Sam Wyche, who was the last coach to lead the Cincinnati Bengals to the Super Bowl, but who was later fined by the National Football League for barring a female reporter from the team’s locker room, died on Thursday at his home in Pickens, S.C. He was 74.
His family said the cause was complications of melanoma.
Wyche coached for several N.F.L. teams but was most closely associated with the Bengals. He began his career as a backup quarterback for the team in 1968, the franchise’s first year.
After seven undistinguished seasons playing for four teams, Wyche joined the San Francisco 49ers in 1979 as quarterbacks coach, working under Coach Bill Walsh to develop a rookie quarterback named Joe Montana. In their third year together, the team won its first Super Bowl.
After a year coaching at Indiana University, Wyche, then a relatively young 38, took over in 1984 as head coach of the Bengals, where Walsh had been quarterbacks coach before departing for San Francisco. He quickly took an unconventional approach in turning the team into an offensive juggernaut.
In his first season in Cincinnati he benched Ken Anderson, the team’s popular longtime quarterback, and replaced him with Boomer Esiason, a rookie. Bengals teams were among the top 10 in the league in offense in five of the next six seasons.
On Twitter on Thursday, Esiason praised Wyche as “an innovator” who “took chances that no coach ever would.”
During that run of success, Wyche was also widely credited with being the first coach to routinely use the no-huddle offense to keep defenses off kilter. The strategy, which includes only brief moments for play-calling, had been typically used at the end of games, when teams behind in the score rush to catch up. Wyche’s decision to use the strategy more frequently helped propel the Bengals to a 12-4 finish in 1988, when they had the league’s top-ranked offense.
“I like gambling and taking chances; it’s what life is all about,” Wyche told The New York Times that season. “Fans are having fun and players have fun, so why can’t coaches have fun, too?”
After winning the A.F.C. Championship for only the second time in their history, the Bengals lost, 20-16, to Walsh’s 49ers in Super Bowl XXIII. The 49ers sealed the victory when Montana tossed a 10-yard touchdown pass to John Taylor with 34 seconds remaining. (The Bengals have never returned to the Super Bowl.)
Known as a fiery and hard-driving coach willing to go against the grain, Wyche made waves for another, more embarrassing reason two years later. In October 1990, the N.F.L. fined Wyche $27,000, a record for a coach, for preventing a female reporter, Denise Tom of USA Today, from entering the team’s locker room. He was unrepentant, saying that women shouldn’t be able to walk in on players while they were naked.
“No amount of fine will force me to change my conviction on this matter,” he told reporters. “We need to find a way for women to have a decent and open access to all these athletes. The commissioner feels like it’s more important to fine me than to seek another solution.”
Wyche had been fined twice before, once for knocking a microphone out of a reporter’s hand and once for barring all reporters from the team’s locker room after a loss. The third fine, though, came just weeks after another reporter, Lisa Olson of The Boston Herald, complained that she had been surrounded by several naked players in the New England Patriots’ locker room and verbally abused.
Wyche’s willingness to buck convention extended to the field. He ran up the score on opponents, once ordering an onside kick even though his team was ahead 45-0. He was also outspoken. He criticized fans in Cleveland for throwing debris on the field and implored fans in Cincinnati to stop throwing snowballs.
After a 3-13 finish in 1991, Wyche, with several years remaining on his contract, left Cincinnati for Tampa, where he coached the Buccaneers for four seasons. Though he led the Bengals during one of the franchise’s more successful stretches, he had only a 61-66 record there (plus 3-2 in the playoffs) and a 23-41 record in Tampa.
He was quarterbacks coach for the Buffalo Bills in 2004 and 2005, then moved to Pickens, where he volunteered as a quarterbacks coach and offensive coordinator for the town’s high school team.
Samuel David Wyche was born on Jan. 5, 1945, in Atlanta. His father, Joseph, was a salesman, and his mother, Sarah, was a homemaker and, after the couple divorced, a secretary.
After graduating from North Fulton High School, he attended Furman University in Greenville, S.C., where he played quarterback. He earned a degree in business from Furman in 1966 and a master’s degree in business from the University of South Carolina, his daughter, Kerry Wyche, said. He played for the Wheeling Ironmen, a semipro team in the Continental Football League, before signing with the Bengals.
Wyche married Jane Underwood, whom he met at Furman, in 1965. She and their daughter survive him, as do his son, Zachary, an assistant high school football coach in Cincinnati; a brother, Joe; and six grandchildren.
In 2016, Wyche underwent heart transplant surgery. Doctors told him the surgery would weaken his immune system and might make him susceptible to melanoma, his daughter said. Last month, doctors found cancer cells in his bones and liver.
Wyche seemed to embrace his role as coach and understood that he was always under the microscope.
“I have those nights like everyone when I wonder why I have the job I do,” he told The Times in December 1989, a year after the Bengals made it to the Super Bowl. “But then I think of all the things this job has allowed me to do. I’m newsy; my position is newsy.”
Source: Football - nytimes.com
