Whitlock - Marty loses super opportunity
 

Marty loses super opportunity
JASON WHITLOCK
The Kansas City Star

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Marty Schottenheimer isn’t likely to shed any tears over the unfairness of his dismissal as head coach of the San Diego Chargers.

Marty knows, better than most, that professional football is rarely fair.

So he’ll take his 200 victories and his 14-2 2006 regular-season record, and look for his next coaching opportunity without making much of a stink about Chargers general manager A.J. Smith dictating coaching decisions.

Nope. What will bring Marty to tears for the foreseeable future is the realization that he left another coach a Super Bowl-ready team. At age 63, Marty, in all likelihood, sabotaged his last and best chance to win a Super Bowl by attempting to hire his brother, Kurt, as defensive coordinator of the Chargers.

According to published reports in San Diego, Marty’s insistence on interviewing his brother to replace Wade Phillips pushed team president Dean Spanos to grant Smith’s wish of canning Marty.

Given Marty’s 2007 lame-duck status, it sort of made sense for Marty to want to fill his five-coaches-raided staff with people he could trust, people willing to walk the plank with Marty after the 2007 season. Going into the final year of his contract, who could Marty trust more than his brother, a man who owes his entire coaching career to Marty?

And given Marty’s hostile relationship with Smith, who beyond Kurt would be willing to join Marty in San Diego’s dysfunction?

This is going to haunt Marty Schottenheimer more than The Drive, The Fumble, Lin Elliott and Rich Gannon.

Marty coached very good teams in Cleveland and Kansas City, teams that could’ve won Super Bowls with the right breaks. In San Diego, Marty coached the league’s best team, a squad that should’ve won the Super Bowl.

Now someone else will get to direct LaDainian Tomlinson and Shawne Merriman, the league’s most dominating offensive and defensive players. Now someone else will finish what Marty started.

The Chargers are sitting in the same spot as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers five years ago after dismissing Tony Dungy. The Bucs had a veteran, ascending team ready to win a championship. They couldn’t afford to hire an unproven head coach. They needed a coach who could win now. They gave up a fortune to get Jon Gruden. He immediately took Tampa to the Super Bowl.

Who is that coach for the Chargers?

It’s complicated now because of the late date of Marty’s firing. Will the new coach have time to assemble a high-quality staff? The Chargers lost their offensive and defensive coordinators (Cam Cameron and Wade Phillips) earlier in the offseason.

The Chargers should think outside the box. I’d try to lure Dick Vermeil out of retirement for one year and pair him with Mike Singletary or Ron Rivera or Jim Caldwell or some other ascending assistant coach.

It would be a mistake to turn this team over to an inexperienced head coach. Has a rookie head coach ever won the Super Bowl? The goal in San Diego is to win Super Bowl XLII. A rookie or a well-traveled retread (Norv Turner) is unlikely to get the Chargers where they need to go in the AFC, which is home to the Colts, Patriots, Ravens, Steelers, Bengals and Jaguars, teams with enough talent to win it all.

The Colts, Patriots and Ravens are all led by previous Super Bowl winners.

What is next for Marty?

He won’t experience the same fate as Dungy, who quickly landed a dream gig with Peyton Manning, the league’s best quarterback, and Bill Polian, the league’s best general manager.

Dungy’s ego allows him to work for a control-freak GM. Dungy is content coaching and letting Polian handle personnel. Marty doesn’t work that way. Marty wants ultimate authority. He and Carl Peterson tangled over personnel.

Marty will land another coaching job. But he’ll never coach another team as talented as the one he leaves behind in San Diego. Monday’s events all but ensure that Marty Schottenheimer will never win a Super Bowl.

The guy's a great coach. Turned three joke franchises into perennial winners.

No doubt in my mind he'll go to some other loser franchise and turn them into something real.

I'm a big fan of Marty. I wish him the best.

If the Chargers go down the tubes the next three years, are they still a greatly talented team or would Marty have gotten a bunch of underachievers to overachieve?

They're obviously a talented team, but another variable has been introduced into the mix - MORALE.

The players apparently LOVED Marty. The team may go down the tubes due to lackluster effort, which invalidates the entire argument.

Marty choked away his best shot at SB......

somebody in the NFL had to be Marty, who else would their be to kick.

NO. Marty wasn't the problem in that game it was player execution. SD has had top draft picks forever, only Marty put it together for them. Cutting Marty now is total BS for him but it is totally in our best interest.

BD is exactly right. It wasn't Marty's fault that the players gave the game away. I mean seriously, head butting a Pat right after a big defensive play that would've forced a 3rd or 4th and long? That's a special kind of dumb.

Marty will land somewhere but he may not have enough time to build another SD or 90's Chiefs.

Marty i dont think is to be blamed on this one, its bs they fired him NOW of all things but hey, ill take it! He is a good coach and will be somewhere.

According to Whitlock Marty committed career suicide by wanting to hire his own coordinators? Didn't Marty hire all the other coordinators and positions coaches that left?

That's just it. Spanos was on the news saying the 'Maty's job is safe' line came when they thought they'd keep all the assistants. What GM/Owner worth their NFL salt assumes a team with an AFC best record would keep its assistants? That's just a strawman that Spanos/Smith is tossing out there for some reason.

Good luck Marty. Find an NFC team please.

CK hit the nail on the head. They're scrambling for excuses because they got caught with their pants down.

Martyocre never had or never will have a chance at a Superbowl. Call it coaching, call it karma, call it whatever you will, the fact, as proven time after time after time, is that he can't win in the playoffs. End of story.

I can't believe the excuses chiefs fans are still making for this guy. Also notably funny is the "wull, he's bedder'n Herm" even though when it matters, HE ISN'T.

What I like best is when you see folks bitching about Carl, the Hunts, the whole franchise, how they're so focused on filling the seats rather than winning, and point at the fact that we haven't won a playoff game in over a decade as proof. And then these very same people will turn around and talk about how great Marty is.

Good fun!

Right. All you had to do was look at SD's last game to see how many chances that team had to win and how time after time players failed to execute or do something stupid. You can go ahead and still be angry at him fro what he did here but Marty was not the reason they failed to move forward in the playoffs To assume he would have blown it later is a big assumption. You know what assuming does right?

BIG DADDY

Glad to see Marty leaving the AFC West.