A Rushmore farewell

Alrighty then, 2020. You can take your seat now.

No. Scratch that.

Here's a pink slip. You are fired, 2020, for being a giant, braggy, hold-my-beer douche. Pack up your things and vacate the building. Go stand in the unemployment line with 1914-18, 1930-45 and all those other douche-y braggy hold-my-beer years.

Oh, and 2019 says bye and thanks for taking the heat off.

That's because you are the worst, 2020, and we haven't even gotten to halftime. First you throw a pandemic at us. Then you add something called a Murder Hornet, which sounds like the spawn of Thanos but is actually a steroidal death-stinging insect straight out of a 1950s horror flick. And then,  just for chuckles, you kill off John Prine and  Al Kaline and Glenn Beckert and Mad Dog Mike Curtis -- and now Mad Dog's legendary coach, Don Shula.

Don Shula! God, you suck, 2020.

Shula passed Monday at the age of 90, and what you can say about him is you won't have to bother carving his likeness on the Mount Rushmore of football coaches. That's because his profile already looked as if it were hewn from granite. Honestly, has anyone ever looked more like a football coach than Don Shula?

He played some pro ball and then he coached a lot of pro ball, and no one did it better. He stalked a sideline in the NFL for 33 seasons, 26 of them with the Miami Dolphins. No active coach is within 55 wins of his 347 career total, and of course no one has ever done what his Dolphins did in 1972 -- which is run the table, going 17-0 and beating the Washington Football Club 14-7 in the Super Bowl.

What's fascinating about that is how much his legacy as a coach hinged on that spotless season, and the Super Bowl that capped it.

Before the 'Fins beat the Over The Hill Gang, see, Shula was the Mr. May of NFL coaches. He could get you there, but he couldn't take you home. That was his rep.

He'd gotten the Colts and the Dolphins to two previous Super Bowls, and he lost them both. And of course the one loss was the most infamous in Super Bowl history -- Super Bowl III, in which Shula's Colts were 17-point favorites and got beat by Joe Namath and the Jets.

Mike Curtis was the linchpin of those Colts' frightening defense. Which Namath undressed. Which in turn cemented Broadway Joe's own legacy, because he was never quite so good again.

In any event, it's odd now to think of Shula as a failure, but by the unfair judgments of professional sports, he was up until the '73 Super Bowl. As he himself always acknowledged, he was the dreaded Guy Who Couldn't Win The Big One.

And then, he wasn't.

And then, he became the guy who crushed everything in his path enroute to winning back-to-back Supes. And he became the guy who got to the Super Bowl with David Woodley as his quarterback (and Don Strock in a key supporting role). And he became a Mount Rushmore guy.

Now he's gone.

Stupid 2020.