First, it took 172 folks over the past 28 years not named Roger Craig to get inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Then this prolific runner and receiver for the San Francisco 49ers during their dynasty of the latter 20th century finally got his gold bust Saturday in Canton, Ohio.
Good for Roger Craig.
Now what about the other guy?
You know, the guy who Roger Craig didn’t mention during his taped acceptance speech of emotion?
John McVay.
John McVay?
You know, the grandfather of Sean McVay?
Sean McVay is the super coach of the Los Angeles Rams, ranked No. 2 on the Forbes’ list for team valuations at $10.5 billion, and that’s partly due to Sean McVay. The Rams are the favorites to win the Super Bowl this season, according to DraftKings Sportsbook, and that’s also partly due to Sean McVay.
Interestingly, Sean McVay remains an NFL coaching babe at 40. He was the youngest in league history to win a Super Bowl (36 when the Rams did so in February 2022), and he was the youngest to receive NFL Coach of the Year honors (32 in February 2018). He’s a master innovator and motivator, and he inherited much of his football genius from grandpa. You know, John McVay, the guy whose connections helped his grandson get an early coaching leap into the NFL, and the guy who isn’t in the Pro Football Hall of Fame despite all he did to build the 49ers dynasty from 1981 through 1998.
He did nearly everything, by the way.
During that 18-year stretch, the 49ers won five Super Bowls, averaged 11.5 victories per season and only missed the playoffs twice (1982 and 1991). They had two Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterbacks in Joe Montana and Steve Young, Pro Football Hall of Fame coach Bill Walsh and another one heading that way in George Seifert, and other Canton players spending the sweet spot of their NFL careers with the 49ers, ranging from Ronnie Lott and Jerry Rice to Charles Haley and Fred Dean.
Eddie DeBartolo Jr. owned those 49ers, and he has been in the Pro Football Hall of Fame since 2016.
Except for DeBartolo, the only common thread for the 49ers during their two decades of prominence was John McVay.
DeBartolo hired Walsh in January of 1979 with the mission of turning around what was then a wretched NFL franchise (five losing seasons in six years), and the first person Walsh hired for his front office was John McVay, the consummate football guy from the Midwest. McVay mostly was raised in Massillon, Ohio, a noted haven through the generations for high school football, and he later played center for legendary college football coach Ara Parseghian at Miami University, which also is my alma mater in Oxford, Ohio, where famous coaches surface out of nowhere on campus in droves.
In addition to Parseghian, you had those with Miami (Ohio) connections such as Weeb Ewbank, Paul Brown, Earl “Red” Blaik, Bo Schembechler, Sid Gillman and Woody Hayes, and they’re either in the Pro Football Hall of Fame or the College Football Hall of Fame. Now you have current NFL head coaches John Harbaugh (New York Giants), Sean Payton (Denver Broncos) and Sean McVay with Miami (Ohio) ties, and they’ve all won Super Bowls.
I wrote a book about it all called Red Brick Magic: Sean McVay, John Harbaugh and Miami University’s Cradle of Coaches, and the book helped to inspire an upcoming major documentary that will stream beginning on Monday, August 17 on NBC Peacock.
John McVay exemplifies that Cradle of Coaches legacy.
He was fresh from coaching the New York Giants when Walsh dialed from San Francisco, and before that, John McVay had coaching stints in college, high school and the World Football League.
Walsh saw an NFL franchise guru.
“I don’t know what I’d have done without John McVay,” Walsh told David Harris in The Genius, a 2008 biography about Walsh.
As I mentioned in RedBrickMagic.com, referring to John McVay’s role with the 49ers throughout their dynasty: “He invented, ran and supervised just about everything in the 49ers’ front office during the 1980s and 1990s, and that’s when their dynasty roared virtually nonstop through the NFL. His positions with the 49ers included vice president and general manager, director of player personnel, director of football operations, vice president of football administration, administrative vice president and assistant to the president.
“He did his job so well that after he retired in 1996, the franchise begged him to come back two years later.
“He stayed another five years.
“When you consider he kept the 49ers potent before the era of free agency and the salary cap and then afterward, he also was something else: the greatest executive in NFL history.”
John McVay also ran that 1983 NFL Draft for the 49ers when they made Craig their first pick.
That John McVay wasn’t mentioned by Craig.
But what else is new for John McVay, who also ranks as the most forgotten of the most significant persons in NFL history.
Let’s begin with the emotion in Craig’s nine-minute speech. It came down the stretch like one of his stiff arms while moving through defenders with high knees.
As the lively crowd shifted into hush mode at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium, he revealed he suffers from vascular dementia.
Just like that, Craig went from the youthful 49ers running back who I first interviewed for the San Francisco Examiner after he was taken in the second round of the 1983 NFL Draft along the way to four Pro Bowls and three Super Bowl titles and an NFL record at the time of 2,036 yards from scrimmage in 1988 to another former player in the league with serious physical issues.
During the spring of 2015, the federal courts approved what could become a $1 billion plan to settle thousands of NFL concussion lawsuits filed by retired players, and the league figured back then that around 6,000 of the nearly 20,000 retired players would suffer from Alzheimer’s disease or some kind of dementia.
Craig became one of those 6,000.
Earlier in his speech, he kept thanking folks.
Bill Walsh, Ronnie Lott, Joe Montana, Dwight Clark, Jerry Rice, Eddie DeBartolo Jr, the York family (which currently owns the 49ers), Jamie Williams (his childhood friend and teammate from grad school through the NFL), those he met during his brief playing time with the Raiders and the Vikings, his business partner, his parents, his wife and the rest of his family.
Craig never mentioned John McVay, but I’ll give Craig a break.
Hardly anybody mentions the NFL grandeur of John McVay, who died in October 2022 at 91, and he isn’t without blame. I dealt with him often over the decades, going back to his early days with the 49ers, and if John McVay didn’t invent the word “modesty,” he perfected it.
He was sincere in his dislike for receiving praise.
Here was a typical John McVay response to anything celebrating the football wisdom of John McVay, and it came from a blushing man praying for you to change the subject: “Oh, no. The 49ers’ success, it’s Eddie,” as in Eddie DeBartolo Jr. “Eddie, he’s the key to everything.”
Well, Eddie did hire Bill.
Then Bill hired the guy who should have been in the Pro Football Hall of Fame before Roger Craig and those 172 other folks.