In four and a half seasons as head coach of the Bengals, Dave Shula went 19-52 and became known as a failure who managed to get a head-coaching job only because his father is Don Shula, the winningest coach in NFL history. After he was fired in 1996, Shula never coached again.
Until now: Shula has just started a new job as the wide receivers coach at Dartmouth.
Shula says he can now look back at his coaching career in Cincinnati and say he wasn’t so bad. After all, the Bengals had six straight losing seasons under Bruce Coslet and Dick LeBeau after firing Shula, and even though they’ve been better since hiring Marvin Lewis, they still haven’t won a playoff game since 1990.
“With 20 years perspective looking back, you realize that maybe it wasn’t all me,” Shula told the Miami Herald. “Certainly I had a role in it, but you can’t blame everything on me, either.”
Dave has spent the last two decades as president of the family’s Shula restaurant company, but now he wants to get into the other family business. Wide receivers coach at Dartmouth is a far cry from head coach in the NFL, but Shula is back doing what he loves.