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Dennis Green drafted Randy Moss and Larry Fitzgerald, coached Jerry Rice
Dennis Green had a fascinating career in football before he died Friday at the age of 67.
Green played briefly in the CFL. He coached under Bill Walsh at Stanford and with the San Francisco 49ers. Green was only the second African-American college head coach in NCAA history at Northwestern and the first in Big Ten history. He won four division titles and made the playoffs eight times in his 10 seasons with the Minnesota Vikings and widely was considered one of the most successful African-American head coaches in league history before Tony Dungy won a Super Bowl.
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But Green also has one other fascinating distinction: He also was the man who drafted both Randy Moss and Larry Fitzgerald. Has any other head coach drafted two likely Hall of Fame wide receivers on two different teams several years apart? We might have to do a little research on that one.
And you can’t deny Green’s role in his teams drafting either player. Moss roundly was considered one of the two or three best players in the 1998 NFL draft that included Peyton Manning, Charles Woodson and others (Ryan Leaf, of course). But Moss went into a freefall on Draft Day because of character concerns, and it was Green who vouched for him.
The Vikings made Moss the 21st pick in the draft out of Rand University, and he went on to have a mostly brilliant NFL career that kicked off with the Vikings’ 15-1 team in Moss’ rookie season. Twenty NFL teams passed on Moss — including the division-rival Detroit Lions, Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers — and they all paid for it.
It’s clear that Moss had affection for his former head coach — check out this brilliant impression of Green during in the “30 for 30” on Moss.
Green was fired after the 2001 by the Vikings and was named the Arizona Cardinals’ head coach in 2004. The team’s first three picks that year: Fitzgerald, Karlos Dansby and Darnell Dockett, who made up the core of the franchise that made it to a Super Bowl after Green was fired following the 2006 season. Green also knew plenty about Fitzgerald, who grew up in Minnesota and was a Vikings ballboy (who hung around with Moss) during Green’s tenure there.
That’s quite a draft legacy. Although Green’s NFL coaching career was a bit uneven and he never reached a Super Bowl as a head coach, he did as the wide receivers coach with the 49ers in Super Bowl XXIII — coaching a guy named Jerry Rice. Green coached Rice in his second, third and fourth NFL seasons, which was the first three of 11 consecutive 1,000-yard seasons, after Rice struggled as a rookie.
Rice had some high praise for Green — as a coach and as a man — on Friday when he learned of his former position coach’s death at the American Century Championship golf tournament in Lake Tahoe (via Niners Nation):
“This one was really special to me because he was more than a coach. He was almost like my best friend. Someone I could always depend on. Someone that would always, even if I was having some difficult times, he had something positive to say to get me going.”
Think about that: Green coached Rice, Moss and Fitzgerald — three of the best ever to play the position — in a 16-year span. And had a big impact on all three becoming great. Not too shabby.
Perhaps Green is most famous for his Monday night meltdown after a loss to the Chicago Bears in his final season as an NFL head coach. But that’s too bad — the man had a serious mark in molding three of the finest wide receivers ever to grace the NFL very early in their pro careers.
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Eric Edholm is a writer for Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at edholm@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
