Bear Bryant came close to taking Dolphins job before Don Shula did

When Joe Robbie landed Don Shula, the brilliant young coach of the Baltimore Colts, in the coup that launched the Miami Dolphins’ Super Bowl years, that was a bold move.

Here, though, is something even brassier. One month before Shula agreed to run the show in Miami, Robbie had a deal all but done with Bear Bryant to leave his empire in Alabama and go pro as the Dolphins’ head coach.

In an interview with Tim Robbie earlier this summer, the son of the late Dolphins’ owner said “I can tell you without hesitation that they had a handshake agreement for him to come here.”

This is not breaking news. Bryant wrote about this near-miss with the Dolphins in his 1975 autobiography “Bear: The Hard Life & Good Times of Alabama’s Coach Bryant.” Still, it takes a moment for the implications to settle in.

As the franchise wades deeper into the celebration of its 50th season, there will be ample recognition of all the players and coaches and unforgettable moments that helped make South Florida a thriving NFL market. There is no one item, however, that could have impacted and altered that rich history as greatly as the Bear’s decision to turn Robbie down and stay with the Crimson Tide.

With Bryant as the Dolphins coach, there would have been no Shula. Without Shula, there is no perfect 1972 season. No quarter-century run of contention and stability. No Dolphins as we know them.

The other side of the coin is trying to figure out what Bryant might have done with the team, and for how long. The high failure rate of otherwise-successful college coaches making the move to the NFL is well known.

Bud Wilkinson was 11-21 with the old St. Louis Cardinals, Steve Spurrier went 12-20 with the Washington Redskins, Nick Saban went 15-17 with the Dolphins and, of course, there are more.

I’ll give Bear credit for figuring something out, maybe even winning a Super Bowl with the Dolphins, but for Bryant ever to get comfortable in Miami, he first would have needed to accept the fact that somebody might question his decisions. For a man celebrated back home as a Southern sports deity, that would have been a tough adjustment.

All the same, Bryant had a Dolphins contract in hand following the 1969 season, a 6-5 disappointment for the Crimson Tide.

“They had done everything but paper it up,” said Tim Robbie, recently retired as president of the Fort Lauderdale Strikers soccer club. “Bear said let me get back to the University of Alabama and tell them. Dad said OK. So he went back and talked to the board of regents or whoever he had to talk to and they said to him, ‘We want you to help us find your successor so that when we announce you’re leaving, we’re all set.’

“That gave him time to reflect. He called my dad back a week or two later and said, ‘I just can’t do it, as much as I wanted to. I’m sorry. I wasn’t being insincere. I just can’t do it.’ “

In Bryant’s autobiography, the coach describes drawing up a contract with Robbie in a Birmingham hotel room and then directing his attorney to rewrite the original version.

“That night I told Joe Robbie I’d take the job,” Bryant wrote, adding that the Dolphins offer had a total value of $1.7 million over five years, including “a stock option, a place to live, cars — the works.”

To put that into perspective, Vince Lombardi’s base salary in 1969 as coach of the Washington Redskins was $110,000, and he had already won five NFL titles in Green Bay.

Everything worked out just fine for Bryant, who won three more national championships at Alabama after deciding against the Dolphins and at the time of his death in 1983 was the winningest coach in major-college history. Shula and the Dolphins were a home run, too.

Got to give Joe Robbie credit, though, for never being shy in the way he ran his team.

“That’s what made him who he was,” Tim Robbie said. “He always went for the gusto.”