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Column: Ex-Chargers line coach Bugel saw firsthand NFL owners make a W-L difference

Redskins offensive line coach Joe Bugel (left) and head coach Joe Gibbs celebrate a win over Dallas in 2005.
Joe Bugel (left), assistant head coach of the Washington Redskins, celebrating a win with Joe Gibbs in 2005, advised the Washington head coach to pare down the Don Coryell offense in 1981.
(Getty Images)

Redskins thrived under OL coach, who helped ex-Bolts aide Joe Gibbs turn Don Coryell offense into a force

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While Joe Bugel never had a winning season in San Diego across the four years he spent with the Chargers, the highly regarded offensive line coach knew what it took to win in the NFL.

Bugel, who died last month at age 80, coached for 35 years in the league with six clubs and went to three Super Bowls with the Washington Redskins.

It was Bugel who developed the famous “Hogs” lines that fueled a pair of Super Bowl victories in the 1980s plus a third title after he moved on — but to hear the coach, the franchise’s winning habits began much higher up.

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“The owner,” a retired Bugel said at a coaching clinic in 2015, “wanted to win Super Bowls.”

Jack Kent Cooke, the team’s owner, could be a prickly leader, one who was known to belittle people when he owned the Lakers, but Bugel said Cooke’s habit of dangling large performance bonuses spurred the Redskins to success.

“If you made $200,000 in the playoffs,” Bugel told coaches five years ago, “the owner Jack Kent Cooke matched that so you could make $400,000 in January.”

He added: “We were gonna coach hard every day, and those players knew it, and that motivated us. And when we took that money home to our wives, they didn’t care if we stayed at the office seven days a week. ‘Just bring home the check, Joey.’ ”

Similarly, Bugel praised Raiders owner Al Davis for investing heavily in football operations during the coach’s three years with the franchise, saying Davis was “top shelf” and “first class” in that respect.

Bugel also said Davis could be overbearing, telling the coaches: “Al is crazy.” He said Davis was “a lot of fun to be around” when Bugel was a Raiders line coach, but when Bugel was the head coach in 1995 he found out Davis, a former coach, would pester him at any hour on any day.

Coryell, Gibbs — and Bugel

Bugel said he didn’t know Joe Gibbs before the former San Diego State and Chargers assistant hired him in 1981 onto his first Redskins staff.

Gibbs had worked under Don Coryell. The previous two seasons, he was coordinator with the famed “Air Coryell” Chargers.

Where Air Coryell featured Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Fouts and an intricately timed passing game led by Hall of Famers in tight end Kellen Winslow and Charlie Joiner plus other star pass catchers such as John Jefferson (and later Wes Chandler), a stout ground game powered much of the success under Coryell’s former aide Gibbs.

Bugel lauded Gibbs for pruning the Coryell playbook, a daring move.

While Coryell’s designs would serve coach Mike Martz well in a pair of Super Bowl runs with the St. Louis Rams, Gibbs and his staff decided that “hundreds of pass routes,” some 15 designs for pass protections and 15 to 20 run plays were excessive for the ’81 Redskins.

Bugel was evangelical about hammering NFL opponents with a ground game. He’d coached at Navy and at Ohio State under Woody Hayes, describing him as brilliant. Under Houston Oilers coach Bum Phillips, where the offense ran through Hall of Fame running back Earl Campbell, he refined the runs he brought to Washington. This would be Ground Coryell.

“We finally convinced Joe — and it wasn’t easy — that we needed to run five runs and limit our protections because we started four rookies in that offensive line our first year,” Bugel said in 2015. He said of Gibbs: “He loved to run the football.”

Gibbs became the only coach to win three Super Bowls with three different quarterbacks, in part because of the rugged ground games that set up downfield passes. Discarding the fullback, Gibbs featured one-back designs and three-receiver formations that discouraged opponents from adding an eighth defender to the run box.

The Hogs became masters of one lethal play and its many variations: The counter trey run, which involved crisscrossing various pull blockers.

In the 1980s, the NFL labor pact allowed for the extensive practice time and padded workouts needed to develop a highly nuanced and calloused ground game.

So while brutal practices that sometimes ran 3 1/2 hours could break some players, Bugel and his “calloused” hogs were generally as happy as pigs in slop when the cold weather arrived. Bugel labeled his Redskins gig the most enviable job in the NFL because he had the support to forge “counter trey” into a foundational play adaptable to any defense.

“It’s probably the most difficult play to teach in coaching because it’s an assignment play, and if your head coach and signal-caller do not have patience, you’ll never get it it right,” Bugel told coaches in 2015. “We were committed to that play.”

Gibbs’ second Redskins team, led by the NFL’s top scoring defense, claimed the franchise’s first Super Bowl victory and first league title since 1942.

Five years later at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium, the Redskins used counter trey to trounce the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXII.

Bugel said 27 of the 40 run plays that day were a version of counter trey. The Redskins amassed 280 yards on 40 carries, and Doug Williams passed for 340 yards and four touchdowns.

The franchise’s San Diego connection extended to Redskins tight end Don Warren, an SDSU alum and versatile blocker.

“We had very, very average backup tight ends,” Bugel said of his tenure, “but the suckers could blow snot on you. They could block you, and we made ‘em block.”

Bugel left the Redskins to become head coach of the Arizona Cardinals, a franchise he likened to a revolving door.

When head coach Kevin Gilbride hired him for the Chargers in 1998, the franchise was in a dysfunctional state.

Hall of Fame talent man Bobby Beathard, who had built the franchise’s lone Super Bowl team in the early 1990s after coming over from the Redskins, was in the midst of spending the No. 2 pick of the draft on quarterback Ryan Leaf.

Beathard had survived working for famously impatient Chargers owner Alex Spanos, whose insistence that Beathard stop going on the road to scout players led Beathard to submit his resignation only for Dean Spanos, the club president, to persuade him to stay.

The plan for Bugel to help nurture Leaf by developing a solid ground game didn’t work out.

The Chargers finished 22nd, 31st, 31st and 20th in yards per carry in his four-year tenure. With the troubled Leaf unable to hold the job, starts went to Craig Whelihan, Jim Harbaugh, Erik Kramer, Moses Moreno and Doug Flutie while the Chargers compiled a 19-45 record between 1998-2001.

Bugel moved on, and another ground-oriented former Redskins coach, Marty Schottenheimer took over the Chargers in 2002. Hired at a discount for his salary class because the Redskins were still paying off a previous contract, Schottenheimer would lead San Diego to AFC West titles in 2004 and 2006.

The Chargers ran the offense through Hall of Fame running back LaDainian Tomlinson and were rugged enough to make a hog snort. In four of the five seasons under Schottenheimer, they finished in the top-10 in yards per carry, and his final team led the NFL in rushing attempts and ground touchdowns en route to a 14-2 record.

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