Samuel David Wyche was born on January 5, 1945 in Atlanta. He played quarterback at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, getting a Bachelor of Arts degree there and a Masters of Business Administration from the University of South Carolina.
He wasn't considered good enough to make the NFL. Fortunately for him and for many others, the 1960s were the time of, among other innovative and rebellious things, the American Football League. After playing the 1966 and 1967 seasons in West Virginia, with the Wheeling Ironmen of the Continental Football League, an AFL expansion team, the Cincinnati Bengals, signed him for the 1968 season.
That 1st year, he started 3 out of 14 games. In 1969, he again started just 3. In 1970, the Bengals and the other AFL teams were admitted into the NFL as part of the merger agreement between the leagues. Again, he played in all 14 games, but started just 3.
He ran an offense the likes of which the NFL had never seen before, even with George Halas' Chicago Bears "Monsters of the Midway" with their flashy variation on the old T formation in the 1940s.
He had been fired as Browns coach by new owner Art Modell in 1962. His contract was guaranteed, so he had money. The joke was that the only men making more money to play golf were Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. He had time to spend with his family. But he missed football terribly.
So when the AFL gave him a chance to get back into the pro game, he did it with gusto, and tried to rebuild the Browns, a Browns without Modell, a Browns over which the other owners gave him full operational control. He was in the same State. He used the same base color, orange. He even gave his team the same initials, CB.
But he didn't have the talent: No Otto Graham at quarterback, no Marion Motley or Jim Brown to run the ball, no Dante Lavelli or Mac Speedie to catch it, no Frank Gatski or Bill Willis or Lou Groza to block for them.
What he did have was an assistant coach named Bill Walsh, who would later use what he learned from Brown to build a San Francisco 49ers team that would win 5 Super Bowls -- 3 while he was their head coach, 2 after. And he had Sam Wyche, one of those mediocre athletes who learned everything he could about the sport, so that when he turned to coaching, he was ready.
In 1971, Wyche was traded to the Washington Redskins. The team won the 1972 NFC Championship, and so they appeared in Super Bowl VII -- but Wyche himself did not, stuck behind Sonny Jurgensen and Billy Kilmer. In 1974, he was traded to the Detroit Lions. In 1976, he was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals (football version). But his playing career was a disappointment.
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Fortunately, his connection to Brown paid off. He already had a year as an assistant coach under his belt, in 1967, with South Carolina while he was getting his MBA there. When Walsh became head coach of the 49ers in 1979, he hired Wyche, who helped him build the team that won Super Bowl XVI in 1982.
In 1983, Sam got his 1st head coaching job, at Indiana University. He only went 3-8. But in 1984, needing a new head coach when Forrest Gregg, who'd gotten the Bengals to the AFC title but lost that very same Super Bowl XVI to the 49ers, took the head job with his former team, the Green Bay Packers, Paul Brown, still owner and GM of the Bengals, hired Sam.
It didn't seem to work out. In his 1st 4 seasons, he finished 8-8, 7-9, 10-6 and 4-11, not making the Playoffs in any of them. But in 1988, with lefthanded quarterback Norman "Boomer" Esiason leading the Paul Brown offense that Wyche had adapted, they went 12-4, winning the AFC Central Division, and earning him the nickname bestowed upon him by Norman Chad of ESPN: "Always Innovative Sam Wyche." In the Playoffs, they beat the Seattle Seahawks, and then the Buffalo Bills. The Bengals were AFC Champions again, and off to Super Bowl XXIII.
Wyche and Esiason
Again, the opposition was Walsh and his 49ers. The game was tight: It was 3-3 at the half, and 6-6 after 3 quarters. In the 4th quarter, despite losing All-Pro linebacker Tim Krumrie to a broken leg, the Bengals had leads of 13-6 and 16-13. It looked like they might bring Cincinnati its 1st NFL title. But Joe Montana, using plays Walsh had adapted from Brown's playbook as far back as the 1940s, led the Niners down the field, and they took a 20-16 lead with 34 seconds to go.
Wyche and Walsh after Super Bowl XXIII
As Gregg had 7 years earlier, Wyche had gotten the Bengals close to a title -- indeed, he'd gotten them as close as any team had ever gotten to winning the Super Bowl without actually winning it. But it wasn't quite enough.
He went 8-8 in 1989, a season whose "highlight" came on December 10 at Riverfront Stadium, against Seattle. An apparently bad call by the officials led the Cincinnati fans to throw snowballs on the field, and the Seahawks, used to playing in the climate-controlled Kingdome, were getting hit by them. They walked over to the referee and said they would refuse to continue as long as the snowballs kept falling.
And instead of ruling that the Seahawks were forfeiting, the referees followed the letter of the law, and told Wyche that, as the home team, the Bengals would forfeit if the field of play remained unplayable.
Wyche asked for the referee's microphone, and told the fans to stop, citing the frequent misbehavior by their arch-rivals across the State: "Will the next person that sees anybody throw anything onto this field, point 'em out, and get 'em out of here! You don't live in Cleveland! You live in Cincinnati!"
That got a huge cheer from the crowd -- and, no doubt, a smile from Paul Brown. The throwing stopped. The Bengals lost the game anyway, 24-17.
The Bengals won the AFC Central again in 1990 with a 9-7 record, then beat the Houston Oilers in the 1st round of the Playoffs, but lost the next round to the Los Angeles Raiders. In 1991, Paul Brown died, and his son Mike Brown fired Wyche after a 3-13 season. Cincinnati fans still loved him, though.
And he wasn't out of work long. He was quickly hired by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, but it got no batter: In 4 seasons, he went 5-11, 5-11, 6-10 and 7-9, and was fired after the 1995 season. However, as de facto GM, Wyche had drafted 3 of the defensive players who would turn the Bucs around under their next 2 coaches, Tony Dungy and Jon Gruden: Warren Sapp, Derrick Brooks and John Lynch. Wyche's record as an NFL head coach was 84-107: 61-66 in Cincinnati, and 23-41 in Tampa Bay.
In 1996 and 1997, he was an NBC studio analyst. Fro 1998 to 2001, he was a color commentator for CBS. In 2002, he went back to South Carolina, and became a substitute teacher and an assistant coach at Pickens High School. In 2004, he got back into the NFL, as the quarterbacks coach for the Buffalo Bills, whose head coach, Mike Mularkey, had coached under him in Tampa Bay. After 2 seasons there, he went back to Pickens High, and was there for another 2 seasons.
Two of his assistants became NFL coaches, thus also becoming part of the "coaching trees" of Brown and Walsh: Bruce Coslet (1990-93 New York Jets, 1994-2000 Bengals) and Mike Mularkey (2004-05 Bills, 2012 Jacksonville Jaguars, 2015-17 Tennessee Titans.)
At the Bengals' 50th season celebration in 2017
He and his wife Jane had a son named Zak and a daughter named Kerry, who gave them 6 grandchildren. But years of hard living caught up with him. In 2016, he got a heart transplant. In 2019, he was diagnosed with liver cancer. Sam Wyche died yesterday, January 2, 2020, and his home in Pickens, 3 days short of his 75th birthday.
Perhaps even more than Paul Brown, Sam Wyche was Mr. Cincinnati Bengal.