They'd won only four games a year on average in the franchise's short history prior to that. The season before coach Shula's arrival in 1970 the Dolphins finished the campaign with just three victories and 11 defeats. Shula holds the NFL record for most career wins as a head coach, with 347 This is the story of how a bunch of "cast-offs" who were working part time, with a quarterback signed for $100, rallied together to achieve sporting greatness. Their record as the only Super Bowl champions to record a perfect NFL season lives on. The '72 Dolphins' legacy has outlasted some of the players that made it possible - Kuechenberg died aged 71 in January and Hall of Famer Nick Buoniconti passed away in July at the age of 78 - while a selection of those who remain still raise a toast together when the last undefeated team loses each season. "I mean, hell, I just lost Bob earlier this year. "Nobody thought we would be talking about this 40-something years later. "Man, it's been a long time," recalls Langer. It had never been achieved before and - as the National Football League enters its 100th season - has never been achieved since. Shula's invincible Dolphins would go on to win the Super Bowl that year with an undefeated 17-0 record. Later that afternoon, the New York Giants became yet another scalp in an unprecedented perfect season. The Dolphins had already secured a play-off spot by winning their opening 12 matches and coach Don Shula, himself the victim of two Super Bowl losses, would never allow his side's standards to slip. Langer and Kuechenberg were good friends and had both been part of the Dolphins squad that suffered a gut-wrenching defeat by the Dallas Cowboys in the Super Bowl 11 months earlier.īut this particular mid-morning chat in the Big Apple was by no means serious.
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