Wilbur Charles "Weeb" Ewbank ( ; May 6, 1907 – November 17, 1998) was an American professional football coach. He led the Baltimore Colts to consecutive NFL championships in 1958 and 1959 and the New York Jets to victory in Super Bowl III in January 1969. He is the only coach to win a championship in both the National Football League (NFL) and American Football League (AFL).
Raised in Indiana, Ewbank attended Miami University in Ohio, where he was a multi-sport star who led his baseball, basketball, and football teams to state championships. He immediately began a coaching career after graduating, working at Ohio high schools between 1928 and 1943, when he entered the U.S. Navy during World War II. While in the military, Ewbank was an assistant to Paul Brown on a service football team at Naval Station Great Lakes outside of Chicago. Ewbank was discharged in 1945 and coached college sports for three years before reuniting with Brown as an assistant with the Cleveland Browns, a professional team in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC). The Browns won all four AAFC championships. They joined the NFL with the league's merger in , winning the championship that year.
Ewbank left the Browns after the 1953 season to become head coach of the Colts, a young NFL team that had struggled in its first season. In 1956, Ewbank brought in quarterback Johnny Unitas, who quickly became a star and helped lead a potent offense that included wide receiver Raymond Berry and fullback Alan Ameche to an NFL championship in 1958. The Colts repeated as champions in 1959, but the team's performance slipped over the next three seasons and Ewbank was fired three weeks after their final game of the 1962 season. He was soon picked up by the Jets, a team in the still new AFL. While his first few years were unsuccessful, Ewbank helped build the Jets into a contender after signing Alabama quarterback Joe Namath in 1965. The Jets won the AFL championship in 1968, and then went on to win Super Bowl III in one of the biggest upsets in NFL history.
Ewbank, who was known as a mild-mannered coach who favored simple but well-executed strategies, retired after the 1973 season and settled in Oxford, Ohio. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in , and died twenty years later in Oxford on November 17, 1998, the 30th anniversary of the "Heidi Game".
Early life and college
Born in Richmond, Indiana, Ewbank's father was a grocer who owned two stores in the small city. He attended Morton High School and played quarterback on the football team, was an outfielder in baseball, and was a member of the basketball team. He captained the football and basketball teams when he was a senior. As a teenager, Ewbank and his father drove to Dayton, Ohio, to see early football star Jim Thorpe and the Canton Bulldogs play. One of his younger brothers could not pronounce "Wilbur" correctly and called him "Weeb", the nickname he was known by for the rest of his life.
After graduating from high school in 1924, Ewbank attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He played on the school's football team as a quarterback under head coach Chester Pittser. He was also the center fielder on the baseball team and a forward on the basketball team. While Ewbank was small in stature – he was only and weighed – he was one of Miami's best athletes. He shared quarterback duties with Eddie Wohlwender on a squad that finished with an 8–1 win–loss record and won the Ohio Athletic Conference championship in 1927, his senior year. Miami's baseball team also won the Ohio Conference when he was a sophomore and took the Buckeye Athletic Association title when he was a senior. The basketball team won a state title when he was a junior. Ewbank was a member of Phi Delta Theta fraternity while at Miami.
Coaching career
Shortly after graduating from Miami in 1928, Ewbank took his first coaching job at Van Wert High School in Van Wert, Ohio, overseeing the football, basketball, and baseball teams. He remained there until 1930, when he moved back to Oxford and took a position coaching football and basketball at McGuffey High School, a private institution run by Miami University. He also taught physical education at Miami. Ewbank took a break from coaching in 1932 to pursue a master's degree at Columbia University in New York City and filled in as Miami's basketball coach in 1939 after the previous coach left for another job, but otherwise held his coaching positions at McGuffey until 1943. Under his tutelage, the school's Green Devils football team had a win–loss record of in thirteen seasons. This included a streak of three undefeated seasons between 1936 and 1939 and one season – 1936 – where the team did not allow any scoring by opponents.
Ewbank joined the U.S. Navy in 1943 as American involvement in World War II intensified. He was assigned for training to Naval Station Great Lakes north of Chicago, where Paul Brown, a former classmate who succeeded him as Miami's starting quarterback, was coaching the base football team. Brown had become a successful high school coach in Ohio before being named head football coach at Ohio State University in 1941. At Great Lakes, Ewbank was an assistant to Brown on the football team and coached the basketball team.
Following his discharge from the Navy at the end of the war in 1945, Ewbank became the backfield coach under Charles "Rip" Engle at Brown University. He also was head coach of the basketball team in the 1946–47 season, his only one at Brown.
Ewbank's next stop was as head football coach at Washington University in St. Louis for the 1947 and 1948 seasons. Ewbank guided the Bears to a 14–4 record in two seasons, (5–3 in 1947, 9–1 in 1948).
Cleveland Browns
Despite his success in St. Louis, Ewbank quit his job when he was given the chance to serve as an assistant under Paul Brown, who by 1949 was coaching the Cleveland Browns, a professional team in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC). Ewbank was brought in to oversee the Browns' linemen after backfield coach John Brickels quit to take a job at Miami University and tackles coach Bill Edwards left to become the head coach at Vanderbilt University. Ewbank expected to coach quarterbacks, having played the position in college, but Brown insisted that he oversee the tackles. "He knew I'd have to work very hard at this job and bring a fresh approach", Ewbank said many years later.
Led by quarterback Otto Graham, fullback Marion Motley, and ends Dante Lavelli and Mac Speedie, the Browns won the AAFC championship in 1949, their fourth straight title. The AAFC folded after the season, and the Browns were absorbed by the more established National Football League (NFL). The team finished the 1950 season with a 10–2 record and won the NFL championship by beating the Los Angeles Rams. The Browns reached the NFL championship each year between 1951 and 1953, but lost once to the Rams and twice to the Detroit Lions.
Baltimore Colts
Ewbank got his first professional head coaching job in early 1954 for the NFL's Baltimore Colts, a franchise that had started play the previous year. While it was a step up for Ewbank, Brown encouraged him not to take the job and told him he would not be successful. After Ewbank took the job, Brown accused him of passing information about the Browns' draft targets to the Colts. Brown had insisted that he stay with the Browns through the 1954 draft, and NFL commissioner Bert Bell agreed. During the draft, Ewbank allegedly sent the names of players Brown liked to the Colts through Baltimore sportswriter John Steadman, including end Raymond Berry, who went on to have a long and successful career.
The Colts struggled in Ewbank's first years as head coach, posting records of 3–9 in 1954 and 5–6–1 in 1955. In 1956, however, the team signed quarterback Johnny Unitas after he was cut by the Pittsburgh Steelers. Ewbank brought in Otto Graham to tutor Unitas, who complemented an improving team that included Berry, fullback Alan Ameche, halfback Lenny Moore and defensive back Don Shula.
The Colts began the 1956 season with a 3–3 record, and calls for Ewbank's firing intensified – just as they had the previous year. Team owner Carroll Rosenbloom supported him, however, saying that while he had considered a coaching change in the past, Ewbank could stay with the Colts "forever – or until he fouls up". When he came to Baltimore, Ewbank had promised to create a system like Paul Brown's in Cleveland, but said he would need time to turn the team into a winner. The Colts finished 1956 with a 5–7 record.
The team made a turnaround the following year, posting a 7–5 record, but still finished third in the NFL's Western Division behind the San Francisco 49ers and Detroit Lions. The team improved further in 1958, winning the Western Division with a 9–3 record and earning a spot in the NFL championship game against the New York Giants. Led by Unitas, Berry and Ameche, the team won the game 23–17 in sudden-death overtime. Often referred to as "The Greatest Game Ever Played", the championship was watched by a large national audience on television and helped make professional football one of the most viewed sports in the U.S. Ewbank was named coach of the year by the Associated Press and United Press International after the season.
Baltimore finished with a 9–3 record for the second year in a row in 1959 and repeated as NFL champions. The team's performance fell off in subsequent years, however, and after posting a 7–7 record in 1962, Rosenbloom fired Ewbank three weeks later. He was succeeded by former player Don Shula, a 33-year-old assistant coach with the Lions.
His legacy as a coach is mixed. Some remember Ewbank as a humble coach who had a good sense of humor and tried to stay out of the spotlight. He could also be harsh with his players, however. Before the 1958 championship game, he gave a speech telling his stars they needed to improve and had barely made the team. Unitas, he said, was obtained "with a seventy-five-cent phone call" and Ameche wasn't liked or wanted. Ewbank was not universally liked by his players. Second-string running back Jack Call later said the team won "in spite of, not because of" Ewbank. Other players saw him as overly easygoing, saying that while he was able to build teams up, he became too relaxed once he reached the top. Hall of Famer Raymond Berry stated in his book All the Moves I Had, "What it amounts to is that Ewbank knew exactly what he wanted his team to do and how to get them to do it well... Being under Weeb's system was the number one reason why Unitas and I had the careers we had."
In his autobiography, which he partially dedicated to Weeb Ewbank, Hall of Famer Art Donovan had this to say about his former coach: "When Weeb and Joe Thomas came in and introduced the keying defense—one that depended upon quickness and a players's ability to read offenses—man, I was in hog heaven. Weeb Ewbank made Arthur J. Donovan, Jr., a Hall of Fame football player. I loved him for that; I always will love him for that. I can honestly say that Weeb Ewbank became and remains one of the most important, cherished people in my life. With that out of the way, I can also honestly say that Weeb was a screwball who held insane grudges, concentrated too much on what I considered the unimportant aspects of the game, thought he was smarter than God, and deep down inside was one mean sonofabitch."
Ewbank left as the longest tenured head coach in the history of the Colts (112), with Ted Marchibroda passing him three decades later.
New York Jets