Here’s something Dave Wannstedt should know: Chicago isn’t always kind to Bears head coaches.
During the 11 years under Mike Ditka, the Bears were one of football’s most popular teams. The head coach could seemingly do no wrong, even when he did. His reign included a Super Bowl victory and unprecedented opportunities for players and coaches alike to make extra money.
Ditka was only the second of 10 Bear coaches to last more than four seasons. The other was team founder George Halas, who gave himself the job four times and kept it for 10 years each time.
The message is clear: Bears coaches either win a championship and hang around for a decade or so or are gone after four seasons.
Neill Armstrong, Ditka’s predecessor, lasted four seasons (1978-81), making the playoffs once, which wasn’t enough.
Abe Gibron was around for three years (1972-74), leaving a team no better than when he took over and without a playoff trip.
Jack Pardee took what Gibron left him and rode Walter Payton to one playoff berth (1977). He wasn’t forced out, but instead quit after 1977 to successfully pursue the Washington Redskins job, after recording a 20-23 record.
Jim Dooley, one of the top assistant coaches of his time, was promoted when Halas retired for the final time after the 1967 season. But his tenure was only four seasons, in which the Bears went 20-36, including the 1-13 disaster of 1969.
The only brief but successful tenure for a Bears coach was Ralph Jones’ 24-10-7 three-year record that concluded with the 1932 NFL title. Jones, whom Halas knew when he was a student at the University of Illinois and Jones was a coach there, was hired away from Lake Forest Academy, a high school.
Jones was best known for taking the T-formation and modernizing it by putting a man in motion. He left the Bears to coach at Lake Forest College and Halas returned to the sidelines, preferring not to pay anyone else during the Depression.
With Halas in World War II, Hunk Anderson and Luke Johnsos co-coached the Bears to a 23-12-2 record from mid-1942 through 1945, winning the 1943 title.
In 1956-57, ex-Bear and long-time aide Paddy Driscoll gave Halas his last break from coaching, going 14-10-1.
So throughout their history, the Bears have preferred to look to their past for their future. That changed in 1975, when Pardee became the first Bears coach to come from outside their organization.
Pardee was hired by new General Manager Jim Finks, who had been brought in by the late Mugs Halas as the Bears departed with tradition by turning their team over to outsiders.
In 1982 Halas, reclaiming control of his team from Finks, launched something less than an exhaustive search when he decided to replace Armstrong.
He hired Ditka, who had impressed Halas with his toughness during his six seasons as a Bear (1961-66) and had learned the coaching trade in Dallas under one of the all-time coaching greats, Tom Landry.
Ditka, too, got a quick lesson in the Bears’ impatience with coaches. In 1984, with the team on its way to the playoffs, team President Michael McCaskey held off deciding to extend Ditka’s original contract. After the Bears won a playoff game, Halas’ oldest grandson decided to keep Ditka.
The next year, only Ditka’s fourth as head coach, the Bears won the Super Bowl.
This year, the fourth of the current regime in Dallas and Wannstedt’s fourth in charge of the defense, the Cowboys are in the Super Bowl.
It is there that the comparisons with past Bears coaches begin. Although like Pardee and Armstrong he is taking over the team as a pure outsider, his resume most resembles Ditka’s.
Like Ditka, he was a Dallas assistant, albeit under different ownerships.
Before that, he was a player at the University of Pittsburgh (1970-73), where Ditka finished his All-America career in 1960.
Wannstedt is from Pittsburgh. Ditka is from nearby Aliquippa, Pa.
Wanndstedt is 40; Ditka was 42 when he was named Bears’ head coach.
But comparisons can only go so far. When Ditka was hired, here is how he stated his goals:
“I’m going to give Chicago a winning football team, an interesting football team and a football team that everybody is going to be proud of.”
Ditka did that long ago, raising expectations to the point where he couldn’t survive a 5-11 season after two straight playoff appearances.
Wannstedt’s goal must be higher: Win, and don’t take more than four years.
