Colts head coach Tony Dungy will turn 52 in October and there is a slight chance this could be his final NFL season.
“There are so many other things I want to do with life, but I wouldn’t be coaching right now if I still didn’t enjoy it,” Dungy told me on Monday.”When I started (he was the league’s youngest assistant at age 25), I told myself I would coach 25 years, thinking that would be long enough,” Dungy said. “Well, I’m over that number now. There are so many speaking engagements that I have to turn down because of coaching. I want to be able to visit prisons and spend a lot more time working with kids. I want to do these things when I’m still relatively young.”
Dungy, a devout Christian, wants to help others. At the behest of his wife, his family has three adopted children.
“When our kids went off to school, she said the house was too quiet,” Dungy said, smiling.
Despite the tragedy of losing his oldest son, James, Dungy seems almost whole once again.
And now that he has finally won a Super Bowl as a coach, his football career is complete. He earned a ring as a defensive back with the Steelers in 1978, and despite this not being his best Colts’ team, he and Peyton Manning finally won a title, beating the Bears in Miami last February.
Not that Bucs owner Malcolm Glazer and his sons care right now (they fired him and ran him out of Tampa), but Dungy is the winningest head coach (90-38 record) in the league since 1999 and the first coach to beat all 32 teams.
To improve ticket sales and boost the stadium bottom line, the Glazers spent four draft picks and $8 million to acquire then-Oakland coach Jon Gruden. But Gruden’s team really won a championship with Dungy’s defense and now there’s talk that the Glazers, if the Bucs don’t win this season, could make another dramatic coaching hire to make some money.
“I’ve thought about it,” Dungy said. “I guess I would be appealing to them now, now that I’ve won and still have a home there. But we both know that isn’t going to happen.”
Trying to repeat is always hard, but Dungy likes that fact that his team is being ignored — most prognosticators are picking either the Patriots or Chargers in the AFC.
“Our ‘05 team here was more talented than last year’s club,” Dungy said. “The ‘03 team was definitely better, too. But our team learned last year how to battle back and how to deal with adversity. By the time we reached the playoffs, we were battle-tested. We weren’t fazed anymore when we got behind in games.
“In previous years, we had such long winning streaks and always had big leads that when games got tight so did we. We simply struggled in playoff games when we got behind; but that didn’t happen last season.”
Dungy has too many interests and options in life to predict his coaching future. But we all know his offensive team could be exciting again this season even if Tarik Glenn won’t be there to protect Manning’s blindside.
I bet he coaches one more year and helps owner Jimmy Irsay open the new Lucas Oil Stadium in ‘08.
