In the Nov. 4, 2002, issue of Sports Illustrated, we invite readers to belly up to bar and debate our writers, who have dug deep to uncover the most overrated people, places and things in sports -- and celebrate the most underrated ones. Dozens of categories are featured in the magazine -- on newsstands now -- but CNNSI.com is extending an invitation of its own to its users: Comment on the writers' choices for some of the selections most worthy of debate.
Coach
Overrated
Underrated
Vince Lombardi
Vince Lombardi could beat you with the sweep, the bomb, the epigram. Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing. His record with the Green Bay Packers (and an orphan year with the Washington Redskins) was 105-35-6. His teams won six division titles, five NFL championships and the first two Super Bowls. Lombardi was the dominant coach of the dominant sport of his generation, precisely the reason the breathless Y2K polls that proclaimed him coach of the century got it wrong.
Lombardi's head-coaching career began in the late 1950s and ended with his death from cancer in 1970, but he was a man of the 1960s -- the era when football became America's Game and Green Bay became America's Town. It was also the last decade when coaching was relatively simple. The confluence of events that would alter American sports -- the social upheaval on college campuses, the emergence of the black athlete, the transformation of athletes into celebrities -- did not strike the NFL with its gale-force winds until after Lombardi's death. The warning signs of the coming sea change were as obvious as Joe Namath's mink coat, but the men Lombardi led so skillfully in Green Bay were temperamentally closer to the soon-to-be soldiers he coached under Red Blaik at Army in the 1950s than the players current Packers coach Mike Sherman handles. When Lombardi said, "Block," the Packers said, "How hard?" He coached the last generation of truly coachable pro athletes. Although he never had the chance to prove otherwise, it seems doubtful Lombardi would have been malleable enough to confront the modern athlete, a challenge that ultimately proved too daunting for a legendary contemporary, Tom Landry.
—Michael Farber
Scotty Bowman
If Lombardi spoke in slogans, Scotty Bowman speaks the way William Faulkner wrote. There are dips and digressions and tangents and tributaries to his gurgling stream of consciousness, but beneath the tangle of words and infamous obsession with schedules and flat-out head trips was the most adept coach ever to run a professional team in North America. He won nine Stanley Cups with three different franchises (Montreal, Pittsburgh, Detroit) while using three different styles (balanced, high-powered and a left-wing lock) in a career that spanned four decades. He won with the Flying Frenchmen up front and the Big Three on defense. He won with Europeans. He won in the Age of Offense. He won in the Dead Puck Era. He won in a 16-team league and a 26-team league. He won.
Bowman, now 69, was a jumble of coaching contradictions, a sometimes rude and stubborn man who was surprisingly flexible, an old-school coach who managed to remain hopelessly modern. Bowman saw the game differently than any other coach, cobbling together a five-man unit composed entirely of Russians at a time when many European players' commitment to the rigor of the playoffs was widely questioned and using a pair of puck-moving defensemen, Nicklas Lidstrom and Larry Murphy, against Philadelphia's Legion of Doom line in the 1997 final when every other coach had been trying to fight muscle with muscle. There simply has never been a better bench coach.
Of course Bowman, in the Hockey Hall of Fame since 1991, made all those Y2K lists too; he was the first hockey coach on the list when he should have been the first coach, period.
—Michael Farber
NASCAR Driver
Overrated
Underrated
Richard Petty
David Pearson
Gambling Opportunity
Overrated
Underrated
March Madness
Kentucky Derby
College Football Stadium
Overrated
Underrated
Michigan Stadium
Autzen Stadium
Short Guy
Overrated
Underrated
Spud Webb
Muggsy Bogues
Jerk Owner
Overrated
Underrated
Dan Snyder
Chris Cohan
Feedback
Think Michael Farber is way off base on his choice to roam the sideline? Likewise, Mark Bechtel (NASCAR Driver), Daniel G. Habib (Gambling Opportunity), Ivan Maisel (College Football Stadium), Jeff Pearlman (Short Guy) and Michael Silver (Jerk Owner)? Feel free to submit your own candidates or comment on those that appear above.
