Dick Vermeil’s Chiefs tenure was cherry atop Hall of Fame career

On Thursday night, the Pro Football Hall of Fame Selection Committee gave longtime NFL head coach Dick Vermeil the ultimate gift that someone invested in the game can get: official induction into the hallowed halls of Canton, Ohio.

Vermeil was this year’s Coach’s Finalist, put forth by a special Coach Committee formed to ask and answer if any previously unelected coach is worth putting forth for the ultimate voting bloc to finalize. A coach must get 80 percent approval from the committee and even then he still needs to be accepted by the Selection Committee.

Within these last few months of voting, Vermeil cleared his final hurdles. He’d started clearing them long before that.

For Kansas City Chiefs fans, the idea of Vermeil as a Hall of Fame coach sounds like a tall order if you’d only paid attention to his body of work in those years alone. What some fans might not realize is that he was already worthy of Hall of Fame consideration before he ever put on his headset, his khaki pants, his white sneakers as part of his sideline ensemble in K.C.

Dick Vermeil’s stint with the Chiefs was the cherry on top of his exceptional career.

Before Vermeil ever landed in K.C., convinced to take over the reins following the forgettable stint known as the Gunther Cunningham era, he was already a rebuilder exemplar, a coach with championship experience, an extensive body of winning work, and a history of being loved by everyone around him.

The Philadelphia Eagles hadn’t won double-digit games in a single season in nearly 20 years before Vermeil first arrived in the late ’70s, and they hadn’t won a single division title since 1960. Vermeil not only turned those clocks back to the present by establishing a solid run of sustained success with Ron Jaworski as his quarterback but he took them all the way to the Super Bowl in 1980 (where they lost to the Oakland Raiders). (An interesting note is that the Raiders were coached by Tom Flores, who was last year’s Coaching Finalist for the Hall.)

From there, it would take 15 years to see him return to the sidelines after citing burnout for his decision to leave the Eagles in ’82. His next stop: St. Louis. What started slowly with Trent Green at the helm turned into perhaps the NFL’s most unlikely winner ever with the miraculous turnaround under quarterback Kurt Warner. Not only did Warner blossom under Vermeil to turn the franchise’s losing fortunes around, but together they also answered the question of whether Vermeil could ever win the big game.

Together with the likes of running back Marshall Faulk and wide receivers Isaac Bruce and Torry Holt, Vermeil and Warner would lead the Greatest Show on Turf to a Super Bowl win over the Tennessee Titans. A new franchise record was set that year with 526 points scored on offense, and the stage was set for years to come with one of the single greatest offensive units to ever come together in the National Football League.

Vermeil would retire following the championship, a man with many interests beyond coaching, but he was too good at it to stay away for long. When the Hunt family asked him to take over for Cunningham, he accepted after a year away and stood on the sidelines at Arrowhead for five memorable seasons. There was the exciting 13-win season with Trent Green at quarterback, a similarly loaded team with Tony Gonzalez in his prime and a tandem of Priest Holmes and Larry Johnson working in the backfield behind an excellent offensive line.

Vermeil delivered an AFC West title in 2003 and retired after five seasons with a final record of 44-36 in Kansas City. He sits fourth on the team’s all-time wins list. Those are nice accolades, to be sure, and Vermeil has plenty of fans in Chiefs Kingdom, but they are asterisks in his greater body of work, the proverbial cherry on top of a career that was already notable enough for induction.

Only three coaches before Vermeil took three separate franchises to the postseason, and only 7 others have taken two teams or more to the Super Bowl. His reputation as a rebuilder of franchises was enough to convince the voters to enshrine him in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Congratulations to Dick Vermeil on this rare achievement. Chiefs fans are thankful for at least having been a part of your coaching run.