John McKay, football coaching legend, dies
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TAMPA, Fla. - Whether John McKay was winning national college football championships at USC or weathering the worst stretch of futility in NFL history at Tampa Bay, his sense of humor never lost its bite.
The legendary coach, who won four national titles at USC while popularizing the "I" formation, died yesterday at St. Joseph's Hospital of kidney failure brought on by complications from diabetes. He was 77.
McKay, who would have turned 78 on July 5, restored USC to national prominence and coached two Heisman Trophy winners in his 16-year career as head coach at USC. He left the Trojans after the 1975 season to become the first coach of the NFL's expansion Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
He will be remembered for his coaching record and for spicing up news conferences with quips.
Once asked about the pressure of coaching at USC, McKay responded: "I'll never be hung in effigy. Before every season, I send my men out to buy up all the rope in Los Angeles."
On those who criticized him for letting O.J. Simpson run the ball too much at USC: "Why not? It isn't very heavy. Besides, he doesn't belong to a union."
On recruiting his son, John (J.K.): "I had a rather distinct advantage. I slept with his mother."
Following one of his many losses during Tampa Bay's formative years, he delivered one of his most memorable one-liners when a reporter inquired about his team's execution.
"I think it's a good idea," he said.
After Tampa Bay broke its 26-game losing streak: "Three or four plane crashes and we're in the playoffs."
Once an electrician's assistant in a West Virginia coal mine and later a World War II tail gunner, McKay took over the USC program in 1960 and restored it to the national prominence it had known in the 1920s and '30s, producing 40 first-team All-America players. Among them were Heisman Trophy winners Mike Garrett in 1965 and O.J. Simpson in 1968, the first two in a line of outstanding running backs that earned the school the nickname Tailback U.
Three of his Trojan teams were unbeaten, nine won Pacific-8 Conference championships and eight played in the Rose Bowl, winning five times. His 1962, 1967, 1972 and 1974 teams won college football's national championships.
USC was 127-40-8 under McKay, losing only 17 conference games.
He was not nearly as successful with the expansion Buccaneers. But after losing their first 26 games under McKay, an NFL record, the Buccaneers rebounded and in only their fourth season came within one victory of playing in the Super Bowl, falling short with a 9-0 loss to the Los Angeles Rams in the 1979 National Football Conference title game.
The Buccaneers made three playoff appearances in nine seasons under McKay, who retired after the 1984 season with a 44-88-1 NFL record.
To Doug Williams, a former Grambling quarterback who was drafted by the Buccaneers in 1978, McKay was an inspiration and an innovator. At a time when a black quarterback was an anomaly, McKay didn't hesitate to use blacks in the sport's most important position.
"When I was growing up watching football in Louisiana ... my two favorite teams were the Grambling State University Tigers and the University of Southern California Trojans, and my two favorite coaches were (Grambling's) Eddie Robinson and John McKay," Williams said. "SC, at that time, had a black QB named Jimmy Jones. And I knew that if John McKay at that time was playing black quarterbacks, you realized that it wasn't about color with that individual."
At USC, McKay was an obscure assistant when he joined Coach Don Clark's staff in 1959 after serving as an assistant coach at Oregon through most of the decade. USC had risen to national prominence under Howard Jones in the 1920s and '30s, but Trojan football fortunes had softened in subsequent decades.
When Clark resigned after the '59 season, McKay, then 36, was named head coach.
McKay wasn't long in restoring Trojan football to what it had been in 1928, 1931 and 1932, when Jones' "Thundering Herd" teams won national titles.
In 1962 the Trojans capped an 11-0 season with a memorable 42-37 victory over Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl game. From then until McKay's departure for the NFL in 1976, his teams finished among the Top 10 in the Associated Press poll eight times.