The AFL’s Best & Worst

I would take off Paul Brown as he never wanted to be in the AFL. I think either Lou Saban or Mike Holovak would have been better choices. JMO.

Really? Paul Brown as one of your top AFL coaches. Yes the man was a legend and one of the great coaches of all time, but he was the coach of a losing expansion team in the AFL. Yes he had the infant Bengals in the play offs in only their third year, but that was the NFL play offs. The Bengals were only in the AFL for two years and Brown only joined the AFL because he knew the leagues were about to merge. Yet you leave out the coaches of the two time champions Oilers and Bills. I also understand your love of the Chargers, but while you are extolling the genius of Sid Gillman, let’s try and remember one thing, his teams lost four out of five championship games. Any other coach would have that little detail prominantly featured.
Your list of best teams features multiple teams that were either runners up or didn’t even make the play offs. Championships count, the ten best teams in the AFL are the ten champions. It says so in the record books.

I think it is awesome that after all these years we can still get heated over a list about AFL coaches. I feel Lou Saban is very deserving of being on that list and feel that just because Paul Brown was a name before coming to the AFL and and had mediocre success is the only reason he is on the list.
I also feel like the Bills helmets and uniforms for the mid to late 60s are the second best uniform behind the Chargers.

“Mike gained a reputation for winning very few exhibition games. He was merely trying to save his players for the regular season.”

– interesting re: Holovak… in KC, Hank Stram did the opposite. He wanted to win ‘every’ game regular season as well exhibitions & the record shows Stram did win many more than he lost.

Of note, some of his former players felt Stram’s modus operandi hurt the team, at least somewhat.

One of them was the late MLB Sherrill Headrick. He was quoted as saying – “our legs would be shot before the regular season was over” due to Stram’s penchant for playing his veterans extensively throughout pre-season games.

Different strokes for different folks… I guess one can’t argue with Stram’s results, though his method might not have been universally popular.

I also think that Mike Holovak should be on the list of the best AFL coaches as well as original Oiler coach Lou Rymkus. Rymkus put together the Oiler squad that played in the league’s first three championship games. After winning the championship in ’60, he got cross-ways with owner Bud Adams about playing two exhibition games in Hawaii in ’61. He felt the 10-day stay in the islands was too much of a distraction for his squad and that they weren’t ready for the season opener because of it. After a 1 – 3 – 1 start in ’61, Adams fired Rymkus. With Wally Lemm at the helm, they ran the table and won the championship again in ’61. But all of the Oiler players agreed that due to the Hawaii trip, they weren’t ready for the season’s start.

Holovak always put together competitive teams on a shoestring. As billd said, he did it with guys from Holy Cross, B.C. and B.U. and other area schools. Holovak said they did it with local guys because they were the players they knew about. Holovak had about a 10-year run as head coach of Boston College before joining the Patriots in ’60 as an assistant coach.