sid Gillman. The seam route that Kelce ran to get the Chiefs rolling? Many say Gillman invented it. Gillman loved his tight ends, and at a time when they basically only blocked, Gillman thought a good one was the secret to an explosive offense. The famous “West Coast” scheme that Chiefs head coach Andy Reid runs? The guy who invented it idolized Gillman and built the strategy based on the concepts Gillman came up with.

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Gillman spent his life innovating the offensive side of football. His influence over the sport can be seen across the modern football landscape. High-powered spread offenses and film reviews are just some of the concepts he created, or at least made popular. Gillman is the only coach ever to be inducted into both the Professional and College Football Halls of Fame, despite never winning a Super Bowl or National Championship.

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Many call Gillman “the father of the modern passing game.” He started his career at Miami University, where he built great teams and destroyed bridges.

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If you’ve been to Yager Stadium since 2010, you’ve seen the group of statues that dominate the south side of the concourse. You won’t find Gillman among them. Even on the day those statues were unveiled, Gillman was being bad-mouthed in Oxford.

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Gillman was born Oct. 26, 1911, in Minneapolis to Sarah, an illiterate New Yorker, and David, an Austrian immigrant and police detective turned movie theater owner. From birth, he was infatuated with sports. As a kid, he wanted to be a baseball star. He cared about nothing else.

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That wasn’t good enough for Sarah, who wanted a Sid of all trades. When Gillman was seven, she started him on classical piano lessons, and for the next 10 years he practiced an hour a day. He became good enough to make decent money playing gigs through high school and college.

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The piano and an appreciation for music stuck with Gillman for the rest of his life. Still, he was all sports. He once set all the clocks in his house forward to get away from the piano and to the football field earlier than he was supposed to. 

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That dedication to sports helped Gillman make a name for himself in Minneapolis. He was an all-city football and basketball player whom the newspapers touted often. Gillman’s football prowess earned him a spot on the Ohio State University football team, where he was named a team captain and won All-Big Ten honors in 1933.

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Once he became a coach, Gillman was one of the first people to take advantage of game film when creating his game plan. It all started because Gillman’s cousin Don Guttman, who worked at one of the theaters Gillman’s father owned, ordered his projectionists to cut out all the football clips from the newsreels and save them in tin cans.

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Gillman came home from Ohio State for the summer and was delighted. Guttman said it was nearly impossible to get his attention because he would always be running the plays back and forth. Gillman spent much of the summer going through film and making notes on index cards. 

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In 1934, after graduating from Ohio State with a bachelor’s in English, Gillman joined the Michigan State University coaching staff. He would jump around the Midwest for the next 10 years, finally becoming head coach of the Miami University football team in 1944.

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All week long, Gillman’s Miami team would work on offense, inserting innovative new plays and drilling them until they were second nature. Finally, late on Thursday (or sometimes Friday, depending on whom you ask) before a Saturday game, Gillman and his team would focus on the defensive half of the game — for a few minutes at least. 

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Don’t mistake Gillman’s disdain for defense as laziness or a lack of will to win. Gillman and his teams slept, ate and breathed football. He often prioritized winning over anything else. When Gillman could, he would skirt the rulebook or ignore it altogether. 

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At Miami, his teams practiced throughout the year, which was against the NCAA’s rules. As the story goes, if a player on his Miami team made a particularly good tackle in practice, Gillman would send him to a steak restaurant Uptown for a free meal. 

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During his years at Miami, Gillman’s teams went 8–1 in 1944, 7–2 in 1945, 7–3 in 1946, and finally, 9–0–1 in the 1947 season, which was punctuated by a 38–7 win over the University of Cincinnati in the Battle for the Victory Bell and a 13–12 Sun Bowl victory over Texas Tech.

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Another of Gillman’s qualities that shines through history is his keen eye for talent.

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Gillman recruited Paul Dietzel, who had just come off of service in World War II, to his Miami team for the 1946 season. Dietzel wound up winning a national championship as head coach of Louisiana State University in 1958.

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In 1942, Dietzel enrolled at Duke University after receiving a football scholarship. His girlfriend, Anne, was headed to Miami for a spot on the cheerleading squad. Soon after enrolling at Duke, Deitzel received notice that he had been drafted and enlisted in the Army Air Corps.

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While fighting in the war, he received consistent postcards from Oxford. From Anne, but also from Gillman, who had somehow figured out that his sweetheart went to Miami. Gillman figured he could convince Dietzel to join his girlfriend in Oxford, and he was right. Paul and Anne Dietzel were in attendance the day those statues were erected; Paul’s is among them. 

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One of Gillman’s key offensive strategies, his passing attack, was so effective partly because it was one of the first to use the whole field, vertically and horizontally. Gillman would line up his tight ends away from the offensive line and send them on routes downfield at a time when the tight end was almost exclusively a blocking position. He spread his linemen out to give his backs wider holes to plunge through.

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“The field is 100 yards long and 53 yards wide,” Gillman once famously said. “We’re going to use every damn inch of it and force the other guy to defend all of it.”

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Gillman believed you could control the passing game with a good tight end. He would line his tight ends up around the hash area, which forced defenses to cover the inside of the field and opened up space for the other receivers. He was one of the pioneers of the seam route, where a tight end lines up in the slot (between the outside receiver and offensive line) and runs straight up the field, occupying at least one safety and giving at least one receiver single coverage on the outside.

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After the 1947 season at Miami, Gillman took an assistant job at the United States Military Academy in 1948. When Gillman was an assistant coach at the academy, he built a relationship with a young Fordham University assistant. When Gillman left the next year to take the head coaching job at Cincinnati, he recommended that Army coach Earl Blaik replace him with that friend, the then 35-year-old Vince Lombardi. In 1958, at a meeting before the NFL draft, an old friend pulled Gillman aside and asked for a recommendation for the next head coach of the Green Bay Packers. Gillman once again singled out the man whom the Super Bowl trophy is now named after. The rest is history.

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Gillman took the assistant job at the academy, expecting that Blaik was close to retirement. Really, Blaik was 10 years away. So after a year at West Point Gillman returned to the Midwest, this time as head football coach at the University of Cincinnati.

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When Gillman left Miami for a more glamorous job at Army, he angered much of the Miami faithful. But it was when he reappeared a year later, 30 miles southwest at Miami’s biggest rival, that the real grudging began. 

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It didn’t help that Gillman poached a good part of the Miami program to Cincinnati. Head coach George Blackburn jumped ship for an assistant job under Gillman, and many of Miami’s star players went with him. 

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In 1948, the year before the Gillman to Cincinnati saga, Miami beat Cincinnati 43–19 at Nippert Stadium in Cincinnati. In 1949, Miami lost 27–5.

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Gillman would skirt the rule book at Miami, but with Cincinnati he was even more brazen. He’d call each player into his office every week to review his film from the previous game. Make a jarring tackle? You might get $5. If you knocked the guy down, but your technique wasn’t perfect, you probably only got $2.50.

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Thurman Owens, whom Gillman once called “pound for pound the best defensive lineman in UC history” would sometimes leave Gillman’s office with $50 in hand.

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In his first year at Cincinnati, Gillman’s Bearcats were set to open the season against the University of Nevada. Gillman sent a young assistant, Jack Faulkner, to Reno. There, Faulkner disguised himself as a student and tried out for the football team. And he made it. He practiced with the squad, and after every practice he would send Gillman notes. When it came time to register for classes, Faulkner vanished and high-tailed it back to Ohio.

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Gillman saw more success at Cincinnati, going 50–13–1 over six seasons with the Bearcats. After one of those six seasons, Mel Olix, who played quarterback for Gillman, got invited to a college all-star game. At one point during the festivities, Olix was cornered by a pair of college football legends: Hall of Famer Rip Engle, who had just hired Joe Paterno to his staff at Pennsylvania State University, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign coach Ray Eliot, who would win the school’s only national title the next year in 1951.

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They wanted to copy Gillman’s offense. They asked Olix to relay it.

“That was the only reason I was invited,” Olix later said. “That’s all they wanted from me.”

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In 1954, Gillman left for the NFL and became the head coach of the Los Angeles Rams, the beginning of nearly 20-years as an NFL head coach. Gillman continued to obsessively study film when he got to the NFL, trying to replicate his success in the college ranks. For him, it wasn’t work. 

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One time in the ’60s, when Gillman was the head coach of the NFL’s San Diego Chargers, he was watching film with a colleague, Bum Phillips. After hours in front of the screen, Phillips was falling asleep. 

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“Hey, Bum!” Gillman barked. “This is better than making love!”

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Phillips jolted awake and glared at Gillman.

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“Sid, either I don’t know how to watch film, or you don’t know how to make love,” he replied.

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Even when Gillman was in his late 70s and out of football for good, he would still obsessively study film. The retired Gillman’s study housed over 500 cans of film, with gray cans for passing plays and blue for runs (he didn’t need a color for defense). Gillman would spend hours splicing raw footage together to make highlight reels. As he got into his later years, Gillman would wonder why he was still spending so much time studying film.

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“What else would I be doing?” he’d answer himself. “It’s my life: what keeps me going.”

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Gillman was so infatuated with football’s progress that, unlike many other older, successful people, he didn’t miss how things were in his day. 

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“Everyone’s interested in the past, the good old days, the Golden Age," Gillman once said. “God almighty, football is so much better now, the technique, the players. The games are great now. I’m part of the good old days, and they weren’t worth a damn.”

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One way people measure a football coach’s influence is by examining his coaching tree. The coaching tree is like a family tree, except instead of kids, you have assistants who become head coaches. There have been 56 Super Bowls played in the history of the NFL. Twenty-eight of them were won by a head coach directly descended from Gillman.

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In today’s NFL, Andy Reid of the Kansas City Chiefs, Miami grad John Harbaugh of the Baltimore Ravens, Sean McDermott of the Buffalo Bills, Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers and Mike McCarthy of the Dallas Cowboys are some of the head coaches who can trace their lineage directly back to Gillman.

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Gillman’s fingerprints are still all over football, even 40 years after his retirement from coaching and 20 years after his death in 2003. His spread offense is now status quo. His tight end infatuation has spread throughout the game. Many of the NFL’s most successful championship teams relied heavily on a star tight end: Kelce, Rob Gronkowski of the New England Patriots dynasty, and Shannon Sharpe of the Baltimore Ravens and Denver Broncos to name a few. They all made their millions lining up in the slot and running Gillman’s streak route. 

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Despite all his achievements, Gillman wasn’t inducted into the Miami University Athletics Hall of Fame until 1991, after being inducted into both the College and Professional Football Halls of Fame. 

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Of the 11 statues south of Yager, four are of men Gillman recruited to Miami during his four seasons as head coach. According to the Miami University Athletic Department, Gillman is not honored because he didn’t graduate from Miami.

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At the 2010 ceremony where those statues were revealed, Lucy Ewbank, the then-104-year-old widow of Miami coaching great Weeb Ewbank, said this about Gillman: “You can have him. [Gillman] owed everybody in Oxford when he left.”

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Miami football bounced back from Gillman’s departure and program pilfering, as did some people’s attitudes (Although some, like Lucy Ewbank, would take their resentment to the grave.) 

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In 1977, former players from Miami’s 1947 Sun Bowl winning team wrote a stack of letters to Miami urging administrators to let Gillman in the Hall. Then-Miami Vice President of Development and Alumni Affairs John Dolibois penned a quick note to Athletic Director Dick Shrider that read: “I was literally besieged at the Sun Bowl party about Sid Gillman. I now agree … his time has come.”

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The time hadn’t actually come yet for one of the greatest minds in football history, one of the most influential people ever to call Miami home. In 1991, 14 years later, he was inducted into the Miami Athletics Hall of Fame. But he still doesn’t have a statue.

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A note on sources: Main sources for this story were the book Sid Gillman: Father of the Modern Passing Game, a 2018 book by Josh Katzowitz, The Genius of Desperation: The Schematic Innovations That Made the Modern NFL, a 2018 book by Doug Farrar, and The Games that Changed the Game: The Evolution of the NFL in Seven Sundays, a 2011 book by Ron Jaworski, Greg Cosell and David Plaut. I also consulted a feature that Paul Zimmerman wrote on Gillman for Sports Illustrated in 1991, and a 1987 Los Angeles Times article by Bob Oates, called “Miami of Ohio: A coaching factory: this university is renowned, not because of its Testaverdes and Kosars, but because of its Parseghians and Schembechlers.”