Behind his coaching abilities, Vermeil is an extraordinary human being. For a start,Google (or DuckDuck) his remarks on leadership.
He took a sow's ear in Philadelphia and made it into a championship football team. He quickly built a so-so football team into a championship teram in St. Louis and after leaving St. Louis took the so-so Kansas City Chiefs to the playoffs. All of these teams made the playoffs three years later, two of them went to Super Bowls.
He was squeezed out of St. Louis by the Martz-Shaw-Marmey triumvirate. Martz took a team that Vermiel built to another Super Bowl before presiding over some horrible drafts and railroading Warner's career - or trying to, and ruining Faulk's by incessantly running him up the middle until his legs were beaten to a pulp.
Had Vermiel stayed and Martz left, he and, say, someone like Al Sunders or Pat Schurmer could have continued to field a dynamic offense with Warner, Faulk or Jackson, Ike and Torrey, and played championship ball for many seasons to come.
And, the defense wouldn't have collapsed. Vedrmiel wouldn't have let it.
On the dark side of the Martz regime, Vermiel wouldn't have sent Warner into games with a known broken hand. Vermiel wouldn't tell his OT's to hold and release their blocks for Warner for only a couple of seconds, in order to get Warner hit and damaged.
Kyle Turley, then ROT for the Rams, testified to this but his remarks were soon squelched. In short, Mike Martz, offensive genius he may have been, was then at least a malevolent human being.
There's more, this is only some of what I remember after much digging and closely following what was going on in that era. Most - if not all - of it has been sent down the tubes.
What could have been if, and what was.... careers and lives were damaged by Mad Mike Martz.
